WORLD Magazine July 26, 2014 Vol. 29 No. 15

Finding ‘quality’ at the end of life | Hobby Lobby victory

J u ly 26, 2014

China’s abortion regime and the heroes fighting it— a street-level look

MS_HCReformAd1_2014.indd 1 15 CONTENTS.indd 2

4/28/14 11:37:54 7/2/14 4:21 PM AM

Contents      ,     /         ,        

     

32 China beachhead

Pro-life efforts are growing in the nation with the most abortions. But saving lives in the womb is an enormous challenge—even within the church      

38 Far from home

Congolese authorities are keeping hundreds of adopted orphans from joining their new families abroad

42 A life worth living

For a decade my father was unable to walk or communicate, but who is to say he had no good quality of life?

48 Cultivating change

 Hope Award: Rural ministry in Michigan earns Midwest regional victory

 

4 News 14 Quotables 16 Quick Takes  

21 Movies & TV 24 Books 26 Q&A 28 Music

12



55 Lifestyle 57 Technology 58 Science 59 Houses of God 60 Sports 61 Money

  :    

21



57 48        .                          

15 CONTENTS.indd 1

3 Joel Belz 18 Janie B. Cheaney 30 Mindy Belz 63 Mailbag 67 Andrée Seu Peterson 68 Marvin Olasky WORLD (ISSN -X) (USPS -) is published biweekly ( issues) for . per year by God’s World Publications, (no mail)  All Souls Crescent, Asheville, NC ; () -. Periodical postage paid at Asheville, NC, and additional mailing offices. Printed in the USA. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. ©  WORLD News Group. All rights reserved. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to WORLD, PO Box , Asheville, NC -.

7/9/14 11:58 AM

“The earth is the L’s and the fullness thereof; the world and those who dwell therein.” —Psalm :     Marvin Olasky  Mindy Belz   Timothy Lamer   Jamie Dean   Janie B. Cheaney, Susan Olasky, Andrée Seu Peterson, John Piper, Edward E. Plowman, Cal Thomas, Lynn Vincent  Emily Belz, J.C. Derrick, Daniel James Devine, Sophia Lee, Angela Lu, Edward Lee Pitts  Megan Basham, Anthony Bradley, Andrew Branch, Tim Challies, John Dawson, Amy Henry, Mary Jackson, Michael Leaser, Jill Nelson, Arsenio Orteza, Tiffany Owens, Stephanie Perrault, Emily Whitten   Les Sillars

   David K. Freeland    Robert L. Patete   Rachel Beatty  Krieg Barrie    Arla J. Eicher     Dawn Wilson   Arla Eicher, Al Saiz, Alan Wood  ..    Jim Chisolm  ..

  June McGraw   Kristin Chapman, Mary Ruth Murdoch

    Kevin Martin  Joel Belz

    worldoncampus.com  Leigh Jones

  Warren Cole Smith   Jonathan Bailie   Debra Meissner    wng.org   Mickey McLean   Leigh Jones   Lynde Langdon, Angela Lu, Dan Perkins   Whitney Williams    worldandeverything.com   Nickolas S. Eicher   Joseph Slife ’    gwnews.com  Howard Brinkman

    worldji.com  Marvin Olasky   Edward Lee Pitts    David Strassner (chairman), Mariam Bell, Kevin Cusack, Peter Lillback, Howard Miller, William Newton, Russell B. Pulliam, David Skeel, Ladeine Thompson, Raymon Thompson, John Weiss, John White   To report, interpret, and illustrate the news in a timely, accurate, enjoyable, and arresting fashion from a perspective committed to the Bible as the inerrant Word of God.

Contact us: .. / wng.org PABLO MARTINEZ MONSIVAIS

     ,    ,  ,        memberservices@wng.org  wng.org/account (current members) or members.wng.org (to become a member)  .. (within the United States) or .. (outside the United States) Monday-Friday (except holidays),  a.m.- p.m. ET  WORLD, PO Box , Asheville, NC -   , ,     .. /    .. or mailbag@wng.org WORLD occasionally rents subscriber names to carefully screened, like-minded organizations. If you would prefer not to receive these promotions, please call customer service and ask to be placed on our    list.

15 JOEL.indd 2

7/8/14 3:21 PM

Joel Belz

Pitifully taught

Most Americans know absolutely nothing about the Hobby Lobby case Demonstrators who do understand the case celebrate the Hobby Lobby decision

>>

PABLO MARTINEZ MONSIVAIS

I ,    the first details of the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision on June , that the issues were nuanced enough to need some careful explaining. So just how confused might the American public be?

And would the mainstream media offer genuine help on that front—or would they just make matters worse?

To find out, I decided to pull out my favorite research tool—a visit to the sidewalk in front of my local Walmart. My wife reminded me that, with no Hobby Lobby store here in Asheville, I might end up with a lot of blank stares. Folks simply wouldn’t know what I was talking about. I hoped for a little more civic interest and engagement.

My wife, though, was right. Only four of the first  people I asked had a clue what I meant when I asked: “What would you say was the main issue in the Hobby Lobby case that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on earlier this week?” Of those four, none was close to getting things right. Instead, all four answered by asking something like: “Was that the decision where the government said contraceptives are illegal?”

I’ll admit that asking all these random shoppers for a detailed analysis of a complex court case might be expecting a bit much. And maybe the sight of a white-haired septuagenarian quizzing Thursday morning Walmart shoppers about contraceptives was a little off-putting.

But I wasn’t pursuing a carefully researched legal brief. Just get the topic approximately right, I asked.

Yet  percent of my sample couldn’t even discuss the matter; and the other  percent got it all wrong.

I have no reason to think a national survey, including

Email: jbelz@wng.org

15 JOEL.indd 3

thousands of respondents, would be any more encouraging.

For the record, here’s what I was looking for: The Hobby Lobby decision held basically that the government cannot require a closely held private business to provide specified aspects of healthcare for its employees if such provision violates the company’s religious conscience, so long as those specific aspects of care remain otherwise available to the employees. And the court specifically based its decision not on the First Amendment of the Constitution’s “Bill of Rights” but on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of .

But the nation’s media provided precious little help to the American public in reaching a clear understanding of the decision. When President Obama (through his press secretary), presumed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid all blasted the Hobby Lobby decision as an expression of conservatives’ continuing “War on Women,” most of the networks, the newspapers, and the magazines gave such spokesmen free rein. No challenging questions, few follow-ups. Here and there, a minor exception—like the liberal Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, who cautioned his colleagues that the Hobby Lobby decision was “not as radical” as some of them were saying. But Tribe was almost alone in his media quarters, flashing such an amber caution light.

Much more typical was the claim, and this assertion was aired in only slightly varied form at least half a dozen times on MSNBC and PBS, that “this ruling allows bosses to force their personal beliefs on employees.” Or try the colorful conclusion that after such a decision, we can expect next to see the court carving out special permission for Amish farmers to sell unpasteurized milk. Scare language was everywhere.

All of which is why the random gathering of people in front of Walmart last week tended to be so tongue-tied. The nation’s media, whose duty it is to provide thoughtful information, had instead served up a steady diet of misinformation. And having been so pitifully taught, the people were now quite unprepared to identify something so simple as the main issue defining the Hobby Lobby case. Sadly, the few who got close still tended to get it very wrong.

It’s a pretty rare thing that when teachers get things terribly wrong, their students do any better.

I’ll try to remember that the next time I head out for a Walmart opinion poll. A

J U LY 2 6 , 2 0 1 4 • W O R L D



7/9/14 10:28 AM

Dispatches News > Quotables > Quick Takes

4

W O R L D • J u ly 2 6 , 2 0 1 4

15 NEWS OPENER.indd 4

7/9/14 12:01 PM

JULY 4: Demonstrators from both sides of the immigration debate confront each other outside a U.S. Border Patrol station in Murrieta, Calif.

Demonstrators had gathered where the agency was foiled earlier this week in an attempt to bus in and process some of the immigrants who had flooded the Texas border with Mexico.

Mark J. Terrill/AP

15 NEWS OPENER.indd 5

7/9/14 12:01 PM

Dispatches > News T h u r s d a y, J u n e  

Dictated change The th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declared Utah’s voter-approved same-sex marriage ban unconstitutional, claiming homosexual couples have a “fundamental right” to marry. It was the first time the Court of Appeals had upheld gay marriage, an issue likely destined for the U.S. Supreme Court. Judge Paul J. Kelly Jr., one of three judges on the appeals court panel, dissented: “We should resist the temptation to become philosopher-kings, imposing our views under the guise of the Fourteenth Amendment,” he wrote. The same day, a federal judge struck down Indiana’s same-sex marriage ban. Over  gay couples in the state received marriage licenses before an appeals court blocked the decision, pending review. The following week, a federal judge struck down Kentucky’s gay marriage ban.

 

FIFA bites back Soccer officials at FIFA gave Uruguayan star striker Luis Suárez the harshest World Cup punishment in history for biting the shoulder of opponent Giorgio Chiellini during Uruguay’s Tuesday match with Italy.

Suárez (left) and Chiellini They fined Suárez , and suspended him from the remainder of the World Cup in Brazil and subsequent games until October. Meanwhile, the U.S. men’s team drew unprecedented numbers of American TV viewers and stayed alive until the tournament’s round of . They ultimately fell to Belgium - in overtime July —though U.S. goalkeeper Tim Howard made  saves, a World Cup record. (See p. .)

A Coke and a smile New York City’s attempt to outlaw large sodas came to an end after officials lost their final appeal. Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s anti-obesity policy would have banned the sale of sugary drinks larger than  ounces in city restaurants, stadiums, street carts, and theaters. But the New York State Court of Appeals said the city’s Board of Health overstepped its authority in imposing the rule.

UTAH: RICK BOWMER/AP • PRO-LIFERS: WIN MCNAMEE/GETTY IMAGES • SOCCER: JAVIER SORIANO/AFP/GETTY IMAGES • BIG GULP: 7-ELEVEN • HULKA: LORI VAN BUREN/ALBANY TIMES UNION/AP

We d n e s d a y, J u n e  

Graduated George Hulka Jr. received a Bronze Star and survived the D-Day invasion at Normandy during his decorated military career. Now at age , he added another accomplishment: high school graduate. Hulka went to a one-room school until eighth grade, but in the s high school wasn’t available in rural New York.

A state program allows World War II, Korea, and Vietnam veterans to receive a diploma. Hulka graduated in June with his -year-old great-grandson and a -year-old World War II veteran, Thomas Smith. 

W O R L D • J U LY 2 6 , 2 0 1 4

15 NEWS 1 & 2.indd 6

7/9/14 9:59 AM

POROSHENKO: OLIVIER HOSLET/AP • WESOLOWSKI: ORLANDO BARRIA/EPA/LANDOV • AL-BAGHDADI: MILITANT VIDEO/AP

Supreme determinations Pro-lifers rejoiced as the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a Massachusetts law that had established a -foot buffer zone between sidewalk counselors and abortion facilities.

Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, said buffer zones that bar access to public property like sidewalks do not pass constitutional muster.

He did not challenge more flexible buffer zone laws, however, such as one in Colorado that requires protestors to keep  feet away from women entering abortion centers. In a separate ruling, the justices rebuked President Obama for making recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board in  while Congress was not officially in recess.

S u n d a y, J u n e  

UTAH: RICK BOWMER/AP • PRO-LIFERS: WIN MCNAMEE/GETTY IMAGES • SOCCER: JAVIER SORIANO/AFP/GETTY IMAGES • BIG GULP: 7-ELEVEN • HULKA: LORI VAN BUREN/ALBANY TIMES UNION/AP

POROSHENKO: OLIVIER HOSLET/AP • WESOLOWSKI: ORLANDO BARRIA/EPA/LANDOV • AL-BAGHDADI: MILITANT VIDEO/AP

Nigerian terror Militants apparently belonging to Muslim terrorist group Boko Haram fired on residents and Christian worshippers in four villages in northeastern Nigeria, killing at least . The villages were near the town of Chibok in a largely Christian enclave where Boko Haram fighters kidnapped  schoolgirls in April. Over , people have died this year in Boko Haram–linked bombings and violence. Some good news: On the first weekend in July at least  kidnapped women and girls (not the schoolgirls abducted from Chibok) escaped from the terrorist group.

F r i d a y, J u n e  

Ukraine signs

President Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine signed a long-awaited trade agreement with the European Union, waving off Russian hostility to the deal. It was the same trade agreement Poroshenko’s predecessor, Viktor Yanukovych, had failed to sign last November, setting in motion protests in Kiev, conflict between pro-Western and pro-Russian Ukrainians, and the Russian takeover of the Crimean peninsula.

Former Soviet republics Moldova and Georgia signed EU trade agreements alongside Ukraine. Four days after the deal, Poroshenko launched a new military offensive against pro-Russian militias in eastern Ukraine after they ignored demands to relinquish control of border checkpoints during a cease-fire.

Archbishop removed

The Vatican removed an archbishop and former church ambassador, Jozef Wesolowski, , from the priesthood after an internal investigation found him guilty of sexually abusing children. Wesolowski is the highest-ranking Vatican official to be investigated for child sex abuse.

He has two months to appeal, and he faces a criminal trial in Vatican City. In May the Holy See said it had defrocked  priests in its investigation of sex abuse.

It has not defrocked any bishops for covering up sexual abuse and moving predator priests to different parishes.

Caliphate claim Sunni Islamist insurgents sweeping through northern and western Iraq declared their organization, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the center of a new caliphate, or global Islamic empire.

The pretentious announcement on the first day of Ramadan called on other Muslim groups to pledge allegiance to leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi—a demand likely to kindle further infighting with rival extremist groups like al-Qaeda.

A day later, the Obama administration announced it would send  U.S. troops to Iraq. That brought to about  the U.S. military personnel assigned to provide logistical and moral support to the Iraqi army.

Died Linda Rolain, a woman suing over Nevada’s Obamacare health exchange, died on June  of complications from her illness. Rolain, who had a brain tumor, was part of a -person class-action lawsuit against the contractor that set up her state’s health exchange, Nevada Health Link. Rolain’s family said her tumor was treatable when it was first diagnosed in , but it became terminal in the spring while she was dealing with enrollment problems and waiting on her coverage to take effect. Rolain, , finally had surgery in May. Download WORLD’s iPad app today; details at wng.org/iPad

15 NEWS 1 & 2.indd 7

J U LY 2 6 , 2 0 1 4 • W O R L D



7/9/14 9:59 AM

Flared conflict

Obama and McDonald M o n d a y, J u n e  

VA replacement President Obama announced his surprise pick for the new secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs—not a career military general but former Procter & Gamble chief executive Robert McDonald, a Republican donor. Although McDonald spent five years in the Army, he has spent the past  primarily at P&G, where he worked to streamline the company and cut costs. “Bob is an expert at making organizations better,” said Obama. If the Senate confirms him, McDonald would replace Eric Shinseki, who resigned in May amid the VA scandal over long healthcare waiting lists.

More recalls

General Motors recalled an additional . million vehicles for an ignition switch problem that could cause the engine to shut off unexpectedly. The company put safety recalls into high gear after receiving a  million federal penalty for ignoring ignition switch defects linked to  deaths. The automaker has recalled  million vehicles this year, but buyers don’t seem to mind: June sales for GM were up  percent from the year before.

Israeli forces launched  airstrikes against militant targets in Gaza in what they said was retaliation for Palestinian rocket attacks. The strikes came the morning after searchers found the bodies of three kidnapped Israeli teenagers beneath a pile of rocks. “Hamas is responsible, and Hamas will pay,” said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, blaming the killings on the Palestinian terrorist organization.

Public anger over the teens’ deaths sparked violent protests and possibly a revenge murder: Suspected Jewish vigilantes abducted off the street a Palestinian teen and burned him alive. Tensions rose to precarious heights as the two sides exchanged retaliatory rocket fire.

Netanyahu eulogizes teenagers

Bogus bills?

Federal regulators accused telecom giant T-Mobile of receiving hundreds of millions of dollars from mobile texting services its customers never authorized. Many customers unknowingly paid . a month for third-party texting services providing horoscopes or celebrity gossip, with T-Mobile taking a cut of the fee, but the Federal Trade Commission said the company had received enough customer complaints to know the services were likely bogus. T-Mobile called the FTC claim “unfounded and without merit.”



CREDIT

Died Former Olympian and prisoner of war Louis Zamperini died on July  at age . Zamperini rose to international fame with the  biography Unbroken, which remains No.  on The New York Times bestseller list. After competing in the  Olympics, Zamperini survived a plane crash,  days adrift in the Pacific, and two years of brutality in a Japanese prison camp. He later professed faith in Christ at a Billy Graham crusade and forgave those who tortured him. A feature length film about Zamperini’s life will open Dec. .

MCDONALD: DENNIS BRACK/BLACK STAR/GETTY IMAGES • GM PROTESTER: JAMES FASSINGER/CORBIS/AP • ISRAEL: BAZ RATNER/AP • ZAMPERINI: MATT MEINDL/USC DORNSIFE COLLEGE OF LETTERS, ARTS AND SCIENCES/AP

Tu e s d a y, J u l y 

W O R L D • J U LY 2 6 , 2 0 1 4

15 NEWS 1 & 2.indd 8

7/9/14 10:00 AM

SIGN: WILFREDO LEE/AP • HURRICANE ARTHUR: MARK WILSON/GETTY IMAGES • IBRAHIM: AL FAJER/AP • SHAOJIE: CHINA AID • KHATTALA: DANA VERKOUTEREN/AP

Dispatches > News

Arthur arrives A Category  hurricane postponed the beach and barbecue plans of thousands of Americans vacationing on the East Coast for the Fourth of July— and prompted the Boston Pops Orchestra to perform its holiday concert a day early. Hurricane Arthur made landfall in North Carolina Thursday night with  mph winds, causing over , residents to lose power. But it weakened quickly on Friday and moved northwest, dumping rain on Atlantic states and leaving minimal damage.

SIGN: WILFREDO LEE/AP • HURRICANE ARTHUR: MARK WILSON/GETTY IMAGES • IBRAHIM: AL FAJER/AP • SHAOJIE: CHINA AID • KHATTALA: DANA VERKOUTEREN/AP

MCDONALD: DENNIS BRACK/BLACK STAR/GETTY IMAGES • GM PROTESTER: JAMES FASSINGER/CORBIS/AP • ISRAEL: BAZ RATNER/AP • ZAMPERINI: MATT MEINDL/USC DORNSIFE COLLEGE OF LETTERS, ARTS AND SCIENCES/AP

F r i d a y, J u l y 

T h u r s d a y, J u l y 

Job prospects

A jobs report from the U.S. Labor Department was even better than economists expected: The United States added , nonfarm jobs in June, while the unemployment rate dropped to . percent—the lowest since September . Five straight months of strong jobs numbers suggested the economy’s health is improving. At news of the rosy report, the Dow Jones industrial average traded above , for the first time in history. Analysts noted, however, that the labor force participation rate is unchanged at a low . percent for the third month in a row.

Stuck in Sudan

After escaping a death sentence for apostasy, Sudanese Christian Meriam Ibrahim faced a fresh lawsuit from relatives trying to convict her of leaving Islam. The new suit aims to prove Meriam was born to a Muslim family, although Ibrahim has previously testified she was raised a Christian. Ibrahim, her husband, and her two children took refuge at the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum after authorities blocked them from boarding a plane and accused them of forging travel documents.

Chinese pastor jailed

A Chinese court sentenced Zhang Shaojie, a Christian pastor from Henan province, to  years in prison for alleged fraud and “gathering crowds to disturb public order,” according to the pastor’s lawyer. Zhang’s supporters say the charges are fabricated, coming amid a Communist Party crackdown on the growing Christian church.

Authorities arrested Zhang last November over what church members said was a government attempt to seize church land. (For more on the church in China, see p. .)

CREDIT

Pleaded Ahmed Abu Khattala, the suspected ringleader of the  terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, pleaded not guilty during a brief June  court appearance in Washington, D.C. At the conclusion, the presiding judge told Khattala—who had a public defender—he had been advised of his “constitutional rights.” Republicans have criticized the Obama administration for taking  months to make an arrest and sending Khattala to a civilian court instead of a military tribunal.

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

15 NEWS 1 & 2.indd 9

J U LY 2 6 , 2 0 1 4 • W O R L D



7/9/14 11:17 AM

M o n d a y, J u l y 

S a t u r d a y & S u n d a y, J u l y  - 

Rebels fall back Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko said his army had reached a “breakthrough” in its fight against rebels in the country’s east, recapturing the city of Slovyansk Saturday, a former stronghold for the pro-Russian separatists. The rebels regrouped in Donetsk, a city of  million, where the battle could take the form of street-to-street combat. Russian President Vladimir Putin failed to answer openly the insurgents’ plea for intervention. “We will fight to the end because we have nowhere left to retreat,” one rebel told the Associated Press. The fighting has killed  since April.

Wimbledon winners Czech tennis champion Petra Kvitova won her second women’s singles title at Wimbledon Saturday by trouncing Canadian Eugenie Bouchard in a -, - match that lasted only  minutes. Media darling Bouchard, , was the first Canadian to reach a Grand Slam final. On Sunday, Novak Djokovic battled and prevailed against the player with more Grand Slam titles () than any other, -year-old Roger Federer, for the men’s singles title. Djokovic, from Serbia, has won seven Grand Slam titles. Federer plans to continue playing next year.

Big bird A scientist said he had identified the largest extinct flying bird on record, Pelagornis sandersi, a fossil with a wingspan of  feet or more—about twice as large as an albatross. Study author Daniel Ksepka had to run computer simulations to ensure the gigantic bird was capable of liftoff.

Indeed, the long wings made the bird “capable of highly efficient gliding,” Ksepka wrote in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The fossil was originally found in Charleston, S.C., in , and has been sitting in a museum drawer.



CREDIT

Expelled China’s push to root out corruption reached new heights on June : The Communist Party expelled retired military commander Xu Caihou after an internal investigation revealed he took bribes for military promotions. Xu’s future now rests in the hands of prosecutors, who will open a criminal investigation. Chinese President Xi Jinping, who took office last year, has promised to clean up the Communist Party and reform the country’s military.

UKRAINE: GENYA SAVILOV/AFP/GETTY IMAGES • PELAGORNIS SANDERSI FOSSIL: COURTESY DANIEL KSEPKA VIA BRUCE MUSEUM/AP • KVITOVA: MATTHEW STOCKMAN/GETTY IMAGES • XU: MARK WILSON/GETTY IMAGES

Concussion deal U.S. District Judge Anita Brody approved a long-awaited deal between the NFL and former football players who may have suffered concussions during games. To satisfy the judge, the league removed a  million cap on injury payouts. Under the deal, still subject to a fairness hearing scheduled for November, former players with conditions like Lou Gehrig’s disease or dementia would receive thousands or millions of dollars in compensation for brain injury claims, depending on their age and condition.

W O R L D • J U LY 2 6 , 2 0 1 4

15 NEWS 3.indd 10

7/9/14 11:25 AM

GAZA: EYAD BABA/AP • IRANIAN FLAG: RONALD ZAK/AP • TSA: ERIK S. LESSER/AP • MADDUX & GLAVINE: TOM DIPACE/AP • BEATS HEADPHONES: HANDOUT • FOXX: CLIFF OWEN/AP • SHEVARDNADZE: JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Dispatches > News

UKRAINE: GENYA SAVILOV/AFP/GETTY IMAGES • PELAGORNIS SANDERSI FOSSIL: COURTESY DANIEL KSEPKA VIA BRUCE MUSEUM/AP • KVITOVA: MATTHEW STOCKMAN/GETTY IMAGES • XU: MARK WILSON/GETTY IMAGES

GAZA: EYAD BABA/AP • IRANIAN FLAG: RONALD ZAK/AP • TSA: ERIK S. LESSER/AP • MADDUX & GLAVINE: TOM DIPACE/AP • BEATS HEADPHONES: HANDOUT • FOXX: CLIFF OWEN/AP • SHEVARDNADZE: JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

July 20 Under the terms of the deal forged

between world powers and Iran, the Islamic regime has until today to broker a deal regarding its nuclear program. Iran maintains it’s interested in a peaceful nuclear program, but many in the West believe the ayatollahs have hostile intentions. The deadline was set when Iran, the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, and China reached an interim deal in November.

LOOKING AHEAD July 27

Baseball will induct six stars into its Cooperstown, N.Y., Hall of Fame today. Atlanta Braves pitchers Greg Maddux (left) and Tom Glavine will join their s-era manager Bobby Cox at the induction ceremony. Other inductees include former Chicago first baseman Frank Thomas and managers Joe Torre and Tony La Russa.

Tu e s d a y, J u l y 

Ratcheting up Tit-for-tat conflict in Israel showed no sign of cooling as Israel bombed over  more targets linked with Hamas and other militant groups. The new strikes came a day after militants in Gaza launched about  rockets and mortars into southern Israel, driving civilians into bomb shelters. The Israel Defense Forces announced on Twitter it had “commenced Operation Protective Edge in Gaza against Hamas in order to stop the terror Israel’s citizens face on a daily basis.” Israel called out several thousand reserve troops in preparation for a possible ground invasion, and military spokesman Lt. Col. Peter Lerner promised “a gradual increase in the pressure we are putting on Hamas.”

July 21 Starting today, passengers will

lose more than time in the security line. The Transportation Security Administration will more than double per-passenger fees from . per way to .. Travelers pay the fee when they purchase tickets. The rate hike, which Congress approved in December, is expected to provide the agency with nearly  billion in extra revenue over the next  years.

July 31

Regulators for the European Union have until today to raise objections to tech giant Apple’s acquisition of headphone maker Beats. EU regulators, as well as U.S. regulators, must be assured the  billion deal, announced by Apple in May, won’t violate antitrust laws.

August 1 Transportation Secretary

Anthony Foxx told governors in July that Congress has until today to reach a deal on increased transportation funding, or else the agency would have to begin cutting back on spending for the nation’s highways and bridges. Without action, Foxx says the nation’s highway fund will begin running dry.

CREDIT

Died Eduard Shevardnadze, the last Soviet foreign minister and an architect to ending the Cold War, died on July  at . Shevardnadze joined Mikhail S. Gorbachev to enact a policy of “perestroika,” or change, which preceded the Soviet Union’s dissolution in . Shevardnadze in  became president of Georgia, one of the many republics created from former Soviet states, but resigned in  amid corruption allegations. Georgia’s Supreme Court invalidated elections it said he rigged in  and —violating laws he sponsored.

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

15 NEWS 3.indd 11

Download WORLD’s iPad app today; details at wng.org/iPad

J U LY 2 6 , 2 0 1 4 • W O R L D



7/9/14 11:26 AM

Dispatches > News

Tolerance in the court >>

In the last week of June and into early July, the U.S. Supreme Court dismantled the Department of Health and Human Services’ regulatory scheme surrounding the contraceptive mandate, for both religiously owned for-profits and religious nonprofits. The plaintiffs haven’t gotten everything they wanted—but they came close.

First and foremost, the court delivered a big win for Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Specialties on June 30, establishing that family-owned corporations can qualify for protection under the Religious Freedom and Restoration Act (RFRA).

Justice Samuel Alito, writing the 5-4 majority opinion in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., said religious exercise is a broad category which can extend to how an entrepreneur runs a business.

RFRA requires that for any laws imposing a substantial burden on religious exercise, the government must show that it is using the “least restrictive means” to accomplish its “compelling interest.” The court ruled that as applied to religiously owned corporations, the government’s contraceptive mandate was certainly not the “least restrictive means” of fulfilling the ­government’s “compelling interest” in providing free contraceptives and potential abortifacients.

The federal government had granted numerous exemptions from the mandate for other groups, and that showed it had alternatives available, according to the court. The court said the govern-

12

ment could try to find another way to supply free Plan B and Ella to Hobby Lobby and Conestoga employees—since the businesses cover all contraceptives except those two drugs that they consider potential abortifacients.

Alito hemmed the ­ruling: He said that ­corporations could not use the ruling as a pretext for not providing health ­services, and that courts should be able to tell easily if a religious business owner is sincere in his beliefs. Hobby Lobby and Conestoga both articulated a Christian vision for running their businesses that isn’t ­limited to the abortion issue.

Alito also made clear that the court’s ruling was limited to the contraceptive and abortifacient issue, and did not extend religious freedom protections to corporations on other issues. The court will have to address separately situations where a business denies services to gay clients for religious reasons.

Before the ruling, most for-profits had won injunctions, but after it even nonprofits began winning injunctions as a result. Christopher and Mary Ann Yep are the Catholic co-owners of Triune Health Group, a healthcare management company just outside of Chicago that objects to the mandate, and had won an injunction. The Yeps’ case is now pending before the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

“Our position is, based on Hobby Lobby, the case is over,” said the Yeps’ attorney, Kevin Edward White, who has represented them on behalf of the Chicago-based Thomas More Society.

Mary Ann Yep was on the steps of the Supreme Court when the Hobby Lobby decision came out. “The joy and the happiness that was felt was, obviously, palpable,” she said.

Then on July 3, the court granted objection: Wheaton College an A demonstrator emergency injuncshoves his tion and in a oneposter in the face of a page order undid the demonstrator current federal holding a sign accommodation for which reads: “I nonprofits, which am the Pro-life Generation” requires nonprofits after the Hobby to notify their insurLobby ruling ance carrier that they outside the object to the mandate Supreme Court.

W O R L D • J u ly 2 6 , 2 0 1 4

15 NEWS pp12-13.indd 12

7/9/14 11:15 AM

JONATHAN ERNST/Reuters /Landov

Supreme Court broadens ‘religious exercise’ definition as well as exemptions to contraceptive mandate By emily belz

Justice Antonin Scalia merely joined the court’s “result,” meaning he agreed with issuing an injunction but did not agree on the legal reasoning behind it.

He likely wanted a fuller exemption for Wheaton instead of the proposed accommodation.

Carl Esbeck, a religious freedom scholar and a professor at the University of Missouri School of Law, had suggested when the court announced Hobby Lobby it might be precisely the settlement reasonable plaintiffs could reach with reasonable White House lawyers: Objecting groups should notify the government of their objection, and then place the responsibility on the government to figure out contraceptive and abortifacient coverage. “It may sound like form over substance but it’s not,” he said. “It’s complicity with evil-doing if you’re notifying your carrier. But if the government tells you you have to do something, you have to tell the government you object. … At that point, it’s the government’s problem.” He made the important point that none of the insurance carriers are religious; they will provide the coverage for the drugs if the federal government tells them to. He thinks the plaintiffs’ lawyers and the White House lawyers should meet and agree on a RFRA right for plaintiffs along the lines of the Wheaton accommodation— something more substantial than a simple regulatory accommodation.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, a deciding vote for Hobby Lobby, indicated in his concurring opinion that the accommodation route was sufficient religious protection to satisfy him. A

JONATHAN ERNST/REUTERS /LANDOV

The court ruled that as applied to religiously owned corporations, the government’s contraceptive mandate was certainly not the ‘least restrictive means’ of fulfilling the government’s ‘compelling interest’ in providing free contraceptives and potential abortifacients. and then requires the insurance carrier to arrange coverage. The court said Wheaton qualified for an injunction simply by notifying the government of its objection, rather than filing a form with its own insurer. Now the burden is on the government to figure out a way to provide coverage of the objectionable drugs to Wheaton employees.

The vote for the order was apparently -, with support from liberal Justice Stephen Breyer, though it wasn’t officially published. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, and

Email: ebelz@wng.org

15 NEWS pp12-13.indd 13

Sonia Sotomayor wrote a long dissent, unusual for a simple court order.

The dissent accurately explained the impact of the Wheaton order: “[B]ecause Wheaton is materially indistinguishable from other nonprofits that object to the government’s accommodation, the issuance of an injunction in this case will presumably entitle hundreds or thousands of other objectors to the same remedy,” wrote Sotomayor.

The dissenters thought the original accommodation for Wheaton and other nonprofits went far enough. Meanwhile,

—with reporting by Daniel James Devine

J U LY 2 6 , 2 0 1 4 • W O R L D



7/9/14 11:14 AM

Dispatches > Quotables ‘I was in complete disbelief.’

U.S. Rep. VIRGINIA FOXX, R-N.C., on President Barack Obama’s June  announcement that he plans to “fix as much of our immigration system as I can on my own, without Congress.”

‘When you see reckless spending, it just belittles the sacrifices students are consistently asked to make.’

‘‘To the extent that she throws him under the bus, she has to run over him at a very slow speed.’

Political analyst BILL WHALEN on Hillary Clinton’s attempt to distance herself from President Obama without alienating his supporters ahead of her potential  presidential bid.



W O R L D • J U LY 2 6 , 2 0 1 4

15 QUOTABLES.indd 14

ELIAS BENJELLOUN, student body president at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, on the , fee the university plans to pay Hillary Clinton for an October speech, even as the university plans to raise tuition prices  percent over the next four years. Clinton has also reportedly received , to speak at UCLA and , to speak at the University of Connecticut.

‘If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to them the other also. If someone takes your coat, do not withhold your shirt from them.’

Houston Rockets guard JEREMY LIN, quoting Luke : in a tweet, after the Rockets posted pictures at the Toyota Center of free agent Carmelo Anthony in a No.  Rockets jersey. Lin wears No. , and the implication was that the Rockets will trade Lin if Anthony signs with the team.

OBAMA AND CLINTON: JACQUELYN MARTIN/AP • CHASE: HANDOUT • FOXX: MANUEL BALCE CENETA/AP • CLINTON: SCOTT OLSON/GETTY IMAGES • LIN: RICK SCUTERI/AP • ANTHONY: HANDOUT

‘As usual, President Obama is using gasoline when a fire extinguisher would be more appropriate.’

Listen to WORLD on the radio at worldandeverything.com

Download WORLD’s iPad app today; details at wng.org/iPad 7/9/14 11:34 AM

CREDIT

Massachusetts resident SUZANNE CHASE on a June letter from the VA addressed to her husband, Doug, announcing he could call to schedule an appointment with a primary care doctor. Doug Chase died of a brain tumor in —four months after requesting VA care.

CREDIT

obama and clinton: Jacquelyn Martin/ap • Chase: handout • Foxx: Manuel Balce Ceneta/ap • clinton: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images • Lin: Rick Scuteri/ap • Anthony: handout

7/9/14 11:08 AM

15 QUOTABLES.indd 15

Dispatches > Quick Takes

  City leaders in Portsmouth, Va.,

  If you’ve got the money, he’s got the town. Investors with , to spend can buy up all of Swett, S.D. The ramshackle town located close to the Nebraska line used to be home to about  residents, but in recent decades, the townspeople moved to bigger South Dakota towns. Now Swett is wholly owned by Lance Benson, who put the entire town up for sale with a Rapid City, S.D., real estate broker. And though only two people officially live in Swett, the town’s bar, Swett Tavern, attracts a number of patrons from nearby ranches and farms.

  Sometimes the best thing to do is not check Facebook during a burglary.

According to police in South St. Paul, Minn., alleged burglar Nicholas Wig, , logged into the popular social media website during a June  burglary.

And then he left without logging out.

Arriving home, owner James Wood noticed not only that his house had been robbed, but that the perpetrator left his Facebook account active on Wood’s computer and a bunch of wet clothes on the floor. Wood used the opportunity to call out Wig by making a post on his page—and offered to give the alleged thief back his wet clothes. Incredibly, Wig offered to return later that night to the home and trade Wood’s cell phone for his jeans. When he arrived for the trade, police arrested him.

  Even the best need proofreaders. Northwestern University’s highly respected Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications in June issued about  diplomas that misspelled the word “integrated” by leaving out the “n.” This isn’t the first embarrassing diploma mistake by an American institute of higher learning. In , the University of Wisconsin-Madison misspelled “Wisconsin” on nearly , diplomas, and last year Radford University misspelled “Virginia” on its diplomas.



W O R L D • J U LY 2 6 , 2 0 1 4

15 QUICK TAKES.indd 16

ILLUSTRATION: KIREG BARRIE • SWETT: ERIC GINNARD/RAPID CITY JOURNAL/AP • MILO’S KITCHEN: CHICAGO TRIBUNE VIA TWITTER • WIG: FACEBOOK • DIPLOMA: HANDOUT

are wondering: How can a city auditor do his job if he goes more than a year without logging into the city’s financial records system?

According to a Virginian-Pilot newspaper report, Portsmouth City Auditor Jesse Andre Thomas had not released a single audit since taking the position  months ago. What’s more, the city official only logged on to the city’s financial system twice in the first few weeks of taking the job, and never since, according to records obtained by the paper. The same records indicate Thomas often goes months without scheduling a meeting or appointment. “If those things are factual,” Councilman Bill Moody told the paper, “then we need to meet as a council and make a decision on his future.”

Of the hundreds of food trucks that litter San Francisco parking lots, one new restaurant on wheels is catering to a different breed of customer. Milo’s Kitchen, a dog snack division of Big Heart Pet Brands, rolled out its dog food truck into San Francisco on June . But the stay by the bay was short-lived. The dog snack truck, which offered not only snacks but family portraits too, traveled to Los Angeles and San Diego in early July. From there, the truck will embark on a cross-country tour with stops in Phoenix, Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis, Atlanta, and Pittsburgh.

Download WORLD’s iPad app today; details at wng.org/iPad

7/9/14 9:06 AM

DOLPHIN: SERGEI SVETLITSKY/AP • CORVETTE: PAUL SANCYA/AP • WEDDING RING:WAOW • ILLUSTRATION: KRIEG BARRIE

  

   Since , George Talley of Detroit has been telling friends and family about his prized Chevrolet Corvette. But since the day in July  when a thief stole the Vette from a Detroit street corner, Talley has spoken of the car only in the past tense. That all changed on June  when Talley received a call from Mississippi. “I get a call from AAA telling me you have a Corvette in Mississippi, come and get it,” Talley told WXYZ. “I’ve heard it was running, it had , miles on it, and right now, it’s at the police station in Hattiesburg, [Miss.].” Police there don’t know the full chain of custody—they were just able to track down the original owner  years after he reported it stolen thanks to the vehicle’s VIN number.

DOLPHIN: SERGEI SVETLITSKY/AP • CORVETTE: PAUL SANCYA/AP • WEDDING RING:WAOW • ILLUSTRATION: KRIEG BARRIE

ILLUSTRATION: KIREG BARRIE • SWETT: ERIC GINNARD/RAPID CITY JOURNAL/AP • MILO’S KITCHEN: CHICAGO TRIBUNE VIA TWITTER • WIG: FACEBOOK • DIPLOMA: HANDOUT

  Russia has returned some of Ukraine’s valuable military hardware since annexing Crimea earlier this year. But Ukrainian officials are insisting that Russia is holding back one valuable asset: Ukraine’s pod of naval reconnaissance dolphins. “The military dolphins need to be returned to our country in the same way that Russia returned Ukraine’s seized military equipment,” first deputy head of the Henichesk Regional State Administration Dmitry Yunusov said. The Soviet Union originally began training dolphins to spot land mines and enemy divers in the s. But since the breakup of the U.S.S.R., Ukraine had administrated the dolphin program in Crimea. Defense analysts suspect Russia will not be so willing to return the pod, however.

  It’s been five years since Lois Matykowski lost her wedding ring. The Stevens Point, Wis., resident spent hours on hands and knees looking for the special band. In June, Matykowski and her wedding ring were reunited—though she may now want it cleaned. That’s because Matykowski found the ring in a puddle of her dog’s vomit. According to Tucker the dog’s veterinarian, Tucker probably gobbled up the jewelry piece years ago. The vet said it may have dislodged in a recent incident where Tucker gobbled up a popsicle—stick and all.

   There’s a new name for students enrolled in Vancouver, Canada, public schools. On June , the school board approved a policy change adding transgender pronouns to the schools’ official lexicon. Henceforth, teachers will be told to use transgender pronouns like “xe, xem, and xyr” to replace “he, him, and his” provided the student identifies xemself as transgendered. The Vancouver School Board approved the measure, and also seeks to institute gender neutral bathrooms at some schools.

J U LY 2 6 , 2 0 1 4 • W O R L D

15 QUICK TAKES.indd 17



7/9/14 9:07 AM

Janie B. Cheaney

Little word, big meaning

Attitudes about sex are changing, even among Christians who should know better

>>



W O R L D • J U LY 2 6 , 2 0 1 4

15 CHEANEY.indd 18

AASTOCK/SHUTTERSTOCK

Q: W  C     A: Everybody is obsessed with sex. Why single out Christians?

Not “everybody” in the literal, individual sense, but throughout history the little word with immense power has been lurking in the human mind, if not front-and-center, then very near the surface.

Humanity in general (especially within a certain age range), when not eating or fighting, is either mating or thinking about it.

Christians are called “obsessed” for attempting to control sex. This is a fight we appear to be losing, to judge by a Gallop poll from May that indicates “new record highs in moral acceptability.” Of the  contemporary moral issues listed in the survey, nine are directly related to sex and its consequences (such as marriage—or the absence of marriage—and babies). To no one’s surprise, acceptance of cohabitation, unwed motherhood, and nontraditional forms of marriage is edging up:  percent of the Americans polled were OK with sex between an unmarried man and woman, and a solid majority ( percent) considered unmarried motherhood to be “morally acceptable” (possibly as the alternative to abortion, which only  percent approve).

Social reformers going back to the th century would say this is all to the good because sex is biology, not morality. If people would only let go of their inhibitions, they, and society as a whole, would be much healthier. Perhaps that made more sense in the s than now. People have been letting go of their inhibitions for the last  years with no noticeable improvement in personal health, and the surge in illegitimacy and internet porn doesn’t speak well for society either.

In one sense the critics are right: The Bible is “obsessed with sex”—rife with examples and consequences in the Old Testament and called out explicitly in the New. When Jesus or the apostles mention works of the flesh, sexual matters always account for at least two or three items on the list (see Matthew :; Galatians :;  Peter :). Paul explains why: “Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body” ( Corinthians :).

Most of us have heard this all our lives, and supposedly teach it to our children. So why do  percent of unmarried Christians between the ages of  to  indicate they have or would have sex outside of marriage? This according to a poll by ChristianMingle.com, but other surveys of Christian young people indicate a similar rise in moral acceptability—only a few percentage points below the population as a whole.

Obvious reasons for the slide include peer behavior and popular entertainment, which make the previously unacceptable seem normal. And if it’s normal, why fight it, especially if marriage is not on the horizon?

But the deeper problem is that the ancient heresy of Gnosticism has infected our culture’s view of spirituality. Gnosticism separates spirit from body, with predictable consequences: One becomes either an ascetic or a hedonist. A sound and biblical “theology of the body” tells us neither way is godly. God is invested in human flesh—He personally shaped it, breathed life into it, took it on Himself, glorified it through the resurrection, and infused the bodies of His people with His own Spirit. We are participants in the divine nature, physical heirs of a future physical glory. “Don’t you know your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit?”

Well, do we?

In the world’s economy, sex is its own reward. The church sometimes takes its cue from the world, speaking of sex as a blissful prize for those who wait until marriage. Until then, it’s a pitfall that can be avoided with some forethought and proof texts.

Neither or both of these propositions may be true, depending on the tangle of unpredictable circumstances lying in wait for each individual Christian. But the premise is false. In God’s economy, nothing is its own reward. He Himself is the reward of a life turned over to Him, body and soul. A

Email: jcheaney@wng.org

7/3/14 3:11 PM

CHANGE YOUR WORLD

WITH A DEGREE FROM LIBERTY UNIVERSITY Discover the benefits of a quality, affordable education from the world’s largest Christian university.

Liberty offers graduate degrees in more than 50 residential programs of study such as biomedical sciences (pre-med), business administration, counseling, music education, public health, religion, and sport management. Classes are taught from a biblical worldview by professors who are experts in their field.

Boost your credentials with a degree from Liberty University.

aastock/shutterstock

LEARN MORE AT WWW.LIBERTY.EDU/WORLD

Training Champions for Christ since 1971

LYNCHBURG, VIRGINIA | RESIDENTGRADUATE@LIBERTY.EDU | (877) 298-9617

15 CHEANEY.indd 19

7/2/14 4:22 PM

d’s

world is filled w

Fil

l yo

ur chi

d n o w ith

ld with wonde

. o o r, t

Discover something new today!

that place—with enriching web content

Three- to six-year-olds are like sponges:

and fascinating audio narratives read by

soaking up everything in the world

friendly voices, plus bimonthly magazine

around them. So, as a parent, you

stories crafted to introduce kids to word

want to be sure your child has a safe

recognition, letter sounds and reading

place to explore. God’s Big WORLD is

skills. Welcome to God’s Big WORLD!

Get started today, go to wng.org/godsbigworld

15 MOVIES and TV.indd 20

7/8/14 4:37 PM

PAUL SCHIRALDI/HBO

Go

. r e

Reviews

Movies  TV > Books > Q QA A > Music A

Bereft and abandoned TELEVISION: Far from edifying, The Leftovers does offer a fundamental honesty about the human condition

PAUL SCHIRALDI/HBO

BY MEGAN BASHAM

Email: mbasham@wng.org

15 MOVIES and TV.indd 21

>>

S ’  covering a television series or film not because it offers an edifying or even innocuous way to spend an hour, but because it reveals something noteworthy about the mindset of our culture. The Leftovers, a new supernatural drama on HBO, is just such a show.

It features frequent profanity and disturbing sex scenes involving teenage characters, and I by no means want to give the impression that I’m recommending it. Yet its sharp depiction of how humankind would likely react to a world in which, while there may still be a God, they suspect He’s no longer interested in them, is worthy of consideration.

As one would expect from a show created by screenwriter Damon Lindelof (who also brought audiences Lost) the first two episodes

of The Leftovers set up plenty of suspenseful, paranormal mysteries. But they also establish loud and clear that, while the show concerns the lives of the survivors of a Rapture-like event, it isn’t meant to be an end-of-times thriller à la Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. It is something far quieter and more disquieting.

It may be exciting to imagine how the prophecies of Revelation will finally play out, but these are sheer conjectures in a fictional format. What we can make an accurate stab at is how bereft we would feel if we believed we’d been forsaken by God. The Leftovers depicts with uncomfortable authenticity the psychological toll it would take on a society to have demonLEFT BEHIND: strable evidence that Annie Q and they’ve been left behind.

Paterson Joseph.

J U LY 2 6 , 2 0 1 4 • W O R L D



7/9/14 9:49 AM

Reviews > Movies & TV Some of the survivors—if that’s what they are—try to justify their continued presence on Earth, passing out fliers that argue the taken were no more deserving of Heavenly citizenship than those who remain. Others conduct odd surveys trying to discover some similar quality all of the raptured—which includes people as unalike as Condoleezza Rice, the pope, Shaquille O’Neal, and Gary Busey—might have shared.

Some idolize those who have gone, and some dismiss the unexplained disappearance of 2 percent of the world’s ­population as a natural disaster, possibly related to global warming. Numerous cults of self-flagellation and mourning spring up overnight, including the GR (Guilty Remnant), ­ascetics who wear God’s rejection on their sleeves. The major-

DOCUMENTARY

America

by Derringer Dick

22

W O R L D • J u ly 2 6 , 2 0 1 4

15 MOVIES and TV.indd 22

America: LIONSGATE • The Leftovers: Paul Schiraldi/HBO

ity, however, carry on with nihilistic lifestyles that are only slightly enhanced by what has passed.

Though the series will no doubt go on to follow its plots about a small-town cop with prophetic dreams (Justin Theroux) and a cult leader who can hug away pain (Paterson Joseph) to all the wacky mystical places Lost did, on some subtextual level what it really seems interested in is parsing the foolishness the world calls wisdom. Within the “Sudden Departure,” as the characters come to call the event, are plenty of scenes that look like our regular, pre-Rapture lives today, and the resemblance isn’t pretty.

How do we handle growing worry that our teens are making immoral, self-destructive choices? How do we explain away violent or tragic events that take our loved ones from us? How do we overcome our own selfishness and self-destructive impulses that create distance between us and the ones we most need to be close to? The core issue, the show seems to insist, is not the degree of our disasters, but our reactions from a place of spiritual fallenness.

“You’re going to forget you ever felt burdened,” one cult member promises a new recruit. “Do you say that to everyone?” the recruit asks. “No,” the member answers. “To some I say abandoned.”

And this, I think, is the implicit honesty of The Leftovers.

Even if it doesn’t recognize the gospel, it recognizes the problem the gospel solves. Without the love and grace inherent in a relationship with the Creator, this—burden and abandonment, sin and loneliness—is all that is ultimately left to the created. A

Where would the world be without America?

Dinesh D’Souza’s documentary film cuts straight to that question, interviewing people who are frustrated with the United States: Native Americans who are still upset that we own the Black Hills; Hispanics who would prefer for Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California to be part of Mexico; college professors who tell the camera that the United States is an imperialist colonial power.

D’Souza tells us many people do not want the United States to exist, and addresses the narrative of shame: the idea that America is not actually a great nation because it massacred Native Americans, enslaved blacks, bombed Vietnam, and invaded Mexico. America tells us that these charges need to be answered, because the people who bring them want justice.

D’Souza’s basic argument is that while the mindset that led to America’s injustices is universal, America’s particular ethos is unique, and good. Every nation, D’Souza says, conquered their neighbors and stole their possessions; when the United States took large swaths of land from the Sioux, for instance, what it was doing was no different than what the Sioux had done, taking those same lands from other tribes. What makes us different, says America, is that Americans also ended slavery, made reparations to the Sioux, and in general championed industry and trade rather than conquest and theft.

It’s too bad the film presents these arguments unevenly.

Sometimes it tackles the hard questions head-on, but other times it skirts the real issues, preferring to shadowbox America’s critics rather than explore their criticisms.

Undermining progressives’ reputations may be a good thing, but it will not undo the skeletons in America’s closet.

There is much to like in America. Much of the movie is told through engaging historical recreations, and it features several forgotten stories from America’s history that deserve to be remembered. While the film is too short to engage thoroughly criticisms of the United States, it is long enough to remember some of her best moments.

See all our movie reviews at wng.org/movies

7/9/14 9:33 AM

Earth to Echo: Patrick Wymore/Relativity Media • 112 Weddings: HBO

>>

MOVIE

Earth to Echo

by Alicia Cohn

America: LIONSGATE • The Leftovers: Paul Schiraldi/HBO

Earth to Echo: Patrick Wymore/Relativity Media • 112 Weddings: HBO

>>

Earth to Echo is meant to be an adventure movie for kids, but only succeeds at being a dull ET knock-off with no real suspense or characters to care about.

The film clearly wants to communicate something heartfelt about the sense of home a group of close friends can create, conveyed through the high-concept means of a stranded alien trying to get home. But it tells that story without charm, nuance, or even mystery.

In the film, three boys (all unknown actors) unite on their last night together before their respective families leave a neighborhood seized for a new freeway. The boys’ interaction is authentic, in that their dialogue is immature and witless, though the late addition of a female character makes no narrative sense and follows every cliché in the screenwriting playbook.

In its sole sign of innovation, the movie tracks the early part of the boys’ journey via YouTube videos and iPhone texts, until eventually they discover part of an alien ship in the Nevada desert. The shaky amateur shooting style—the movie is narratively framed by a heavy-handed future voice-over and supposedly filmed by one of the boys—is occasionally unbelievable, often jarring, and ultimately dull, like watching somebody else’s home videos.

Steven Spielberg’s 1982 classic worked because he kept the focus narrow and slowly built up the relationship between alien and kids. Earth to Echo does neither.

Instead, it purports to be a coming-of-age film, a film about friendship, about feeling invisible, and a genre story about aliens and government conspiracy (centered on an uninspired Jason Gray-Stanford). “Having a friend light years away taught us ­distance is just a state of mind,” the voice-over declares, but the movie never fully develops the For the weekend of July 4-6 ­ according to Box Office Mojo friendship or the inexplicable visit. cautions: Quantity of sexual (S), ­violent (V), and foul-language (L) ­content on a 0-10 Earth to Echo also scale, with 10 high, from kids-in-mind.com plays the storytelling S V L

almost too safe, steering 1̀ Transformers: Age clear of any real sense of of Extinction PG-13..................3 7 5 danger as if to stay 2̀ Tammy R......................................5 4 8 ­family-friendly, a goal 3̀ 22 Jump Street R....................5 5 10 ruined somewhat by the 4̀ Deliver Us From Evil* R.......3 7 7 reckless behavior of the 5̀ How to Train unsupervised children Your Dragon 2 PG.................... 1 3 2 6̀ Earth to Echo* PG.................... 1 3 4 throughout the film (the 7̀ Maleficent PG............................ 1 4 2 movie is rated PG and 8̀ Jersey Boys R............................4 4 8 includes some profanity).

9̀ Think Like a Man Too PG-13...6 3 5 10 Edge of Tomorrow* PG-13....2 6 5 `

Box Office Top 10

*Reviewed by world

15 MOVIES and TV.indd 23

DOCUMENTARY

112 Weddings

by Sophia Lee

>>

112 Weddings is an HBO documentary that may scare single people away from marriage—until their God-given desire to love and be loved prevails.

Filmmaker Doug Block shoots weddings on the side.

Over a period of 20 years, he has shot 112 weddings, getting intimate access to ordinary individuals experiencing the most extraordinary day of their lives. In 112 Weddings, Block revisits some of these couples and asks: So how’s your happily ever after?

We first meet Rachel and Paul, married for 13 years, who on their wedding day locked glistening eyes as they stood before the officiate. They say their marriage is great— but it’s hard to understand them because they’re constantly talking over each other.

Jenn and Augie, married eight years, share the typical troubles: losing sleep over a new baby, a layoff, days-long arguments. Augie says sometimes he wants to leave—but just for a week and then come back. As he speaks, Jenn sits a foot away and wipes tears from her cheeks.

Block (who’s been married 28 years) interviews divorced couples, too. One couple split up after 19 years when one day, during a couples therapy session, the wife discovered her successful, slimmed-down husband had been cheating on her. Another divorced screenwriter calls his ex-wife a “horrible wife” who was “abusing her antidepressants.” Then he backtracks: “No. I’m sorry. That was me.”

Some couples, like Janice and Alexander, didn’t actually marry. Instead, they had a “partnership ­ceremony,” in which they swore “unconditional love” without the legal “possessing.” Janice claims she would love Alexander even if he ran off with another woman. Alexander, however, is not certain his love is as unconditional as hers. And then there’s lesbian couple Anna and Erica, who say what they have is special because “when you make the decision to stay with somebody forever, you really want to work on it.”

112 Weddings can be emotionally draining, and it’s no wonder Disney movies always end with a wedding. Happy weddings are easy. Happily ever after is complicated and messy.

J u ly 2 6 , 2 0 1 4 • W O R L D

23

7/9/14 9:30 AM

‘Wisdom journalists’ Author acknowledges a lack of media objectivity, but his solution means more propaganda BY MARVIN OLASKY

>>



W O R L D • J U LY 2 6 , 2 0 1 4

15 BOOKS.indd 24

Hmm. No objectivity, no fairness, no balance: How then shall we report?

Stephens proposes that journalists “consecrate themselves to insight and understanding” and henceforth be known as “wisdom journalists.” I can hear press gangs across the land saying, Wisdom Journalist Gus Grissom. I kinda like the sound of that.

But if journalists are so consecrated— Merriam-Webster defines that as “dedicated to a sacred purpose”—we need to ask what “wisdom” means.

Stephens defines it as “good sense … insight … accumulated learning.” He writes that news organizations can gain wisdom by “hiring individuals with an academic background in the fields upon which they are

HANDOUT

S I    when the opposition partly accedes to my view, but misses what’s most important?

In the s I criticized the mainstream media fiction of “objectivity” but wasn’t impressed with the common alternative, existentialist subjectivity.

My proposed alternative: biblical objectivity, based on the realization that God created the world and knows its essence, so only He can describe it accurately, and has done so in the Bible.

The s also brought us The Right Stuff, a memorable movie about the early days of the space program. In it Gus Grissom—who would become the second American in space—asks a fellow flyer what the word “astronaut” means. His friend replies, “Star Voyager.” Grissom responds, “Star Voyager Gus Grissom. I kinda like the sound of that.”

In Beyond News: The Future of Journalism (Columbia University Press, ), influential NYU journalism professor Mitchell Stephens notes that reporters and editors in the late th century publicly defended “objective journalism,” but in the early st century “many journalists were finally ready to concede the point.”

Stephens quotes Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. acknowledging that “nobody’s objective,” but insisting that his reporters should try to be “fair.” Stephens criticizes that standard as well, because “we can’t be ‘fair’ to all, anymore than we can see the world as it is seen by all.”

Stephens also slams another word used by post-objectivity editors, balance, because “there inevitably are a limited number of seats on their seesaw. The range of positions that are balanced is limited—usually to two.

The range of discussion will thereby be circumscribed.”

commenting” and having them pursue what New York Times columnist David Carr calls “shimmering intellectual scoops.”

The Bible has a different definition of wisdom. Chapter  of Proverbs tells us it begins with “the fear of the L.”

Chapter  explains, “The L gives wisdom; from his mouth come knowledge and understanding.” Chapter  nails it down: “Trust in the L with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.”

Stephens wants journalists to move from the five W’s (who-what-whenwhere-why) to his five I’s: informed, intelligent, interesting, insightful, and interpretive. He should have added a sixth: ideological. Stephens compliments in passing a couple of nonliberals, but heaps repeated praise on the politically correct: Eight cheers for the late Rachel Carson, who did some good but whose antiDDT campaign led to more malaria in Africa. Nine cheers for New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.

Ten cheers for Ezra Klein, the former Washington Post wunderkind.

But even if the playing field were not so tilted, reliance on man’s wisdom rather than God’s makes us shepherdless sheep. In the s I argued against journalists who said their ignoring of God was “objective journalism.” Now Stephens opines, “The main goal of a twenty-first-century journalism organization is to fill its site with wisdom.” Unless we seek God’s wisdom, all we have is a new rationale for propagandizing.

Hope remains. Proverbs tells us, “If you turn at my reproof, behold, I will pour out my spirit to you. … Be not wise in your own eyes; fear the L, and turn away from evil. It will be healing to your flesh and refreshment to your bones.” A

Email: molasky@wng.org

7/8/14 9:04 AM

BRIAN SMITH

Reviews > Books

NOTABLE BOOKS

Time travel books for kids and adults > reviewed by  

The Time Traveler’s Almanac Ann and Jeff VanderMeer This anthology pulls together short stories by many well-known writers in the time travel subgenre, including H.G. Wells, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and Douglas Adams, and complements them with stories by lesser-known authors. The preface is playfully written, dated , and each section of the book is grouped by trope (Section  features experiments) and finishes with a nonfiction essay. The book suffers a painful lack of imagination regarding God and creation, ignores Christian authors like C.S. Lewis, and includes plenty of disturbing material. But for well-grounded adults and teens, it also provides a well-charted panorama of this ever-expanding literary galaxy.  pages.

Ages  and up.

The Redcoats Are Coming! AIO Imagination Station Books (Book 13) Marianne Hering and Nancy I. Sanders Coming, like other Imagination Station The Redcoats Are Coming books, provides clean entertainment that reinforces wholesome values and familiarizes kids with history. Cousins Patrick and Beth travel back to the Revolutionary War to take an important letter to Patrick Henry, all the while facing spies, snakes, and other dangers to complete their mission.

Compared to its predecessors, this book contains far richer Christian content and shows how Christian beliefs helped establish American freedoms. Christian families and educators will likely find The Redcoats Are Coming a step up from the similar Magic Tree House series and from previous books in this series.  pages. Ages -.

SPOTLIGHT Rush Revere and the First Patriots: Time Travel Adventures with Exceptional Americans is the second book in a series for kids (ages -) by radio host Rush Limbaugh.

Limbaugh’s conservative views come through unmistakably in the main voice of the story, history teacher Rush Revere. Liberty, the talking and time traveling horse, livens up the tale with slapstick antics and occasional potty humor, a la Shrek. As these two gallop through history, Revere’s unremarkable students tag along to learn truly insightful lessons about our country’s founding, friendship, and the cost of freedom. Parents who want to weigh the series— and Limbaugh’s presentation of the founders’ Christianity—more thoroughly, can go to the Summer Reading Challenge at Redeemedreader.com. —E.W.

Journey Aaron Becker In this  Caldecott Honor Book a young girl creates a door in her wall with a red crayon, then steps through the door and into a world of blue-green watercolor: She draws herself a red boat, then a red balloon, then a red magic carpet to ride. She also wins a bird’s friendship as the plot unfolds, but the real beauty here is the visual artistry, the evocative flights of fancy, and the story’s wordless pages, which allow families to create their own stories each time they share the book. Journey melds the artistry of Harold and the Purple Crayon with the imaginative mystery of The Secret Garden.  pages. Ages -.

The Infinity Ring: The Iron Empire

BRIAN SMITH

HANDOUT

James Dashner In this seventh book of the Infinity Ring series, Dak, Sera, and Riq must fix the last Great Break in history by saving Alexander the Great. To do that they will need help from Aristotle, the founder of their time travel group, before the bad guys can arrive to take down the teens. Dashner’s fast-paced storytelling, dramatic action, and pro-democracy insights make this a winner for young teens. Caution: One character stores an object in his pants to offend a female character.  pages.

Ages -.

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

15 BOOKS.indd 25

7/3/14 3:18 PM

Reviews > Q&A

Missing the mark The $20 trillion War on Poverty has barely dented the poverty rate.

Expert Jennifer Marshall says we can do better By Marvin Olasky

>>

26

­ overty. Relational deprivation, p including erosion of the family and the collapse of marriage.

When President Johnson announced the War on Poverty the rate of unwed childbearing was about 6 or 8 percent.

Today it’s 42 percent. Then, one of four black children was born to an unwed mother.

Today it is three of four. Among blacks, unwed childbearing was 25 percent, but today it is more than 72 percent.

Libertarians complain that social conservative talk of marriage is getting involved in personal ­m atters. How do you react to that critique? Marriage, and the family centered on marriage, holds back the state and protects the individual. So those concerned about individual rights and ­limited government, those fighting government spending and centralization of power in Washington should be concerned about the stability of the family. There is a very extraordinary link between the collapse of marriage and dependence on welfare. A child born outside of marriage is five times more likely to be poor than a child raised in an intact family.

So one of the reasons that the poverty rate really hasn’t moved is family nonformation and malformation. What about education, which is crucial for social mobility? In 1965 the big

f­ ederal intervention into local education came with the Elementary and Secondary Education Act—today that’s known as No Child Left Behind.

All the reauthorizations of that law, one after the other, have led to further and further intervention from Washington.

So the big story of the last 50 years in public education has been the centralization of ­policy-making. Right now we’re debating whether there will be a common core, a set of national standards and tests.

We’re seeing less of an opportunity for a community to design education according to the needs of the children there, and more centralization where bureaucrats in Washington do not know the names of children in need and how to design education fitting to them.

Homeschooling is one reaction to that . The zip code assignment system we use for education policy often locks children into failing public schools. The critical new idea on the block in the last 25 years has been ­parental choice in education.

Homeschooling is up to about 3 percent of students now, and we have probably about 225,000 ­students participating in ­private school choice programs across the country.

We’ve seen lots of innovation in terms of the mechanisms that provide for school choice, whether they be vouchers, tax credits, or education

s­ avings accounts. That’s encouraging to see, because they are making our education conversation child-centered, not system-centered.

Let’s talk Washingtonspeak: What is your major policy proposal? The most important is not even a policy

Lee Love/Genesis

Jennifer Marshall is vice president for the Institute for Family, Community, and Opportunity at The Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., where she directs domestic policy research. With 2014 bringing the 50th anniversary of Lyndon Johnson’s declaration of a “War on Poverty,” we talked about his pledge that government programs would abolish poverty.

How close are we to ­w inning the war? Sadly, we have missed the mark entirely.

We’ve spent $20 trillion, more than all our other wars ­combined, and have hardly reduced the poverty rate.

We’ve got to go deeper and ask questions like, “Why this stubborn resistance of the poverty rate? What should ­citizens be thinking? What should Christians be doing?”

Given that the rate is nearly the same, does ­poverty now look like it looked 50 years ago? In many ways no, because not even the f­ ederal government can spend $20 trillion and have it not make a dent. We have seen an increase in the material living standards of the poor. We can be thankful that the kind of absolute ­poverty we see in some developing nations, with people fearing for their lives, has been all but eradicated here.

What kind of poverty do we have here? Relative

W O R L D • J u ly 2 6 , 2 0 1 4

15 Q&A.indd 26

7/2/14 3:08 PM

reforming welfare reform You refer often to the 1995-96 welfare reform. What was the major change? Before, the welfare system was telling single moms in particular [that] you can keep getting your welfare check so long as you don’t have a job and so long as you don’t marry somebody with a job who kicks your income up. And those two disincentives were getting what you would expect. They were driving people not to work. Welfare reform almost two decades ago emphasized a work requirement: That has what social scientists call a “dissuasion effect,” because some people say, “If I have to bother coming into the welfare office every week to say I’m looking for a job, I might as well just go get the job that I know I can get anyway.”

Did welfare reform work? Changing Aid to Families with Dependent Children worked, but we only reformed that one program. We need to go systematically through 80 others.

Food stamps needs to be a work activation program. Plus, the dramatic effects that we saw up front on welfare reform have been muted in the past years, in part because pressure has not been kept up on governors to keep those welfare rolls down in their states by helping people get out into work. The Obama administration’s willingness to waive the work requirement— something that is not legal for it to do and something that rips the heart out of welfare reform—has communicated to states that welfare reform is not a priority any longer.

Lee Love/Genesis

proposal: It’s tapping those institutions in society that have relational capital. By that I particularly mean families able to give relational mentoring to other families. Marriage mentoring where older couples go into neighborhoods where perhaps a young person has

Email: molasky@wng.org

15 Q&A.indd 27

never been to a wedding. Last weekend I heard a store vendor say she had never been to a wedding—that will happen more and more as the marriage rate declines. We need to help people form a vision for marriage and gain the relational skills.

How can government be useful here? We need elected officials to use their leadership capacities to point to the ­connection between marriage and poverty-fighting. President Obama is in a terrific place to be doing this. He has a beautiful family and by all accounts has been a great father to his two daughters. If he could be calling attention to the need for fathers to be committed to the mothers of their children in marriage, and to be devoted to the lives of their children by being present in a married family, that would be an ­enormous, enormous benefit to us. We’ve heard one or two statements on Fathers’ Day,

but not a real sustained focus on the importance of marriage as a contributor to the ­common good.

Of course, “stay in school messages” are heard all the time, yet the enormous dropout rate shows those messages have not been all that effective. We don’t know what the dropout rate would be without that campaign, but we certainly haven’t seen results like the anti-smoking campaign produced.

Or people now coughing into their arms—but ­promoting marriage is harder. It’s got to be a very personal intervention. A

J u ly 2 6 , 2 0 1 4 • W O R L D

27

7/2/14 3:06 PM

Reviews > Music

Silver

Good and gone The recent deaths of four musicians may also signal the death of what they did so well

BY ARSENIO ORTEZA

Bland

of pop songwriting, it certainly inflicted deep wounds.

It also devalued the rich, blackchurch-based style of singing at which Bobby Womack and Bobby “Blue” Bland excelled for half a century.

Between  and , Bland made  appearances on Billboard’s R&B Top , enlivening resonant blues tropes with his gravelly crooning and reaching a latter-day highlight in  with “Member’s Only.” Womack, on the other hand, was as celebrated for his guitar playing and his songwriting as for his recordings,  of which made the R&B Top  between  and .

Once established, neither Bobby sang the gospel on which he’d been reared.

But neither violated its spirit either, bravely fighting a—if not the—good fight with humility and grace. A

SILVER: GAI TERRELL/REDFERNS/GETTY • GOFFIN: GAB ARCHIVE/REDFERNS/GETTY • WOMACK: MATT SAYLES/INVISION/AP • BLAND: RICK DIAMOND/GETTY IMAGES

15 MUSIC.indd 28

Womack

W O R L D • J U LY 2 6 , 2 0 1 4

Goffin



Silver’s secret was uniting the many strands of his vast oeuvre with a playful accessibility at odds with the avant-garde experimentation for which jazz was becoming notorious during the years of his ascent. The title of his final album of original material was Jazz … Has … a Sense of Humor (), but his output had already long made it obvious that he believed as much.

The death of the Brill Building alumnus Gerry Goffin symbolizes a different kind of loss. As the writing partner of Carole King (his first wife), Jack Keller, and Barry Mann, Goffin wrote the lyrics to over  Top  hits, eight of which reached No. .

But by the late s, the division of labor requiring nonsinging songwriters and nonwriting singers had been rendered passé by Bob Dylan and The Beatles, whose performing of their own compositions redefined authenticity.

Pithily crafted universal sentiments were replaced by self-expression whether the selves had anything worth expressing or not.

Professionally marooned, Goffin sank into philandering, drug abuse, and mental illness. He never fully recovered his momentum, placing only nine songs on the charts after  and none after . Meanwhile, a new kind of self-expression—rap—was ascendant. And if it didn’t kill the craft

Email: aorteza@wng.org

7/8/14 10:52 AM

ARTSQUEST

>>

A    through the mourning occasioned by the recent deaths of the jazz pianist Horace Silver (), the pop lyricist Gerry Goffin (), and the R&B singers Bobby Womack () and Bobby “Blue” Bland (): namely, that we may not see their likes again—and that we may be worse off as a result.

Consider Horace Silver. Of jazz instrumentalists and singers there’s an abundance. But Brad Mehldau aside, it’s hard to name a jazz pianist under  capable of rivaling Silver’s impact as a musician, a composer, or a performer.

Besides recording and touring with various versions of his own quintet for decades, Silver also performed and/or recorded with Stan Getz, Art Blakey, Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Sonny Stitt, Lester Young, J.J. Johnson, and Cannonball Adderley, somehow never succumbing to the chemical dependency then prevalent among such company.

And although he was usually categorized as a “hard bop” pioneer, Silver defined himself less narrowly. “I’m a jazz musician,” he wrote in his  autobiography, Let’s Get to the Nitty Gritty, “[but] my musical influences include the blues, black gospel music, Latin music, symphonic music, Broadway show music, and folk music. In short, whatever appeals to me.”

What appealed to Silver also appealed to others. His composition “Señor Blues” has been covered by Ray Charles, Taj Mahal, George Shearing, David Sanborn, Ike Turner, and Quicksilver Messenger Service. And elements of his “Song for My Father” inspired and found their way into songs by Stevie Wonder, Earth, Wind & Fire, and, most notably, Steely Dan (“Rikki Don’t Lose That Number”).

NOTABLE CDs

New or recent jazz CDs > reviewed by  

Jazz Is Now Jonathan Batiste Named after a “jazz-education” program that Batiste oversees at Harlem’s National Jazz Museum, this album finds the -year-old, Louisiana-born pianist and his bass-drums-tuba Stay Human Band coming on friendly, loose limbed, and funky by turns. Exactly how much more forceful they’d be were they to combine all three traits at once remains to be heard. But for now the rhythms swing, the timbre survives the “harmonaboard,” and Batiste plays “The Entertainer” as buoyantly as he sings “Sunny Side of the Street.”

Gadditude Steve Gadd Band

These nine live performances from  and  are ideal for those fans of the world’s greatest drummer (no quotation marks please) who always waited for him to burst into a solo the way that certain Bruce Banner fans anticipate the coming of the Hulk. And who knows? Now that Rich has been gone for over a quarter of a century, maybe shearing his solos of their big-band contexts and absorbing them in rapid succession really is the best way to appreciate their (and his) breathtaking genius.

Forever Young Jacob Young The standout track, should you wish to cut to the chase, is “Bounce,” nearly eight minutes of the saxophonist Trygve Seim lovingly and tastefully gilding the most gorgeous of Jacob Young’s latest melodic lilies. The formula, however, recurs throughout: Seim on top and Young (guitar), Marcin Wasilewski (piano), Slawomir Kurkiewicz (double bass), and Michal Miskiewicz (drums) providing diaphanous rhythms and countermelodies below— a musical safety net if you will. Do the soft-focus chord progressions run enough risks to justify such a metaphor? No. But the diaphanousness does.

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

15 MUSIC.indd 29

SPOTLIGHT Chick Corea has been so many things to so many people that it’s easier these days to approach his new recordings without preconceived notions than with. And because some of the things that he has been are pretentious, it’s nice

The Solos Buddy Rich

ARTSQUEST

SILVER: GAI TERRELL/REDFERNS/GETTY • GOFFIN: GAB ARCHIVE/REDFERNS/GETTY • WOMACK: MATT SAYLES/INVISION/AP • BLAND: RICK DIAMOND/GETTY IMAGES

After decades as one of rock’s most highly prized drummers for hire, Gadd has as much right to be leading his own band as fans of his work with morefamous people have to be wondering why he’d want to. Well, it turns out that he and his combo mates have something to say—not literally, of course, but vibewise. Whether bringing out the Southern soul in Abdullah Ibrahim’s “The Mountain of the Night” or putting Larry Golding in touch with his inner Rick Wakeman, they’re articulate.

to encounter him the way that he presents himself on his recently released Solo Piano: Portraits (Universal)—alone onstage before a paying audience, with an unfamiliar acoustic piano and no set list. “So welcome to my living room,” he says. Less pretentious it would be hard to get.

He plays Irving Berlin’s “How Deep Is the Ocean” and Stevie Wonder’s “Pastime Paradise.” He plays Bill Evans, Thelonious Monk, and Bud Powell. He plays Bartók and Scriabin. He even plays some of his own “Children’s Songs” and geographic “Portraits.” That he plays them all equally well is almost as unpretentious as the approximately  total minutes that he spends introducing what he has just decided that he wants to play next.

J U LY 2 6 , 2 0 1 4 • W O R L D



7/8/14 10:52 AM

Mindy Belz

The  a.m. fire alarm It’s a time to learn what real Christian women are made of

>>



W O R L D • J U LY 2 6 , 2 0 1 4

15 MINDY.indd 30

tional tack. As pastor (and Gospel Coalition co-founder) Tim Keller said at the beginning of this year’s event, “This is about getting women to look at God, not focusing on God’s view of women. The subject of women can get pretty claustrophobic.” The conference featured leading female and male speakers, like Keller, and the subject was the book of Nehemiah.

Keller’s right, but it seems to me one of the reasons women gather as women to talk about women’s issues is that’s what both men and women over time in conservative evangelical circles have come to expect.

The clear teaching of Scripture that keeps (or helps) women from holding ordained offices in the church gets applied overbroadly—by men and women—leaving women out of other leadership positions, and from important and useful engagement on cultural and civic issues of the day. That’s not what we see in the New Testament encounters women have with Jesus (usually together with men). Or in the Old Testament, where daughters join to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem, Nehemiah tells us.

In Orlando more than  percent of Gospel Coalition attendees were younger than . At early morning hours and late into the night I saw them pouring over their Bibles in the lobby or rapt in conversations of two or . I got into earnest discussion about workplace issues, missions, and orphans. One young mother hunted me down in the underground parking garage to talk about how she could help the persecuted church.

There’s a loud “coalition” of evangelical women on the left, typified by Rachel Held Evans and others who expend a lot of snark on conservative Christians who question gay rights or climate change, and on anyone who takes the Bible literally. Among conservative evangelical women on the right some come across as disengaged when it comes to culture and society. But those who care about their families, homes, churches, and the world in which children will grow up are out there (see our interview with Jennifer Marshall on p. ). They just speak with quieter voices of compassion and concern. And they are busy. A

KULICKI/ISTOCK

S   I’m uneasy about large women’s gatherings generally, and there’s nothing to put such unease to the test like a  a.m. fire alarm in a -story hotel full of women attending a national women’s conference.

It was dawn of the final day of The Gospel Coalition’s National Women’s Conference, with over , women in attendance. With the siren blaring over instructions to evacuate the Orlando Hilton, what chaos and panic might ensue as we all headed to the nearest stairwells, most of us in pajamas and grabbing the barest essentials?

An hour or so later, the fire alarm turned out to be a false alarm, and I’m here to report that calm and kindness reigned. Mothers trooped down the stairwells with babies asleep on their shoulders, and strangers sidled to them, saying, “Here, let me take your diaper bag.” Others spoke kindly and waited on toddlers and older women who needed a hand down many flights of stairs. For me it was the cap to a weekend observing and marveling at a new generation of compassionate women who at all hours of the day are thinking more about the God they serve and the world they live in than themselves, so it’s really no shock they were doing that first thing in the morning.

Historically I’ve worked more closely with men. At a planning or management meeting I’m the only woman in the room. And with an older brother my only sibling, I grew up an unconflicted tomboy, spending Saturdays hunting or doing yard work with the men in the family more than baking with my mom in the kitchen (thankfully my mom was a ready and willing teacher when domesticity struck in my twenties). Robert Louis Stevenson, Daniel Defoe, and Ray Bradbury were favorite authors; with marriage and daughters came appreciation for Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters. This might explain my unease to this day with women’s Bible studies, women’s retreats, and girls’ nights out, though over the years I’ve grown in appreciation of women’s ministries.

The Gospel Coalition women’s conference, where I’ve been privileged twice to speak, takes a nontradi-

Email: mbelz@wng.org

7/8/14 3:26 PM

Choose the Affordable Hearing Solution!

R ECHARGEABLE RECHARGEABLE

Designed to Save you Time and Money while Delivering Crisp Quality Sound!

NeutronicEar is the pioneer in modern Sound Amplification technology. The high cost and inconvenience of hearing FEATURES aids drove our innovative audiologist, to develop an Program button Volume wheel affordable solution that is Easy On/Off switch to use, Hard to see, and now Rechargeable. NeutronicEar has provided affordable hearing help for millions of customers for 3 Sound tubes 6 Soft tips over 25 years.

The Rechargeable, is the world’s first personal sound amplification product with Two uniquely removable and Rechargeable Power Packs.

Never change a hearing aid battery again! No more constant trips to the store to buy expensive replacement batteries. No more fiddling endlessly to get them back in place, or having them die at the most inconvenient times.

The Rechargeable comes with 3 Channels of Noise suppression. At the press of 2 Power packs a button, you can fine tune to your individual hearing Complete Charging station needs. The Volume Control Wheel can easily turn Up and Down the sound level for any environment. Batteries are now a thing of the past with our patented removable Power Change your Power Pack technology.

It works… but don’t take our word for it. Why pay thousands to make everything sound louder when all you really need is a (PSAP) Personal Sound Amplification Product? We’re so sure you’ll be absolutely thrilled with the quality and clarity of sound, that we are offering it to the public at a LOW introductory price with our exclusive in-home offer. If, for any reason, you are not amazed by how this product improves your life, simply return it for a refund within 30 days.

Testimonial

CREDIT

“The sensitivity of these instruments is astounding; they provide clear sound from that of a partner whispering to the user in a movie theater to the language of conversation at a party - adjustments for each of these environments is simply a matter of one or two touches on the Program button!”

Respectfully, Lloyd Rain; AZ

15 MINDY.indd 31

pack for another in seconds!

The Rechargeable is built CALL OUR CUSTOMER CARE with the same state of the art SPECIALISTS TOLL FREE digital components as products FOR LOWEST PRICES EVER costing thousands more. Don’t waste your money on cheap Please mention code 14SW026 imitations.

1-866-729-4726

www.neutronicear.com NeutronicEar is not a hearing aid. If you believe you need a hearing aid, please consult a physician.

7/7/14 9:52 AM

CHINA beachhead Pro-life efforts are growing in the nation with the most abortions.

But saving lives in the womb is an enormous challenge—even within the church

by June Cheng in China

T

he smell of steamed rice and stir-fried beef waft into the simple warehouse converted into a church in northern China.

Fans mounted on the walls breathe air into the warm room, as gracious hosts hand v­isitors cups of boiling water, the drink of choice no ­matter the weather. As two pastors—one American, one Chinese—finished teaching on the sanctity of life, women and men of all ages stood up, sobbing and praying for repentance: “Lord, forgive me for aborting my child; I didn’t know it was murder. Lord, forgive me for shedding innocent blood.”

For most in the room, this was the first time they had seen photos of fetal development, learned about what abortion entails, and studied what the Bible says about the sanctity of life. A middle-aged Chinese woman with cropped hair approached me with a nervous smile afterward. “Where do the [aborted babies] go?” she asked, eyes watering. “I’ve had it done before and was wondering if I’d ever see them again.” I mumble in b ­ roken

32

W O R L D • J u ly 2 6 , 2 0 1 4

15 CHINA.indd 32

Chinese that the babies go to heaven, telling her the story of King David’s child. “Oh, that’s so good to hear,” she said.

In China abortion is “as common as drinking water,” one woman told me, with the official tally at 13 million babies aborted each year, by far the highest in the world.

For many, abortion is viewed as the preferred method of birth control, with ubiquitous ads on buses and billboards touting quick, cheap, and pain-free abortions. Few people, including Christians, are knowledgeable about life inside the womb or understand the abortion procedure, a fact attributed to the gov“I DIDN’T ernment’s desire to continue its popuKNOW IT WAS lation control policies. Yet it’s not just MURDER”: the one-child policy causing women A little girl to abort; more and more s­ ingle women holds a fetal model at a are also aborting as the younger house church ­generation’s lax view of sex clashes where the proagainst traditional stigmas against life training having children out of wedlock. was held.

PHOTOS by June Cheng

7/8/14 9:54 AM

15 CHINA.indd 33

7/8/14 9:54 AM

TAKING A STAND: In the past few years, Chinese Pro-life training at Christians are starting to take a stand the house church for life, both by teaching about aborin northern China. tion from the pulpit, and working with women to find oftentimes unconventional ways to protect life. Some originally hear the pro-life message from U.S.-based ministries, some through the internet or overseas teachings, while others are convicted through reading the Bible. From there, the message has spread to tens of thousands of churches around the country, and resulted in mothers holding ­giggling babies that otherwise wouldn’t be born, women saved from forced abortions, and churches growing stronger as they repent and help their own.

Yet still only about 1 percent of all the churches in China have heard what the Bible has to say about life, according to the pro-life group China Life Alliance (CLA). And with ­cultural, governmental, and practical roadblocks hindering their message, the Chinese pro-life movement still has a long way to go.

34

I

t’s midmorning, yet inside the dingy illegal medical clinic in Southwest China, light seems impenetrable.

Next to a room lined with thin, musty cots and IV stands, a stout female doctor sits behind her desk, bragging to me about her experience performing abortions.

She’s done abortions for 40 years now both at a hospital and at the clinic (where she makes much more money) and promises that it’s a very typical operation–one girl had eight abortions done, and she’s doing fine.

While China’s law forbids late-term abortions, she said she would do the abortion regardless of the delivery date, “even if [the baby] comes out crying.” An abortion at three months would cost merely 1,000 yuan ($160), and the patient could be in and out of the clinic in two hours. She then showed me where the operation is performed, a locked back room that reeked of chemicals and death. In one corner stood a rusting operating chair with stirrups, which the doctor quickly walked toward to toss out bloodstained tissues from her last operation, an 18-year-old who was five months pregnant. Tucked between a cot and table

W O R L D • J u ly 2 6 , 2 0 1 4

15 CHINA.indd 34

7/8/14 1:37 PM

Married couples often see abortion as their only choice as well under the one-child policy. While the law has become less strictly enforced in some areas—with exemptions for ethnic minorities and parents where one is a single child— couples who have a second child are often forced to pay a fine between three and 10 times the average after-tax income in the city where they live. For those who work at government-run workplaces, having a second child leads to job loss, as it sets a bad example for the rest of society. While the REEKING OF DEATH: government officially bans forced Operating room inside abortions, the practice continues the illegal abortion clinic; in rural areas where local officials the ultrasound machine don’t understand the law. is behind the lamp.

was an illegal ultrasound machine covered with a piece of cloth, which the abortionist offered to use to help determine the sex of the baby. Sexselective abortions are illegal in China, as the preference for sons has skewed the country’s sex ratio.

Yet about a block away from the clinic stands a police station, deliberately oblivious to the ­illegal activity down the street. Mark Li*, an American missionary who founded CLA, said the police secretly appreciate these clinics because they lower the official number of abortions in the country. While the government counts 13 million abortions a year, the actual number including unreported abortions could be as high as 30 million.

In China sex education is not taught in school, as teachers are embarrassed to discuss it. Parents also don’t talk to their children about sex, so children learn from media, including sexually explicit Western movies, music, and TV shows. As a result, more than 70 percent of Chinese engage in premarital sex, a 30 percent increase from 20 years ago.

For unmarried girls who get pregnant, abortion often seems like the only option. Unwed mothers bring shame to the families, so parents pressure their daughters to abort. If a single woman keeps her baby, she’s without a support system and could lose her job, get kicked out of school, and have difficulty getting married in the future. Also, the child would be unable to get hukou, or household registration that allows people to go to school, travel, or get a job.

Placing the child for adoption is also difficult, as the government has restricted private adoptions, leaving only a complicated and arduous legal adoption process. So for many, the optimal solution to the problem is to slip over to the hospital or illegal clinic, spend two hours and 1,000 yuan and return back to normal life.

*WORLD used pseudonyms to protect the lives of these sources

15 CHINA.indd 35

E

ven the Chinese church, which has been growing exponentially since China opened up in 1979, has kept silent about abortion. Peter Wang*, a ­former house church pastor who now spends his time training churches like the one mentioned above in northern China, said he’s met pastors who have had abortions themselves or given money to parishioners to help pay for their abortions. Some pastors, especially those in rural areas, have never been taught that abortion is wrong or why it’s wrong. Others keep quiet because they feel that the topic is too sensitive and don’t want another excuse for the government to persecute their church.

But lately the tide is turning, as more Christians see the need for a Chinese pro-life movement. Li started CLA in 2010 to create a decentralized network of churches and ministries all with the goal to share the pro-life message and help women keep their babies. By linking resources from the experienced American pro-life movement to the leaders of the Chinese church, CLA was able to equip local believers quickly to start their own ministries. The group has launched a network of safe houses for pregnant

J u ly 2 6 , 2 0 1 4 • W O R L D

35

7/8/14 1:37 PM

women, abortion rescue teams, a Christian legal aid ministry, a Chinese resource website, and a pregnancy help ­center. Li said that so far about 20,000 churches have heard of the pro-life message, and each church that hears the m ­ essage goes on to save two to five babies a year.

Pro-life solutions offered to mothers need to be altered to deal with Chinese culture. So in CLA, the on-the-ground work is being done and funded by locals, like Sarah Huang*, a cheerful house church pastor in her 30s with quirky expressions like “It’s so hot I could spit blood.” After almost aborting her son in 2012, she saw the importance of protecting life and started working for CLA. Since then she’s started her own one-woman ministry that has saved 50 to 60 babies.

In the afternoon we spent together, Huang’s two cell phones kept ringing as mothers needed her help: “What do I do about my second baby?” “I’m pregnant and I don’t have money to take care of this child.” “The officials are forcing me to have an abortion, can you help?” Most calls deal with one-child policy problems, and Huang assertively douses the fires by challenging churches to help families pay the fine, find safe GROUND houses to keep the pregnant woman WORK: Mother away from the pressures of relatives, or and child that threaten to report family-planning offiSarah Huang cials who continue to practice forced helped save.

36

abortion. For those who still can’t pay the exorbitant fines, families can have the baby and then buy hukou for their child in the black market for a fraction of the price.

Huang doesn’t seem to have a free minute, as she’s off teaching sex ed in rural villages one week, then visiting abortion clinics and hospitals to talk young women out of having abortions the next. Every time at least one or two girls end up taking her phone number and giving her a call, and she’s even built a relationship with the aforementioned abortionist.

In spite of the lives saved, Huang finds it difficult to get support from the local church: Churches that can’t even afford to pay their pastors don’t have money to support other causes. CLA faces other trials as well: Earlier this year government officials arrested several workers connected to CLA and told them the organization was under investigation. Police officers stymied a planned national pro-life conference for church leaders in March, yet pastors still met at a different location to pray and repent for ­abortions in the church.

J

im Peters*, a veteran American pro-life activist has also turned his focus from the United States to China, where he saw firsthand in 2010 how desperately the church needed to hear what the Bible says about abortion. With his pastoral background, he points to passages such as Luke 1—where John the Baptist leaps in Elizabeth’s womb at Mary’s and the just-conceived Jesus’ arrival—to show what the Bible says about when life begins. Peters, who travels back and forth between China and the United States, hired Wang to work full-time at the ministry training church leaders all over the country.

Even if pastors are at first hesitant to hear the message, once Wang starts preaching, “their eyes get bigger, and if I speak for an hour, they’ll listen. If I talk for four hours, they’ll listen.” He’s even been able to teach at state-­ recognized Three Self churches to packed audiences of 700-800 people.

It’s often after the teaching that the most challenging work begins. Ruth Wu*, a bubbly young woman, remembers feeling convicted when Wang came to preach about abortion at a church she was visiting. A few days later, she found out she was pregnant with the child of her ex-boyfriend.

“In my heart my thought was to obey God, but realistically it seemed like I couldn’t [keep the baby], because my parents would not understand or support it.” So she went to the hospital for an abortion three times, but each time she ended up walking out. She called Wang asking for help, and through his church he found her a job and a place to stay. Throughout her pregnancy—which she kept secret from her family—church members brought her food and visited her, staying by her side in the delivery room. Once the baby girl was born, an older couple in the church privately took her in.

Months later, Wu married David, her Bible study leader, and the two of them have joined the U.S.-based nonprofit

W O R L D • J u ly 2 6 , 2 0 1 4

15 CHINA.indd 36

7/8/14 9:59 AM

All Girls Allowed in hopes of helping other young women in similar situations. AGA, founded by former Tiananmen student leader Chai Ling, works in China giving financial assistance to women at risk of aborting their babies, which opens up opportunities to share the gospel with these families.

At another church where Wang shared the message, members mentioned to him that a nearby hospital had a Christian director and several Christian nurses—why don’t they try to open a pregnancy center in the hospital? The

FIVE LIVES SAVED: director agreed, and required every Pink-and-yellow woman coming in for an abortion to pregnancy center first pass through the pink-and-yelinside the hospital. low room and speak with a volunteer counselor. At first about 20 v­olunteers showed up for the PHC training from Peters and other American pro-life activists, but the number dropped down to 10 when the center opened in May 2013.

In the year that the center has been open, five babies have been saved, said volunteer Mary Chen*, as she showed me iPhone photos of the chubby-cheeked babies bundled up in blankets. Most are from single mothers who are now married to their boyfriends. But difficulties started to arise in March when the hospital placed a doctor in charge of the center who would not let the counselors meet with the patients. The volunteers were relegated to making follow-up calls to women who have just had their abortions.

But the bigger problem is that even if the counselors could meet with patients, there wouldn’t be enough people to staff the center. The number of volunteers has dwindled to three due to busy work schedules and disagreements between Three

Self and house churches, and Chen wonders if the center could find a way to hire paid staff. She said she knows the opportunity to have a life-saving center in the hospital is Godordained, and can only pray for solutions to their problems.

T

hroughout the sprawling house church networks, leaders are rising up independent of any overseas ministries. In Chengdu, Jonny Fan, a 27-year-old at the 500-member Early Rain Reformed Church, saw images of abortion on a blog in 2012 and felt convicted about the high abortion rates in the country. So for the past three years, he and his fellow church members have passed out brochures urging mothers not to abort on June 1, which is Children’s Day. Using his background in marketing, Fan created polished pamphlets explaining the scope of abortion in China, the hope found in the gospel, and contact information for his church. Last year, he expanded his campaign to include bus ads, and authorities arrested him and a few others for printing unapproved material. This year, Fan printed 50,000 fliers for his church to pass out, and police officers beat one church member for passing out the fliers.

At Early Rain, the focus on protecting life is noticeable in the number of families sitting in the service with two kids.

Fan said that most of the second children don’t have hukou, and they aren’t sure yet what they will do in the future.

Besides buying hukou, families can also wait until the national census, when officials will sometimes register children for free to make their own job easier. One upside is that Early Rain has its own private Christian school and seminary, so the lack of hukou wouldn’t stop them from getting an education.

During the rest of the year, Fan leads a pro-life small group that focuses on educating church members about abortion and has expanded into adoption care. Last year, one church member passing out fliers outside a hospital convinced a young women to keep her baby. Fan connected her with a family who was willing to adopt the child privately, and realized this would be the next big need in his ministry.

His June 1 campaign has inspired others to use the day to talk about abortion: This year Peters and Wang started a month-long campaign ending June 1 to train church leaders to spread the word about abortion within their church networks. About 8,200 pastors ended up preaching about abortion in their churches, according to Wang. Fan said that while others have approached him asking about pro-life work, he’s not an expert, he’s just a Christian acting on his convictions.

“I do this because I see China’s rate of abortion is growing too fast; it’s frightening,” Fan said. “This is what I believe: We cannot murder. But Chinese people have sinned in this way. I don’t want to let the next generation live in an environment like this.” A

J u ly 2 6 , 2 0 1 4 • W O R L D

15 CHINA.indd 37

37

7/8/14 10:00 AM

Far fro

15 ADOPTION.indd 38

7/4/14 2:27 PM

rom home

Congolese authorities are keeping hundreds of adopted orphans from joining their new families abroad

BY Kiley Crossland // photos by Shane Pequignot/Genesis

Alima and Masalay, two 5-year-old children from Congo, are legally part of the Stroud family in Fort Wayne, Ind. Their adoption occurred last July, and they have passports and visas to leave Congo. But a year after their adoptions were finalized, they remain 7,000 miles away from their adoptive family.

The reason: Last September, Congolese authorities suspended issuing exit papers to children adopted by foreigners. The suspension left hundreds of cases stalled, with some parents already in the country but unable to get their children out.

In late May a total of 62 children received exit permits to leave, the first movement by the Congolese authorities in months. But the majority of children in the process are stuck—and among them are Alima and Masalay.

This holdup is one of the largest in the history of international adoptions. According to numbers released by the U.S. Department of State in May, 792 children are stalled in adoptions. Of those, 368 have completed legal adoptions, and half of those have passports and visas ready to go. The only thing needed is the exit paper, a document WAITING GAME: Marianne required to take the and Chris Stroud are still in ­children through airport the adoption process for two security on their way out Congolese children, Alima of the country. (left) and Masalay.

The story of stalled adoption in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is part of a larger story of declining international adoption globally. International adoption has dropped 69 percent in the last decade, from 22,991 in 2004 to 7,092 in 2013, according to the U.S. Department of State. The decline is not for lack of orphans, or of parents who want to adopt them, but is instead a result of a complex web of international diplomacy and regulations.

“Sadly [Congo] has become yet another country where we have been struggling to work out a process of how we can do adoptions,” says Kathleen Strottman, executive director of the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute. Strottman says there is a growing bias against international adoption, fueled on many levels, both by countries that feel they are exporting their greatest resource and by organizations that fixate on a few cases of post-adoption tragedy. But while countries like Nepal, Guatemala, Russia, and, for now, Congo halt their adoption programs, Strottman says the underlying problem is unaddressed: “children languishing in institutional care.”

Chris and Marianne Stroud applied for an adoption decree in March 2013. In July 2013 Alima and Masalay were legally declared their children. “They have our last name. They have been on our health insurance since last July,” says Marianne, explaining how much she considers them hers.

Marianne remembers sitting in a circle with Chris and their three biological children, ages 12 to 16, looking at two grainy pictures printed off their computer. Little dark faces with big eyes, one boy and one girl, looked back at them. She says her family knew three things about the children: They were orphans, they were HIV negative, and the orphanage thought they were 4. That was it. They later found out Alima was found abandoned at a bus stop and Masalay was brought to a medical clinic when both his

J u ly 2 6 , 2 0 1 4 • W O R L D

15 ADOPTION.indd 39

39

7/4/14 2:28 PM

‘I understand

people are desperate.

I’m desperate.

But you have got to follow the rules.’

—Marianne Stroud

African nations and 20 armed rebel militias. The rebel forces, especially in the east, are known for their use of sexual violence to degrade and conquer enemies. In May, two Congolese men were sentenced to life in prison for their part in the systematic rape of 97 women and 33 girls over two days.

In an environment of instability, high poverty, epidemics of prevent-

parents passed away. She says she wondered, “Are these the two little faces who are meant for us?” The Strouds prayed as a family, and decided to move forward. “We all had such a peace about it.”

D

emocratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire) is a tropical mass of mountains, lush river basins, plateaus, and grasslands.

The 11th-largest country in the world and the second largest in Africa, it is home to the vast Congo rainforest, the winding Congo River system, whose tributaries cover most of the country, and a rich supply of natural resources.

But a tragic history of exploitation and political conflict since liberation stifle economic and social progress. Some estimate over 5 million Congolese have died since 1998 in the Second Congo War, a bloody and ongoing war involving nine

40

able diseases, and rape, UNICEF ­estimates there are at least 4 million Congolese orphans.

Michele Jackson, a lawyer and the executive director at MLJ Adoptions Inc., the largest agency doing adoptions in the

W O R L D • J u ly 2 6 , 2 0 1 4

15 ADOPTION.indd 40

7/8/14 4:27 PM

DRC, was in-country within weeks of the suspension announcement. She says authorities told her the country stopped issuing exit permits because of news reports they saw concerning a Reuters investigation into rehoming in the United States. Rehoming is a process where parents privately transfer the custody of their adopted children to another family, in some cases putting the kids at risk of abuse and mistreatment.

Though the Reuters report covered a rare situation affecting a minority of children who are adopted, it was a situation that alarmed authorities in the DRC. In a country with recent memories of colonial exploitation, there is wide skepticism and suspicion about why foreign families are so eager to adopt Congolese orphans. Marianne Stroud says another family who was in the DRC to adopt their child heard radio advertisements claiming that foreigners adopt Congolese children for slave labor and organ harvesting.

Jackson says part of the problem is a lack of communication. She says that as she meets with Congolese in the adoption system she finds there is “little to no education about our screening or education about our process.” She is doing what she can as an adoption service provider, but believes that is the U.S. Department of State’s role primarily. She says it is important the United States acts in a way that is encouraging and collaborative. “It is a privilege for us to be able to adopt children from Congo.”

Kelly Dempsey is a private-practice attorney and the Director of Advocacy and Outreach for Both Ends Burning, an adoption advocacy organization. Both Ends Burning launched a petition that has gained over 100,000 signatures, calling on Congress to intervene in the DRC adoption halt.

She says the problem is a “fundamental lack of leadership for international adoption” and “a clear and undeniable bias [in the United States] against adoption in non-Hague countries.” The Hague Convention is an international treaty, entered into force in the United States in 2008, that governs how international adoptions take place. In non-Hague countries like the DRC, she says, the United States has enflamed an already fragile relationship by treating the country with suspicion, including extended investigations to ensure DRC processes are ­correct and allegations of fraud and corruption.

“Hague is a good idea. A best practice policy. … But as implemented and as it is currently working, it is not ­protecting the best interest of children.”

Marianne Stroud is torn. “I applaud them that they want to fix their system. In the meantime, these are my children … they can’t stop the rock rolling down the hill and say, ‘Hold on, we’re going to freeze here.’”

U

ntil they are able to bring the children home, the Strouds are responsible for Alima and Masalay’s care. They moved Alima from her orphanage to an American Christian missionary boarding school in December.

The school is boarding nine other adopted children stuck

in the adoption process. The Strouds had their first Skype call with Alima in late May. She had never seen a working computer. Marianne said she had her hands over her eyes, but kept peeping out.

After months of work, the Strouds were able to get Masalay out of his orphanage in early June. It is a sticky situation because the orphanages are desperate for resources.

Marianne says, “The perverse incentive is that the orphanage does not want to release him because I pay for him to be there.” In late May the head of the orphanage signed his release paperwork, and he joined Alima at the boarding school. It was the first time Alima and Masalay met.

A few families have tried to go around the DRC’s restrictions, inciting Congolese authorities to clamp down even harder. A Belgian woman was caught trying to ­smuggle her child out of the country. An American family forged a date on an official letter in an attempt to get out sooner. Marianne says it is frustrating. “I understand ­people are desperate. I’m desperate. But you have got to follow the rules.”

But the rules are unclear. The State Department’s recent alert announcing the issuing of 62 exit papers also said that most people in the pipeline would have to wait until “a new law reforming intercountry adoption enters into force.”

However, a network of adoption agencies, parents, and incountry experts are saying the DRC will soon release more exit permits. Marianne says she is glued to Facebook and blogs, where some of the quickest news and commentary is released. She says anything she is holding onto now is “part rumor, part hope, part a little bit of firsthand knowledge.”

The Strouds joined 55 other families in Washington, D.C., in late June to ask their senators and representatives for engagement in finding a resolution to their stalled adoption cases in Congo. They are still waiting to see if the effort will pay off. They hoped to generate interest in a Department of State and congressional delegation to Congo, and to get support for the Children in Families First Act, a bill currently making its way through Congress that would restructure the way the United States handles international adoptions.

Chris, an OB-GYN physician who specializes in treating infertility, says the hardest part for him is feeling utterly helpless. “As the man of the family, I am sort of wired to go kill the bear. That’s my job. I want to go fix the problem.”

He says this waiting and longing has made him understand his patients more. “It’s very humbling and very hard.”

Chris gets teary when he thinks about what he’ll say to them when they get home. “I’ll say that you are here. No matter what for the rest of your life you are a part of this family. You are unconditionally accepted. We are broken, we make big mistakes, but you are a part of us. We are glad you are here.”

Until then, Marianne keeps a pile of booster car seats, clothes, and supplies in the middle of their master bedroom. She says it is a daily reminder every morning that their family is not complete: “These car seats are going to rot until we get them home.” A

J u ly 2 6 , 2 0 1 4 • W O R L D

15 ADOPTION.indd 41

41

7/8/14 4:27 PM

A

life worth living

by JAY C. GRELEN



meant, the preacher and the lawyer, about my father’s quality of life in the years before he died. I know both of them well enough to know that their intent was to comfort, to acknowledge that Dad’s last decade was hard and that finally he was better.

They intended no offense, and I took none. For I, too, have occasionally indulged in the same misapplication of meaning as I considered, in the abstract, the matter of “quality of life,” a description rendered benign by its familiarity, which is the purpose of euphemism—to declaw accurate characterization.

But in the here and now, two days after my father’s passing, their pronouncements stung. Their words were a judgment of an actual life, my father’s, and indirectly and unintentionally, an indictment of my mother’s devotion to him.

The preacher, a long-time friend who was my parents’ pastor for more than  years, lives in another state now. He had been in town and visited my parents the afternoon that turned out to be my father’s last in the home in which he had lived for more than half a century.

With the long drive only  days behind him, the pastor alerted us that he wouldn’t be able to return for the funeral.

At Mother’s request, then, he wrote a eulogy, which he closed with these words: “I have two feelings on this day. One is deep grief. I mourn the loss of one of the really good guys in this world. … The other feeling is one of relief. Harold was disabled for so many years and toward the end, there was no good quality of life.”

Then came the lawyer, a friend from high school, who offered a similar characterization as we talked at Dad’s visitation.

No good quality of life, they said.

  

to Fort Bliss, a fitting assignment given that he found the woman he would marry in the same town as the Army post. My parents met in December  in Sunday school at Immanuel Baptist Church in El Paso, Texas.

PHOTOS COURTESY GRELEN FAMILY

For a decade my father was unable to walk or communicate, but who is to say he had no good quality of life?

   what they

W O R L D • J U LY 2 6 , 2 0 1 4

15 JAY GRELEN.indd 42

7/8/14 2:38 PM

Dad, fresh from Fort Lee, Va., already had his orders to go to Korea for a six-month tour. He and Mother discussed a pre-deployment wedding, an urgency very unlike my staid, unsentimental, and pragmatic father, who never bought a product without first consulting Consumer Reports.

Although Mother was inclined to marry nd Lt. Harold Eugene Grelen, who ran the bakery on Fort Bliss, they chose practical over romantic. So he left for the conflict a single man. The war shut down practically upon his arrival: Dad touched down in early July, and on July , , the armistice was signed.

On Dec. , , a year after my parents met, after only six months of a courtship that was interrupted by an international conflict, and only two weeks after his return from Korea, Janie Charlene Miser took my father’s last name, and the two of them took off for Ruidoso, N.M.

 ’

long and mysterious decline behind us, we are comfortable that Lewy Body Dementia is the accurate diagnosis, with the added complication of Fahr’s syndrome and peripheral neuropathy, which shut down his feet. In addition to Lewy Body and Fahr’s, Mother and Dad considered many another diagnosis over the  years: Parkinson’s, Parkinsonism, and depression were the primary guesses.

My father retired from the U.S. Forest Service in the fall of . Technically, you could mark that as the beginning of his end, although we can’t show any cause and effect.

Six months before his retirement, he suffered an acute reaction to a sulfa drug, which required a hospital stay and damaged, apparently, his vocal cords. He never really regained his voice.

The next things to go were his agility and his cognition. The man who could fix most anything no longer could patch a hole in Sheetrock, much less hang a ceiling fan.

Without a good diagnosis, pharmaceutical aid was guesswork.

Some medicine seemed to help, most of it didn’t. Mother marks  as the year Dad went to bed to stay.

PHOTOS COURTESY GRELEN FAMILY

UP AND COMING: th wedding anniversary (far left); Harold shows off his gold bars at Fort Lee, Va., after his second-lieutenant commissioning (above); Harold (right) and his older brother, Tom, in their Texas tuxedos and Popeye ties circa .

He could sit up in his hospital bed, feed himself. When my brother-in-law Ramon or I were there, we would put my dad in his wheelchair for a meal with his family at the big table or transfer him to the chair lift in the living room so he could watch us come and go.

Mother once put Dad in their car (with help, of course) for a visit to my home in Maumelle, Ark., and then the three of us traveled to Nashville, Tenn., for a visit with his brother, the last time they ever saw each other.

Dad became less and less lucid, but you could tell he was still in there. He would cry. Sometimes, rarely, you could coax out a laugh. Two-way conversation, however, pretty much ended about , although Mother usually could decipher his efforts to communicate.

She attended to Dad’s every need— meals, medicine, hygiene. The hired hands whom she paid to help two hours a day on weekday mornings often were more hindrance than help.

For the past five years, Dad’s life was a loop of bed; breakfast at the kitchen table; a stop in the bathroom for a shave, shampoo, teeth cleaning, and application of deodorant; and trips to doctors and the dentist.

Mother never neglected him, never once complained.

She never lamented that she couldn’t leave home without arranging for a sitter, never mentioned that she couldn’t leave town, period. She always referred to herself in the plural as “we” and “us.” If we were in the kitchen or living room, she often herded us into his room so he could hear, could be near. A half dozen times a day, when he would slide west and his feet would hang off the end of the bed, my -pound mother would straighten him and pull his  pounds back to the other end. She changed his clothes and changed his sheets all while he lay in bed, a tough task for even a young trained nurse. Until April , Mom was still doing that—at the age of .

Dad’s last evident pleasure in life was food, and Mother is a great cook. In , however, life tried to deny him even that. Doctors told Mother that Dad was aspirating food and recommended a feeding tube. Mother said “no.”

At the expense of even more of her time and energy, she liquefied his meals and fed him. She crushed his pills and

J U LY 2 6 , 2 0 1 4 • W O R L D

15 JAY GRELEN.indd 43



7/8/14 2:37 PM

gave them to him in a spoon of applesauce. She gave him his coffee and sweet tea by the teaspoonful.

Dad loved dessert, and with Mother in charge, Dad rarely missed, even at the end, when Mom blended the desserts she made, usually from scratch, into liquid. Or mashed bananas into vanilla ice cream.

At bedtime, after Dad was clean and brushed, Mom would tuck him in and lower the bed in the bedroom they had shared until they no longer could. She would plug in Andy Griffith singing hymns or another of the two dozen compact discs she had accumulated for him. And when she finally turned in, she slept across the narrow hall of their small house in a twin bed. With her door open.

    ’ life lacked good

quality implies a call to action. If, say, the quality of my father’s life was poor because he didn’t have food or a warm bed, we could easily have improved his living conditions.

But the impediment to Dad’s so-called good-quality life was an apparently terminal condition that lingered for years and bound him to bed, prevented him from verbalizing his wishes, so what were we to do? Or what were we to withhold to improve the quality?

Who determines whether a life is sufficiently pleasant and productive to qualify for further care and attention? I speculated to myself occasionally that if a panel of doctors



STARTUP: Janie and had been assigned to study Harold on their wedding Dad’s case through the prism day in  (left); Harold of our current definitions and was in charge of the discussions of healthcare, bakery at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas (top); Jay, Dad probably wouldn’t have Janie, Julie, Lori, and qualified for much. He could Harold in . not do a single thing for himself for six years before he left us. At any point during those years, my father, left to himself in his bed, would have died in a matter of days.

But he wasn’t left to himself, and however bleak his life may have looked, I don’t think he would have rated the quality of his life as poor. We can’t know, of course, what he was thinking or whether he was aware of his limitations. I don’t think, however, he would have preferred death to the quality of his life, and he was the only one qualified to rate it.

We hear of people who have lost the will to live; my dad didn’t. Exam after medical exam, he amazed the doctors and nurses. His heart, his blood pressure, his blood counts, his cholesterol—all good all the time. Based on the testing, there was no apparent medical reason for Dad to be in the bed.

If the quality of his life had been an issue for him, might he have despaired and slipped away years ago? Might he have willed himself to die? Maybe. Would he have preferred better health? Little doubt. But he lived with the health he had. Maybe deep down my father hoped and prayed and believed that tomorrow God would set him

W O R L D • J U LY 2 6 , 2 0 1 4

15 JAY GRELEN.indd 44

7/8/14 10:17 AM

walking again, hope that made his life today tolerable, the hope that makes all our lives tolerable. Who are we to deny him his hope and trust in his Creator?

What we really are talking about is the quality of physical health. Poor health is not necessarily the equivalent of a poor quality of life. We want to assist those who are in poor health, to make life better. But if we can’t make a life better in ways that are readily apparent, do we stop trying?

The quality-of-life question is born of self interest. A person in my father’s situation, we think, would be better dead than alive. The caregivers would be relieved of the work and sacrifice of giving care or spared the expense of paying others.

“Quality of life,” then, is subjective. From the perspective of the pastor and the lawyer, people who can still move about freely and care for themselves, my father’s life might have seemed to lack good quality.

But he—and we—would have missed much had he not lived that last decade confined to bed. He would have missed  years in the lives of granddaughters, who often stood by his bed to visit or who mugged for our cameras with him when he sat in his recliner or wheelchair. His children and his grandchildren would have missed the lessons in devotion, loyalty, and compassion my mother taught every day. My father would have missed that decade of love and attention from the woman who waited for him to return from the war.

Although our former pastor doubted the quality of Dad’s life at the end, he well knew the quality of my mother’s care for him, which he acknowledged in his eulogy: “When Harold and Janie took their wedding vows and spoke the words ‘til death do us part,’ they were spoken with clarity and commitment. Janie set the standard very high as she has cared for him through every day of the years of the illness. …”

To say that there was “no good quality of life” at the end diminishes, if not discounts entirely, the value of my mother’s love and devotion, and Daddy’s appreciation of her, although he couldn’t say so. Our pastor surely would not have deprived them of that.

A GOOD LIFE: Harold was a range scientist with the U.S. Forest Service (above); at his mother’s house in  shortly before he left for Korea (right); at home with Janie and their three grandchildren, .

   of , we persuaded

my mother to visit us in Arkansas and my sister in Mississippi. Though her assent was reluctant and cut across the grain of her devotion and better judgment, she set Dad up for a threeweek stay in a nursing home half a mile from

J U LY 2 6 , 2 0 1 4 • W O R L D

15 JAY GRELEN.indd 45



7/8/14 2:12 PM

their house; she could accept this only because my sister Julie, who lives in town, would be checking on him.

When Mom walked into his room after her three weeks away, Dad’s eyes—to use Mom’s word—brightened. He couldn’t say it with words, but his eyes said that the quality of his life had just improved. Had just, in fact, walked through the door. His living companion, not his living conditions, determined the quality of his life.

FAMILY MAN: Harold with granddaughter Rebekah in  (top); daughter-inlaw, Sloane Grelen, reads to Harold and Janie at the breakfast table in July .

   when he went into

the hospital late on April .

Nine days later, on May , my sister, Lori, was in the hospital room with our parents. She updated me by text message: : a.m.: His blood pressure has been going up. It is getting too high. With that & his constant moaning, the nurse thought he might need some pain med. He has been very restless since yesterday afternoon. : a.m.: His bp is /. : a.m.: After pain med, Bp is now /. : p.m.: He’s almost gone. Very bad.

My phone shows that my call to her connected three minutes later at : p.m., when Lori said two words: “He died.”

My mother and father fully lived out the roles God gave them, faithful to their commitment and vow until death parted them. Years ago Dad told me he believed Mom was his reward for remaining pure before marriage. And even as my dad approached his hour, right to the end, they were reaping the harvest of fidelity to God and to one another that my parents had planted  years earlier: An hour before Dad died, Mother was at his side, spooning broth from a bowl, nourishment for a soul and not only its vessel of clay. This is love that puts the sword to the euphemism, devotion that proclaims that the degree of quality in our lives is beyond mortal measure. A —Jay C. Grelen is a writer living in Maumelle, Ark., available via jaygrelensweettea.com



W O R L D • J U LY 2 6 , 2 0 1 4

15 JAY GRELEN.indd 46

7/8/14 10:18 AM

Technology has finally caught up with The Great Commission.

Shaping servant leaders that will change the world

With sites in Greenbelt, MD; Springfield, VA; Lancaster, PA; Philadelphia, PA; Indianapolis, IN; and Boca Raton, FL—and access anywhere in the world via the internet—Capital Seminary and Graduate School is using 21st -century technology to prepare 21st -century Christian leaders to face 21st -century challenges.

Discover the difference at bible.edu or by calling 866.275.8720.

Capital Seminary and Graduate School is a division of Lancaster Bible College and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, gender, or disability.

The State Council of Higher Education in Virginia has certified Lancaster Bible College | Capital Seminary and Graduate School to operate in Virginia. lbc.edu

WORLD_Apr2014_Capital.indd 1 15 JAY GRELEN.indd 47

2/19/14 10:39 AM 7/8/14 3:10 PM

THE AWARD FOR EFFECTIVE COMPASSION

Cultivating

change RURAL MINISTRY IN MICHIGAN EARNS MIDWEST REGIONAL VICTORY

T

by DANIEL JAMES DEVINE in Lake Cit y, Mich., & Milwaukee, Wis.

     of WORLD’s Hope Award for Effective Compassion. Through the nominating work of our readers we’ve had the privilege of looking into hundreds of povertyfighting ministries, and through the kindness of donors we’ve been able to award , each year to programs that impress our reporters and our readers who vote online each October to decide the national winner.

This year, after researching numerous ministries via internet and telephone interviews, we sent Midwest bureau reporter Daniel James Devine to eyeball Friends Ministry in Michigan and Community Warehouse in Wisconsin. Both seemed equally effective in stimulating change among those who are poor.

Both rely largely on informal relationships of Christians and non-Christians within controlled work environments.

We chose Friends as the Midwest Region winner because over the past nine years we haven’t seen as many rural programs as urban ones, and because Friends’ garden work program is intriguing. Friends has many avenues of outreach into the



W O R L D • J U LY 2 6 , 2 0 1 4

15 HOPE-MIDWEST.indd 48

community, since anyone in crisis can arrive looking for help, and Friends gives church volunteers great opportunity to interact with those who are bartering their time to get bills paid.

Please read on. —Marvin Olasky

FRUITS OF LABOR A COMMUNITY GARDEN IN RURAL MICHIGAN CHALLENGES THE POOR TO WORK OFF THEIR BILLS

O

      J, strawberry, asparagus, and pea sprouts stood in rows in a community garden in Michigan. Dozens of Geronimo tomato plants and bell peppers grew inside a hoop house. Sprouts of parsley, sage, and basil spread their leaves in a greenhouse heated to  degrees Fahrenheit.

Near the garden’s front gate, CHANGING LIVES: Don Teresa Paxton, , a worker with Hoitenga (kneeling) and freckles, a ponytail, and a friendly workers in the field at smile, sprinkled water on salad Friends Ministry.

    

7/3/14 3:29 PM

15 HOPE-MIDWEST.indd 49

7/3/14 3:30 PM

THE

Teresa Paxton

AWARD FOR EFFECTIVE COMPASSION

Mark Mortenson

greens growing in waist-high plastic bins. She ran her fingers through robust romaine and green leaf lettuce, and pointed out arugula, radishes, and beets. Caring for these salad bins is her therapy, she said: Two years ago she was “miserable” after her marriage crumbled, but “this place changed my life.

When I walked in that gate, this peace came over me.”

Here at Friends Ministry, a -acre nonprofit in northern Michigan, berries and  varieties of vegetables grow in a community garden created to help the poor. The official unemployment rate here is  percent, and while some work on dairy farms and at Christmas tree plantations, others draw welfare checks and use food stamps. Friends Ministry aims to revive a work ethic by hiring residents to labor in the garden in exchange for financial assistance, and along the way teach about both God and budgeting.

At  a.m. on a recent Thursday,  workers arrived and gathered in a circle as a garden manager prayed for safety for the day and salvation for the lost. Then they split up for assigned tasks: some to plant beets, one to run a rototiller, and two to rake up dead stalks cut from Nova red raspberry bushes, making way for new growth that should bring , pints of fruit this year (plus whatever the robins snatch).

Some of these workers were fulfilling hours required by “barter” contracts they’ve signed with Friends Ministry: Once



they work in the garden . hours, the organization will directly pay a bill of up to , whether for house rent, utilities, or a car repair. It works out to  an hour, though they are not technically employees: If they break a contract by failing to fulfill their scheduled hours, their bill goes unpaid.

The gardeners include volunteers who come here regularly to befriend the barter laborers and offer a word of encouragement or a listening ear. One, Don Hoitenga, carried gospel tracts in his shirt pocket and said he sometimes hands out Bibles to barter workers. “God bless you. Good to meet you again. Keep the faith,” he told one after helping her transplant asparagus into a shallow trench.

Paxton, for example, gained help with a gas and electric bill but also spiritual help: As she worked in the garden, a supervisor (and pastor) listened to her, prayed with her, and invited her to Bible studies. Today, she is a member and weekly attender of his church. Before, she merely believed in God, but she’s now trying to “live my life the way God wants me to.” She collects Social Security disability income for a spinal abnormality that causes back pain when she sits still for too long, but watering, harvesting, and packaging salad greens allow her to keep moving.

Paxton also hopes working in the garden will get her in good enough shape to get an outside job. Earlier this year she

W O R L D • J U LY 2 6 , 2 0 1 4

15 HOPE-MIDWEST.indd 50

7/3/14 3:30 PM

Christian Reformed Church that offered prayer, transportation, bartered labor to pay for repairs to her red pickup truck, and or help with heating bills. It grew to include a banquet hall since then she has come every day as a volunteer or to donate rental business (which failed) and a thrift shop (which thrived her hours. (Friends Ministry allows friends and family members and brings in a third or more of Friends Ministry’s annual revto help one another fulfill contract hours, but limits contracts enue). It gives away or resells donated used cars and organizes to two per household, per year.) summer volunteer church teams to fix roofs or clean up yards Brian Cohee, a -year-old single dad who said he’s been in the community. off drugs for three years, collects Social Security income for a In  Friends Ministry added the garden in hopes of head injury: In  he huffed cleaning spray, passed out, hit giving people with low income a dignified place to work in his head on concrete, and underwent two brain surgeries. He exchange for help. Today it sells the fruits and vegetables at a said he doesn’t yet attend church but prays more than he road stand and farmers market. Some residents also pay in used to. He believes his head injury would make him a liabiladvance for a “share” of the season’s produce. The garden ity to a regular employer, but thinks he might be able to run hasn’t suffered widespread crop losses yet, although cowbirds his own landscaping business: At Friends Ministry he fired ate all the saskatoon berries overnight last year—this year, up a weed whacker and cut grass along the garden fence, nets will cover the bushes. working to pay off an electric furnace When new clients arrive looking for repair bill: “I’ve paid off court fees, I’ve help with a bill, executive director Mark paid off license fees, lawyer fees.” He Mortenson, , usually requires them to sometimes brings his kids along to teach write out a budget. He often prays with them the value of hard work: “My FRIENDS MINISTRY them and invites them to surrender to -year-old was even out here picking up 3  revenue: , God what they can’t control: car problems, rocks on a Saturday.”

3  expenses: , gas prices, physical pains. He provides Friends Ministry started in  as a 3 Net assets at the end of : spiritual counsel for overcoming alcohol nondenominational outreach growing out , or drug addictions, and refers them to of a deacons’ ministry run by the 3 Executive director Mark Mortenson’s salary and benefits: , 3 Staff:  full-time;  part-time 3  budget: , 3 Website: FriendsMinistry.net J U L Y 2 6 , 2 0 1 4 • W O R L D 

Money box

15 HOPE-MIDWEST.indd 51

7/3/14 3:30 PM

THE AWARD surprised by his ability to retain numbers and manage outside counselors for serious family problems or FOR EFFECTIVE COMPASSION a business: “No matter what shape, form, or color mental illness. you are, God has blessings for any individual that Friends Ministry does not hand out cash to clients leans more towards Him.” but will give a free piece of furniture from the thrift That was the belief of several businessmen who created shop, and pay directly up to  for a legitimate need such as Community Warehouse in  as an effort to spruce up the a heating payment, a GED testing fee, or work boots. For city’s low-income neighborhoods. Residents within one of larger bills, clients must work off a garden contract. If their Milwaukee’s poor neighborhoods pay an annual membership expenses exceed the contract limit, Friends Ministry connects fee ( for individuals,  for nonprofits,  for businesses) them to other assistance agencies, or helps them find subsidized and can then shop at the warehouse, with product prices dishousing if they are living beyond their means. Many clients counted roughly  percent below retail. One shopper, Lonita get help with bills then disappear the rest of the year, but Thomas, , said she had bought bathroom fixtures, a sink, some, like Paxton, return to donate their time or money. and faucets: She is helping her brother remodel the white, Clients often arrive blaming others for their problems, and two-story home they share, and had ridden a commuter bus are sometimes lazy, so Mortenson challenges them to take for an hour to get to the warehouse. responsibility. Once, when a worker was “lollygagging” As Community Warehouse facilitates fix-ups it also provides instead of doing his job peeling the bark from cedar posts, transitional jobs to a stream of Mortenson walked over, threatened to cancel his work conworkers with checkered backtract, and said, “I want one log peeled every  minutes. … If grounds, often involving weapons you can’t do that, then go home.” The worker peeled the log in FACILITATORS: Jacob Maclin (below) with a or drug convictions. (In Milwaukee  minutes and, excited by his success, began teaching others satisfied customer; County, which includes the city, how to do the same.

David Buford over half of African-American men Mortenson’s conclusion: “People respond when you love prepares books for in their s have spent time in state them enough to give ’em a little push.” A sale online (right).

FREEDOM TO WORK A MILWAUKEE NONPROFIT GIVES BACKGROUNDCHALLENGED WORKERS A DOOR TO NEW LIFE

J



MACLIN: COMMUNITY WAREHOUSE

 M       to his two young children, but he had no car, no job, and a gang background. He’d recently served nearly five years in prison for participating in a drug deal. His job hunting efforts led to more than  interviews and many promises of, “We’ll keep you in mind,” but no one ever called back.

Maclin kept count of the interviews in a black book. After , he planned to give up—but his rd interview was at Community Warehouse, a Christian nonprofit based in Milwaukee’s south side that provides discounted construction materials such as windows, doors, siding, and light fixtures to dilapidated neighborhoods. After some internal debate, the organization hired the former convict in early .

Maclin’s only skills were cooking and cleaning, so he started dusting off the warehouse products. “The more stuff I wiped off, the more things started to sell.

So I just went on a wiping spree for two weeks.” He soon learned to drive a forklift, work the cash register, and track inventory.

By , with sales doubled and revenue soaring, Maclin became the discount warehouse’s manager.

Now he’s  and his responsibilities include directing eight or so workers in jobs he once held—unloading semitrailers full of donated products, or organizing tubs and ceramic tile on display shelves. He’s been

W O R L D • J U LY 2 6 , 2 0 1 4

15 HOPE-MIDWEST.indd 52

7/3/14 3:30 PM

MACLIN: COMMUNITY WAREHOUSE

erly tape up sold textbooks in bubble wrap, envelopes, and boxes. “This is my pride and joy,” Leroy Maclin says of the online business. On a world map on the wall, pushpins mark where the business has shipped products—to every continent except Antarctica. It even shipped some exercise equipment to a Navy destroyer in the Mediterranean, all the while maintaining Milwaukee Working’s  percent positive feedback seller status on Amazon.com.

Elsewhere in the building, workers cut apart used pallets, shearing nails with reciprocating saws, discarding cracked planks, and saving good ones. In a huge, dank basement, the sound of pop! pop! pop! bursts from pneumatic nail guns and ricochets off a high ceiling as workers build new pallets. Leroy prisons.) As part of the effort to help some of those least likely Maclin, smiling, jumps up and down on one of the freshly to be employed, Community Warehouse has now opened a nailed ones: “I’m practically  pounds. I got to test it out.” second large warehouse on the city’s north side. There, workOne pallet worker, Eric Knox, , served nearly eight years ers are rebuilding pallets and selling books online in business in prison on federal drug charges. He has three daughters, one endeavors Community Warehouse has created for them, an of whom recently graduated from college, and says “a lot of initiative it calls “Milwaukee Working,” which generates family members are proud of what I’m doing now.” He plans around , a month. to marry his fiancée next year.

In a corner of that second warehouse, shelves hold rows of Community Warehouse isn’t a church. Transitional workers donated books, board games, DVDs, and CDs. Sitting at a need not profess faith, and some live with fiancées, but they computer workstation with a mouse, keyboard, and handmust abide by rules at work: hand in cell phones, no smoking held scanner, David Buford, , flips through a textbook, except during breaks, be honest and respectful. Staff and vollooking for markings or dog-eared corners. He notes the unteers serve as informal mentors, and Milwaukee Working book’s condition before listing it for sale online. hosts a Monday morning Bible study that almost all the workers Before coming to Milwaukee Working, Buford had helped attend voluntarily. The Bible study “helps guys like me underhis uncle do home improvement jobs, but the work typically stand why Jesus sacrificed Himself,” says Leroy Maclin. “A lot lasted a few months then bottomed out: “I didn’t have a lick of guys like me believe in Him, know of Him, but really don’t of money.” He was tired of being broke for Christmas and his know of His Word.” two kids’ birthdays, and thought robbing , from a drug Some workers prove themselves unreliable. “Gettin’ ’em dealer might change things. Instead, it landed him in jail for here is the biggest challenge,” Jacob Maclin says. “Right now I four months. got four guys that didn’t show up today!” Workers are allowed Afterward, Milwaukee Working let him work in the online one sick day per month, and when some miss more, Maclin business: He started at the minimum wage rate of . an contacts them to find out what caused the absence, and may hour, paid by the YWCA Southeast Wisconsin, a federally offer to help them overcome personal struggles: He empathizes funded social services agency. Now Buford earns  an hour, with men who feel drawn back into old lifestyles, where drug with a quarter of his paycheck temporarily subsidized by deals once offered thousands of dollars of income per day.

YWCA, and the rest paid by Community Warehouse. He’s Firings occur only as a last resort. saving up to buy bunk beds for his “That’s the toughest part of my job: kids, who spend weekends with him. letting someone go.”

Buford says he’s gone “from having For the workers who stay, Jacob the courage to go rob somebody to Maclin, now married and a father to having the courage to get up every COMMUNITY WAREHOUSE four, is a role model. It’s his responsimorning and provide for my family 3  revenue: ,, bility, he says, to make sure “no honestly.”

3  expenses: , matter if they are here for six months, At another workstation, the 3 Net assets at the end of one year, four years, five, that they e-commerce manager, -year-old fiscal year : ,, know that they have somebody who Leroy Maclin (Jacob’s younger 3 Salary of immediate past executive really cares.” A brother), helps a new worker propdirector George Bogdanovich: , 3 Staff:  employees on payroll;  transitional job workers 3 Fiscal  budget: . million 3 Website: TheCommunityWarehouse.org; MilwaukeeWorking.org J U L Y 2 6 , 2 0 1 4 • W O R L D  Email: ddevine@wng.org

15 HOPE-MIDWEST.indd 53

Money box

7/3/14 3:30 PM

Alan Spearman/The Commercial Appeal/landov

15 LIFESTYLE and TECH.indd 54

7/8/14 3:09 PM

Notebook

Alan Spearman/The Commercial Appeal/landov

Lifestyle > Technology > Science > Houses of God > Sports > Money

A look back >>

Hope Award winners from the past: Where are they now?

by Elizabeth Stinnette

As our coverage of contenders for our 2014 Hope Award for Effective Compassion continues, we wanted to see what’s happened to men and women involved with five of our 77 past finalists.

Since WORLD gave A Way Out (Memphis) its top award in 2008, the program to help women escape strip joints has continued its 17-week intensive life skills classes, and many graduates have gained jobs and families. The first four paragraphs of the story reported on Megan Kane’s past and her aspirations to become a medical missionary. She’s following through by

Download WORLD’s iPad app today; details at wng.org/iPad

15 LIFESTYLE and TECH.indd 55

earning a nursing degree in 2012—and she’s married a minister.

The background of many women being helped has shifted. Executive director George Kuykendall has worked with county officials to encourage enforcement of the Adult-Oriented Establishment Registration Act, which has turned some of Memphis’ roughest strip joints into closely monitored “bikini clubs.” A Way Out ESCAPE: Women now helps more women pray during A Way Out Bible study. who have escaped from human trafficking and have no desire to return to the industry. They don’t have to face leaving behind the money and attention that strippers receive. Instead, they need time and grace to recover from extreme abuse and brainwashing.

J u l y 2 6 , 2 0 1 4 • W O RLD

55

7/8/14 9:03 AM

Notebook > Lifestyle Rock Ministries, our Northeast Region winner in , is still a place residents of Philadelphia’s impoverished Kensington neighborhood come to learn to box in a ring instead of fighting in the streets. The ministry’s boxing team is winning awards under the coaching of Rock alumnus Johnny Rivera and Ethiopia’s former Olympic boxing trainer. The ministry has also expanded its youth programs to include girls’ kickboxing, a drama club, and a rap group.

Founder Buddy Osborne, who co-founded Rock Ministries after spending five years in prison for racketeering and after

Rock Ministries

sometimes looks at other organizations and wishes he could provide more material help—but he then realizes, “There are just some forms of compassion that are more effective than others.

We’re more about having hard conversations with people.”

David Spickard, president of Jobs for Life (Raleigh, N.C.), a  finalist, also emphasizes teaching: He hopes to “prove in a community that the church has the answer for poverty and unemployment,” which includes teaching the poor about God’s design for work. He sometimes has a hard job convincing well-meaning church members about the importance of

Joshua Station

becoming a Christian, has also developed “The Lost Coin,” an outreach to female addicts and prostitutes based in a nearby building formerly used by heroin addicts. Osborne started a Calvary Chapel that’s filled to its -person capacity on Sundays, and police now keep drug dealers away from the once notorious corner of Kensington and Somerset.

Although the press is less interested in writing about homelessness during the Obama administration than when Republicans are in the White House, the needs are still great.

One Denver shelter, Joshua Station (a  finalist), now hosts  families that typically stay for two years. The ministry teaches job and life skills and has a legal clinic that gives free representation and counsel. The relationship of material and spiritual help engages executive director Jeff Johnsen, who

Jobs for Life

spiritual counseling: “It’s a lot easier to give away clothes on a Saturday morning.”

Some of the ministries we’ve profiled have learned from hard experience what not to do. In  a Nebraska shelter we profiled, Crossroads Center Rescue Mission, took a small amount of government money—but it quit taking funds last year. Executive director Jerry Bumgardner said, “There’s so many restrictions when it comes to government funding,” and those dollars prevented volunteers and employees from openly speaking of Christ: “We’re not holding back now.” Even though Crossroads was receiving enough private donations at the time to keep going, Bumgardner said it was frightening to give up government dollars—but, “The Lord has really been blessing us.” A



W O R L D • J U LY 2 6 , 2 0 1 4

15 LIFESTYLE and TECH.indd 56

TOP: HANDOUT • BOTTOM: SUSAN OLASKY

The last of the anti-Christian Roman emperors—Diocletian—built his retirement palace in Split, Croatia.

The massive project, finished around .. , took  years to build. Large parts of it still remain, serving as the nucleus of this Adriatic coastal city. Tourist ferries and buses dump visitors nearby. They join the approximately , people who live within the palace walls, making this UNESCO World Heritage site a living city rather than a mere ruin.

The repurposing of the palace began in the centuries after Diocletian’s death when Christians turned his mausoleum into a cathedral and transformed Jupiter’s temple into a baptistry. Over the centuries residents built houses inside the Roman walls, creating a rabbit warren of narrow streets and stone structures.

Now modern shops, bars, and restaurants occupy ground-level space and apartments occupy the upper levels. Window boxes of flowers and lines of wash hang from railings. Grocery stores and real estate offices vie with souvenir shops and gelato stands. Street performers dress up as Roman centurions and Diocletian to amuse tourists, who pay to visit the cathedral and the basement of the Roman palace. For Americans used to seeing historic sites preserved as museums, Split offers an alternative. —Susan Olasky in Split, Croatia

Download WORLD’s iPad app today; details at wng.org/iPad

7/3/14 4:13 PM

HANDOUT

   

Notebook > Technology

My digital neighborhood

A slow-growing social network wants you to get online and meet your neighbors

BY DANIEL JAMES DEVINE

TOP: HANDOUT • BOTTOM: SUSAN OLASKY

HANDOUT

>>

A   stcentury civilization is how perfectly normal it is to chat online with a friend from across the state, but how unusual it is to talk face-to-face with a neighbor across the street. In my experience, most neighborhood conversations are sparked by lost dogs, power outages, and extreme winter weather. A poll from Pew Research found that a quarter of Americans don’t know any of their neighbors by name.

A free social network called Nextdoor wants to change that. Nextdoor.com is like Facebook for your neighborhood: Only people who live nearby can view the network or post comments on it. Based in San Francisco and launched nationwide in , Nextdoor has grown to include , neighborhoods in over  cities.

In January an email arrived in my inbox asking me to join a new Nextdoor website for my neighborhood in northwest Indiana.

I did, and became one of the first  “neighbors” on the network. Over the next six months I occasionally checked in to the site, in hopes of discovering whether it could provide a meaningful connection to my neighbors.

Nextdoor requires members to use real names.

Members have the option to post a profile picture and

Email: ddevine@wng.org

15 LIFESTYLE and TECH.indd 57

contact info, explain what they do for a living, and say whether they have children or pets. A few members are assigned as administrators and can delete inappropriate posts.

When members post to the site, they can choose whether to make the information visible only to their immediate neighborhood or to nearby neighborhoods as well, giving some control over the degree of privacy.

They can also exchange private messages.

In my town, neighbors posted break-in alerts, photos of missing cats and dogs, and holiday greetings. Some asked about subdivision garage sales, offered items for sale, or asked (and occasionally complained) about city services. I chimed in with a warning about telephone scammers after a woman with an Asian accent called one day and tried to hijack my computer over the phone. A few neighbors thanked me and posted additional scammer tips of their own.

The team that runs Nextdoor has been pitching the service to law enforcement officials as a way of keeping in

touch with residents. In my neighborhood, the local police department was the most active user. It posted holiday burglary prevention tips and asked residents to report uncut grass and unlicensed vehicles.

One major problem, though, was that from January to June, my network grew glacially, from  members to just — almost all total strangers to me. That out of , households allegedly within my “neighborhood” boundaries.

Postings were infrequent, too (in June, no one had written a new post since March). My neighbors might have been like me: Whereas I often checked Facebook, I only rarely checked in with Nextdoor. Who has time for both? After all, the local police department is on Facebook, too.

Still, only  percent of Facebook “friends” consist of physical neighbors, according to another Pew report. It leads me to believe Nextdoor has potential to fill a local niche.

As to meaningful connections, I have already learned the names of a few nearby neighbors for the first time—an initial step to better acquaintance. However, none of us has been willing to divulge our phone numbers yet, suggesting we still have some bridge building ahead.

A

J U LY 2 6 , 2 0 1 4 • W O R L D



7/3/14 4:08 PM

Notebook > Science

Refining the oil ban

A long-term study finds middle-school popularity often doesn’t end well By daniel james devine

>>

When the subjects reached their early 20s, though, researchers followed up, ­asking similar questions. It turned out the popularity of kids who engaged in pseudomature behaviors in middle school faded quickly as they grew older. By early adulthood their peers rated them as poor at handling friendships and romantic ­relationships. Worse, they were 22 percent more likely than others to commit serious crimes, and 45 percent more likely to experience problems related to alcohol or drug use.

Published online in Child Development in June, the research suggests an early drive to gain popularity eventually leads some adolescents to more extreme, unhealthy behaviors. Kids who grew up well-adjusted—even if they were unpopular while younger—probably benefitted from time spent not impressing peers but developing healthy friendships with them.

—D.J.D.

Obamacare hike Americans who gained insurance under the new healthcare exchanges are sicker than expected and will need to be subsidized by higher premiums, according to insurance data from the first three months of 2014. The Wall Street Journal, compiling data from healthcare technology company Inovalon, reported 27 percent of people who saw a doctor after obtaining new coverage under Obamacare had serious illnesses, such as cancer, diabetes, asthma, heart disease, or mental disorders. By comparison, only 16 percent of patients with individual plans in 2013 had a serious illness. People with new Obamacare plans were also older and more likely to visit the doctor. Private insurance providers had expected an increase in sick enrollees, but some found the total to be greater than anticipated: To ­balance their costs, they said they plan to raise premiums by up to 25 percent next year. —D.J.D.

58

WORLD • J u l y 2 6 , 2 0 1 4

15 SCIENCE and HOUSES OF GOD.indd 58

illustration: krieg barrie • oil: zorandimzr/istock • healthcare: skodonnell/istock

The kids who were “cool” in middle school aren’t so cool anymore. That’s what researchers found in a new study examining the social status and behavior of 175 young people, ages 13 to 23, over a decade. Teens who impressed their friends in middle school because of their daring, sometimes rebellious behavior ultimately developed more social problems later on.

The study tracked male and female ­adolescents beginning at age 13, asking them about what researchers called “pseudomature” behaviors, such as whether they had “made out” with boyfriends or girlfriends, snuck into a movie theater without paying, or stolen inexpensive items. Researchers also examined whether they sought out the most ­attractive classmates as friends. Kids who engaged in these behaviors were often rated as very popular by their friends.

Listen to WORLD on the radio at worldandeverything.com

7/3/14 4:34 PM

CHRIS TODD/epa/newscom

From cool to cold

The Obama administration has taken a step toward reversing the long-standing ban on exporting oil from the United States. In June The Wall Street Journal broke news that the Commerce Department had given two U.S. energy companies permission to export a type of ultralight oil called condensate—composing up to 13 percent of oil extracted from shale rock through fracking. Administration officials quickly claimed they made “no change in policy on crude oil exports,” since the condensate will have to be partially processed (though not refined) before being shipped. But one analyst described the new policy as a “historic shift.”

Some in Congress have called for a total repeal of the ban, established during the 1970s Arab oil embargo.

ILLUSTRATION: KRIEG BARRIE • OIL: ZORANDIMZR/ISTOCK • HEALTHCARE: SKODONNELL/ISTOCK

CHRIS TODD/EPA/NEWSCOM

Notebook > Houses of God

The Mt. Zion Methodist Church outside Philadelphia, Miss., dates back to the years after the Civil War. Fifty years ago, on June , , civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Mickey Schwerner were killed on a country road outside the city while trying to investigate the burning of the church.

A stone marker sits in front of the church in memory of the slain men.

J U LY 2 6 , 2 0 1 4 • W O R L D

15 SCIENCE and HOUSES OF GOD.indd 59



7/2/14 3:37 PM

Game changers

American interest in the World Cup may be part of a long-awaited trend for soccer By Andrew Branch

>>

60

With many parents looking for safer sports than football, soccer may be set to take advantage. Capital Area Soccer League in Raleigh, N.C., saw a surge of girls as the U.S. women made the World Cup final in 2011 and won Olympic gold in 2012. That’s on par with national numbers, business development director Katharine Kelley told me. This year, most registrants are boys younger than 10 who are signing up for the first time.

The emerging subculture has brought international investors, with Major League Soccer crowds up by more than 10 percent since 2010. Orlando’s 2015 expansion team and its Brazilian owner just landed Kaká, a former FIFA player of the year and one of the world’s biggest names.

World power Manchester City, led by an Abu Dhabi royal, is overseeing the inception of Yankee Stadium’s New York

ALL THINGS SOCCER: Tim Howard in the World Cup between Belgium and the USA (above); an emerging sport with the youth (right).

Howard: Julio Cortez/ap • youth: Ken Blevins/The Star-News/ap

Despite the U.S. national ­soccer team’s elimination from the World Cup July 1, unfortunate American historical figures suddenly found their faces poorly Photoshopped into goalkeeper Tim Howard’s. Viral internet memes and one-liners touted “things Tim Howard could save” as the goalkeeper “won the internet.”

Howard saved 16 shots in the 2-1 loss to Belgium, more than any World Cup keeper since 1966. “It’s heartbreaking. I don’t think we could have given it any more,” a tearful Howard choked out after the loss.

Americans showed they appreciated the effort with unprecedented support, leading many to predict a bright future for U.S. soccer. More Americans bought tickets to Brazil than any other nation.

And stateside for Belgium, 30,000 spectators crowded into Chicago’s Soldier Field alone, a crowd unheard of four years ago.

Naturally, the World Cup’s popularity had a number of factors, not the least of which was Brazil’s American-friendly time zone. On the pitch, a record 136 goals lit up a hotly contested group stage.

That brought ESPN a 40-plus percent spike in ratings over 2010. But more long-term trends can spur o ­ ptimism from American soccer leaders.

City FC, also set for 2015. Britain’s David Beckham is fighting the city of Miami for his privately funded stadium plan.

But perhaps the biggest driver of interest has been social media. Highdefinition camera phones didn’t exist until after the 2010 World Cup. For Millennials—the majority of the ­oftenpainted or Captain America–clad fans at watch parties—that means more exposure to international traditions and viral videos after big European matches.

It means more access to live games and a window into players’ lives off the field.

“You feel like you know Clint Dempsey, or that you know Tim Howard now because you saw him on Instagram or Facebook, and you’re retweeting him,” Kelley said. Both players shared publicly this World Cup cycle how they put faith in Christ in adversity. Dempsey overcame his sister’s death from a brain aneurysm, and Howard found peace with Tourette’s syndrome.

Howard’s tearful effort against Belgium brought international praise, not the least of which came on social media from Belgium’s own Vincent Kompany: “Two words. TIM HOWARD. #Respect.” U.S. coach Jürgen Klinsmann said the close-knit squad “made their country proud.” Millions saw a side of soccer they hadn’t seen, despite a familiar loss in the Round of 16.

Of course, not everyone was paying attention. Nearly two thirds of Americans didn’t care about the World Cup, an NBC poll said. The New York Times itself took two days to realize it had misspelled U.S. player DeAndre Yedlin as “Yellin.”

Call it growing pains. But further exposure to soccer’s role models may change that sooner rather than later. A

W O R L D • J u ly 2 6 , 2 0 1 4

15 SPORTS and MONEY.indd 60

7/9/14 12:08 PM

warren: Lauren Victoria Burke/AP • illustration: Adam Niklewicz/sis

Notebook > Sports

Notebook > Money

Debt decisions A better idea for student loan reform

BY DAVID SKEEL

HOWARD: JULIO CORTEZ/AP • YOUTH: KEN BLEVINS/THE STAR-NEWS/AP

WARREN: LAUREN VICTORIA BURKE/AP • ILLUSTRATION: ADAM NIKLEWICZ/SIS

>>

S  have become the summer’s hot regulatory issue, and we’ll hear a lot more about them between now and November. With roughly . trillion in outstanding student loan debt, and a lousy job market, student loan defaults look like a disaster waiting to happen.

But the real reason for most of the recent attention seems to be Democrats’ conclusion they can score points with the student loan reform issue in the upcoming election.

The best evidence that politics is steering the ship is a proposal by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who has been sounding the alarm on student loan debt since her days as a law professor. Under Warren’s bill, which fell a few votes short in the Senate last month, borrowers could use government money to refinance their loans down to . percent (from  or  percent in many cases). Where would the money come from? A new tax on the wealthy.

This turned the vote into pointless “political theater,” as Slate.com put it; the tax forced Republicans to vote no, and let Democrats claim “the GOP sided with the rich and against students.”

Much of the recent discussion also assumes that student loan borrowers are all the same. But there actually are two very different types. My law students fall into the first category. Many of them graduate from law school with mind-boggling amounts of debt—well over ,. They often feel constrained to take the highest-paying job they can get, so that they can begin paying off their debt. More importantly for the economic recovery, most of them also will not be financially secure

enough to buy houses any time soon.

These are serious constraints, but students who have degrees from highquality universities are far less likely to default than the second category of borrowers: students who attended more precarious colleges and in many cases never actually got a degree. These students, many of whom attend for-profit or online colleges, generally have much less student debt. But their job prospects are often bleak.

The Warren bill isn’t a great solution for either set of concerns. A lower interest rate—and slightly lower bills—wouldn’t enable my students to buy houses, so it wouldn’t help the housing recovery or give the students a great deal of relief in the short run. And lower interest rates would do almost nothing for borrowers who don’t have either a degree or a stable job. The bottom line: serious costs and very limited benefits.

A more effective reform would start by rethinking the government’s role in the student loan market. The government currently is the lender for a large majority of all student loans. I don’t think the government should get out of the student loan business altogether.

After all, the education made possible by student loans benefits all of us, not just the borrowers themselves (and would benefit us even more if some of the corrosive tendencies in American universities were reformed). A welleducated citizenry is a “public good” like safe neighborhoods or clean water, and expanding access to higher education is a much better response to income inequality than a tax on the wealthy.

Listen to WORLD on the radio at worldandeverything.com

15 SPORTS and MONEY.indd 61

But the government shouldn’t be deciding whether to lend to a particular borrower or what the interest rate should be. These aren’t decisions that government employees are good at making. An economist friend of mine recently suggested a clever alternative: The government could agree to lend  for every  committed to a borrower by a private lender, perhaps at a slightly lower interest rate. Private lenders would make the initial lending decision, and the government would help out from there.

You probably won’t hear much about options like this in the run-up to the November elections, but perhaps lawmakers will be interested in considering real reform after the dust finally settles. A

J U LY 2 6 , 2 0 1 4 • W O R L D



7/9/14 10:19 AM

THE WORLD MARKET Classifieds are priced at  per line with an average of  characters per line and a minimum of two lines. Bold text and uppercase available for  per line; special fonts and highlighting available for an additional charge.

You will receive a  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 confi rmation will be required of all advertisers.

CONTACT: Sarah Sawyer, WORLD, PO Box , Asheville, NC ; phone: ..; fax: ..; email: ssawyer@wng.org

CHURCH EMPLOYMENT I Mitchell Road Presbyterian Church in Greenville, SC, is seeking a Director of Youth Ministry. This position will be responsible for the students of the church in grades -. Mitchell Road is a growing PCA church on the Eastside of Greenville. Applicants will need at least  years of prior experience as they will guide a vibrant youth ministry as well as a multiple person staff. Questions or resumé and cover letter can be sent to Shannon Outen at souten@ mitchellroad.org. Visit our website at www.mitchellroad.org.

SCHOOL EMPLOYMENT I Seoul Foreign School seeks qualified applicants for High School Principal starting  August . The job application deadline is  August . For complete job and application details please visit www.iss.edu and look for the administrative openings, as ISS is heading up this administrative search.

You can also view the job details on our school website www.seoulforeign.org.

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

Help Ministries. www.goodlifeathome. com. Marybeth () -.

MINISTRY OPPORTUNITIES EDUCATION 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 -/hr. We provide complete training and materials. www.academicassociates.com; () -.

WEB RESOURCES I Defend the faith: Heart, soul, mind, & strength. www.WitnessKit.com.

RETIREMENT I Quarryville Presbyterian Retirement Community is a continuing care retirement community in Lancaster County, PA. You can retire the ordinary things in life—the lawn mower, the snow shovel, and the rake. But you never retire from your calling in life. Quarryville’s maintenance-free living frees you to engage in the things that matter most. Choose from spacious apartments or stunning cottages. Enjoy activities and amenities to make your retirement extraordinary.

Quarryville’s affordable senior living campus is located a short drive from Philadelphia and Baltimore. Visit Quarryville.com or call () -. Retire the Ordinary. Live the Extraordinary!

I Come Home To “GO YE VILLAGE,” a Christian LIFE CARE Retirement Community. Nestled in the beautiful foothills of the Ozarks in Tahlequah, OK, the village offers activities, fellowship, and security knowing you will always be cared for in independent, Assisted Living

15 MAILBAG.indd 62

or Long Term Care environment. CALL TODAY () - or visit our website www.goyevillage.org for more information.

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

REAL ESTATE I Home & Business in small Midwest town. Super nd biz. Excellent for semi-retired. Low investment, low taxes, etc. ,; () -.

I NEED A CHRISTIAN REALTOR in the PHOENIX area? Call Dan or Carol Smith with Dan Smith Realty; () -; www.dansmithrealty.com.

I Naples, Marco and Bonita, Florida Stuart W. Miller, LLC Broker Associate @ John R. Wood Properties smiller@johnrwood.com; () -.

I Maine Properties. Recreational, woodland, investment, & residential.

Owner financing; () -; www.themainelandstore.com.

The C12 Group is America’s leading business roundtable for Christian CEOs and owners of firms ranging from $1 million to $1 billion. Many member companies are long-term participants who, after many years of C12 membership, still find real value in coming together with other Christian professionals to focus on breakthrough business and ministry applications.

C12 MEMBER

“After nine years, I’m still getting lots out of the monthly meetings and national conferences. I plan to stay plugged in to C12 as long as I’m in business.”

Building GREAT Businesses for a GREATER Purpose

Call (336) 841-7100 • www.C12Group.com

SERVICES I CHRISTIANS HELPING CHRISTIANS: Like-minded believers are sharing one another’s medical expenses through a unique ministry that doesn’t involve insurance. For more information call () -, or visit us online at www.samaritanministries.org.

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

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!

Why isn’t your ad here?

For information about advertising contact

call: 828.232.5489 | fax: 828.253.1556 email: advertise@wng.org

7/7/14 3:51 PM

Mailbag ‘Day of reckoning’

June  The articles on GM’s culpability in ignoring fatal car defects and the exposé on the government’s cozy relationship with big banks (“Too big to jail,” June ) give citizens knowledge and insight into issues that affect them.

I found the cover story especially endearing because of Lance Cooper’s dogged determination to get down to the facts and then hold those responsible up to the light of ethics and the law.

—E S, Brunswick, Ohio Jamie Dean did a great job telling us what really went on in the Melton family’s lawsuit against General Motors. We should never forget how one person can make a difference.

—P M, Pagosa Springs, Colo.

‘Let’s be reasonable’

‘Repeated exposure’ June  Andrée Seu Peterson is right about how our cultural attitudes gradually change: through repeated exposure.

Especially if we are regular TV watchers, our attitudes change so gradually we hardly know what happens to us.

—L A N, Encino, Calif.

June  Janie B. Cheaney describes marriage as the union of one man and one woman for the purpose of begetting and nourishing children. I would add that it is the very heart of the created order, the source and means of growth of the human race. God’s judgment is at the gate when government institutionalizes and churches bless same-sex “marriage.”

My first year in Africa we had no TV, so when I came home I was shocked by what my Christian friends were watching. By the end of that year-long home assignment, I was amazed by what I was watching. Now that I’m retired, I try to avoid watching negative things, but our whole culture bombards us daily. It’s a battle.

—W C, Pike, N.H.

—J H, Rumford, Maine

The world is changing so fast I can’t keep up. Just when I thought we were making good progress in the abortion debate, along comes gay marriage like a tornado. Now we have federal judges overturning state laws and voter mandates as if they were written in disappearing ink. It seems we have been ambushed in the culture war, but our job is not to give up.

—R H, Lakeland, Fla.

Send photos and letters to: mailbag@wng.org

15 MAILBAG.indd 63

‘Honoring Dad’ June  I too miss my father and wish he were here. Despite his mental struggles, he led me to a deep-seated, Calvinistic faith, uprooting our family from a comfortable setting and moving to Iowa to attend a Christian Reformed Church and enter a Christian school system. I am eternally grateful for the sacrifices, financial and otherwise, my father made for us.

—P A, Pella, Iowa

‘Hashtag wars’ June  There are no adults in the White House. Keep turning up the heat, and keep letting us know about those in Washington who understand the problems so we can encourage them.

—J R, Oro Valley, Ariz.

‘Grandpa J and the VA’ June  I commend Joel Belz for acknowledging that in government, as in all walks of life, some bureaucrats are “sincere and devoted providers.”

Christians must resist our culture’s tendency to belittle particular groups, and the controversy surrounding the VA would have made those workers easy targets.

—J N, San Antonio, Texas

‘Reflective journey’ May  Sophia Lee’s account of her train journey made me want to take in the America that surrounds me daily but that I rarely notice. Finding pleasure in the mundane and taking time to notice the sights, sounds, and smells around us seems to be a forgotten art these days.

—R F, Seattle, Wash.

I like WORLD, but can stomach only so many articles about things we need to pray for. I was about to put down this issue until later when I turned to Lee’s article and wondered, “What’s this about?” I enjoyed it very much.

—K D, Woodland-Kamiah, Idaho

Lee’s reflections brought back many memories of cross-country travel on

J U LY 2 6 , 2 0 1 4 • W O R L D



7/2/14 3:39 PM

Mailbag

MBA CEDARVILLE UNIVERSIT Y

online

Equipping Christian Leaders

ABBA, NIGERIA submitted by Liza Hopper

Amtrak in the ’s. But since when does the definition of “lady” include a person who “spew[s] f-bombs for  hours.” My dictionary’s definition describes a woman with “refined habits and gentle manners.” I suppose this is something else we of advanced years must accept.

—P L, West Bend, Wis.

‘Sky watch’

START BY SUMMER 2014, AND YOUR

FIRST CLASS IS FREE! cedar ville.edu/mbaonline

May  People are concerned about surveillance programs, but I think people would do well to remember the supreme surveillance program.

As it says in Hebrews, “all things are naked and open to the eyes of Him to whom we must give account.”

—P E. Y, Union, W.Va.

‘Pattern of deception’ May  Thanks again for another great issue. It seems as though the administration deceives us on almost every subject, with officials thinking they can create their own version of “truth.” Perhaps the most significant are the deceptions regarding Benghazi. That debacle was no “accident.”

—P M, St. Charles, Ill.

15 MAILBAG.indd 64

‘A little common sense’ May  I would like to include a little common sense of my own in the gendered bathroom debate. Going to the bathroom should not be a social or political activity. It is a biological function, which is part of why we have separate bathrooms: to accommodate physical differences.

—C W, Lexington, Ill.

‘To train up a Pharisee’ May  I thought you did a good job on the article about the Pearls. We were expecting a very negative article, but you were fair and balanced.

We read To Train Up a Child over  years ago and have been blessed by their perspectives over the years.

—M M, Santa Rosa, Calif.

We are very disappointed in this article. We have read the Pearls’ books and magazine for well over a decade now and find their ministry faithful to Christ and refreshingly biblical. I suspect that some warped or unstable parents have abused the Pearls’ teachings on physical correction of children, perhaps because they read about wonderful, peaceful, homes and try to beat their children into

7/8/14 3:00 PM

fitting that image. Such people cannot make that happen, whether they read the Bible, the Pearls’ books, or anything else.

—L B, Baldwin City, Kan.

The loss of three children’s lives is heart-wrenching, but it was shocking to see them mentioned in an article about the Pearls. It puts a negative cloud on this family and business. Those cases speak volumes, not about the Pearls or homeschooling, but on the challenge of incorporating adopted children into family life.

There’s still health care for people of Biblical faith!

—L G, Pittsburgh, Pa.

‘Silent submission’ May  Christian culture has become so foggy regarding the authority of Scripture. How refreshing to be reminded what we have: God’s actual word! The truth is on our side, in creation and all aspects of life.

—P ME, Camas, Wash.

I appreciate Joel Belz’s stand on creation, and agree that God is involved in the whole world, not just the “religious” parts. As a young earth creationist, I do not understand how some try to point people to God but yet deny that He is the creator and sustainer of the universe from Genesis  through Revelation .

—Jeff D, Bloomington, Ill.

Your magazine has a different tone.

You give the negative side of the news, but you balance it with positive news about decent, helpful beings on this increasingly evil planet who strive to make it a better place to live. Thanks so much.

—B K, Hamilton, Mont.

LETTERS & PHOTOS Email: mailbag@wng.org Write: WORLD Mailbag, PO Box , Asheville, NC - Please include full name and address.

Letters may be edited to yield brevity and clarity.

As a committed Christian, you can live consistently with your beliefs by sharing medical needs directly with fellow believers through Samaritan Ministries’ non-insurance approach. You do not have to purchase health insurance that pays for abortions, abortifacient drugs, and other unbiblical practices. Health care sharing satisfies the individual mandate in the recent Federal health care law (United States Code 26, Section 5000A, (d), (2), (B)).

Every month the more than 36,000* households of Samaritan Ministries (over 120,000* persons) share more than $10 million* in medical needs directly—one household to another. They also pray for one another and send notes of encouragement. The monthly share for a family membership of any size has never exceeded $405*.

For more information call us toll-free at 1-888-268-4377, or visit us online at: www.samaritanministries.org.

Follow us on Twitter (@samaritanmin) and Facebook (SamaritanMinistries). * As of July 2014

Biblical faith applied to health care www.samaritanministries.org

15 MAILBAG.indd 65

7/8/14 10:02 AM

Raising Kids To Do Hard Things"

2014 National Tour with Gregg Harris" A “family-wisdom workshop” grandparents! for teens, parents & grandparents!

Presented Live & In Person

by Gregg Harris,"

pioneer home-school advocate, bestselling author & father of 3 best-selling authors

!“You can’t spend much time with the Harris children...

What others are saying: saying:"

without concluding that their parents have done something remarkable, and have earned the right to be heard.” !

!“Anyone raising teenagers would benefit from spending

— Randy Alcorn, Author of Heaven & If God is Good"

— Mike Smith, President, Home School Legal Defense Association

Visit Our Website & Register On-line at www.NobleInstitute.org

2014 National Itinerary • • • •

San Diego, CA, Sat., June 21 Louisville, KY, Sat. June 28 Las Vegas, NV, Sat., July 19 " VA Beach Area, VA, Sat. Sept. 13

• • • •

Northern " VA, Sat. Sept. 20" Syracuse, NY, Sat., Sat. Oct. 18 " Long Island, NY, Sat. Oct. 25" Baton Rouge, LA, Sat. Nov. 15

Scan our Quick Response Code to go to Eventbrite.

"

KRIEG BARRIE

some time with Gregg. It will be one of the most beneficial investments you could ever make in your family.”!

Presented by Noble Institute & HSLDA. Hosted & Sponsored by the Christian Home School Associations, Support Groups, Co-ops and Local Churches of each state.

15 SEU PETERSON.indd 66

7/8/14 3:02 PM

Andrée Seu Peterson

A many-splendored thing But with love, we need the guardrails God provides in Scripture

>>

KRIEG BARRIE

“L.” Never was a word more empty till it was filled up with something. I hear more about “love” these days than any other word except “hate.” God says to “walk in love” (Ephesians :), and that sounds as broad and wide as a dime-store greeting card before you apprise yourself of the delimiting contours in His Word.

Those contours are not stultifying restrictions but guardrails. And who doesn’t want to be kept from driving off the cliff?

There are many legitimate kinds of love. There is love for nature, which is a splendid thing unless you make it a religion. For nature, apart from the surroundsound declaration of the power and deity of God, gives no instructions in living.

And if you count on it to do so, you end up making it say what you wanted to hear: thus, the hippies’ free love and more modern debaucheries. C.S. Lewis said the mistake of the th century was to make nature love a direct path to God. This, he writes, led “to a great deal of nonsense.”

There is another kind of love, one that makes my four children dig each other though some of them would never have chosen each other as friends. This domestic love is comfortable like bed slippers, and doesn’t ask much of the other person. It learns to appreciate things in the other that it would not have if a base of affection had not been laid that alchemizes potential irritants into endearing qualities. My sons have some fondness for poetry because of their poetic sister.

But this domestic love is not to be confused with Christian love. It is natural like love of the dowdy elementary school you went to is natural. But its tensile strength is not great enough in itself to sustain much freight. My children could conceivably become alienated from each other in certain circumstances.

(Who doesn’t know siblings who have turned enemies over their parents’ will?) And the danger of domestic love is that we take liberties and presume upon it: We expect to be loved though we don’t lift a finger to make ourselves lovable.

Email: aseupeterson@wng.org

15 SEU PETERSON.indd 67

Maternal love is reputed to be the strongest. A mother hen or wildebeest will put herself in harm’s way for her chick or calf, defying an enemy much stronger than herself. Mother love can go bad too, however, and can morph into a sick dependence. She insists on making you a meal—never mind you told her you’re not hungry. She is “helpful” to the brink of smothering. This is the mother who “lives for her family.” Her Jimmy (he is  now) wants to try something different this Christmas and go skiing.

Woe to Jimmy if he breaks tradition.

Companionship is splendid—the power of two or three to break the fundamental loneliness of one.

Companionship’s chief danger is that groups will dare a mischief that a single person would not dream of.

Proverbs opens up with warnings on the choice of pals, and Paul concurs by saying that “bad company ruins good morals” ( Corinthians :).

Friendship—by which I don’t mean our accidental companions but those people whom we discover we share a truth with—is a wonderful love and less taxing on the nerves than romantic love. It is not instinct and it is not cloyingly needy. In fact, the only potential pitfall here is pride and cliquishness. For some reason, there is a tendency to think those “inside” our circle better than those “outside.” This love also, then, needs the alien grace of a higher love to keep it from going bad.

Marital love is the love God invented to illustrate His own relationship with us, His church. Its intimacy is multifaceted and exclusive. Its jealousy is fierce and right. But here we come full circle to the danger we saw in nature love, which making it a god lets in a demon. We are also back to the contentless Hallmark view of love that baptizes sodomy as a legitimate love so long as there is found affection in it.

We find ourselves back again at the need for Scripture and those guardrails. God says to “walk in love,” then tells us how to walk and what to watch for, that our journey may go pleasantly. A

J U LY 2 6 , 2 0 1 4 • W O R L D



7/2/14 3:45 PM

Marvin Olasky

The great escape

Messing up the works in enemy-occupied territory

>>



W O R L D • J U LY 2 6 , 2 0 1 4

15 OLASKY.indd 68

McQueen in The Great Escape

of the Luftwaffe. Not the Gestapo and the SS.” Bartlett responds, “You talk about the High Command and the Luftwaffe, and then you talk about the Gestapo and the SS. To me, they’re the same! … the common enemies of everyone who believes in freedom.”

Ramsey lets the escape go on, and later tells a survivor reeling from news of the murder of , “Roger’s idea was to get back at the enemy the hardest way he could, mess up the works. … He did exactly that.” Asked the hard question—“Do you think it was worth the price?”— Ramsey responds, “Depends on your point of view.”

The metaphor: C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity, which he developed as BBC radio talks during World War II, wrote, “Enemy-occupied territory—that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.”

Up until World War I, many in England and America were postmillennialists. Viewing Europe’s material progress and general peace, they thought a great society was coming—and Christ would then return and reign.

World War I killed most of that sanguinity and a repeat  years later wiped clean the rest. Those who read Lewis could readily believe that Satan, by God’s leave, dominates this world like the Nazis for four years ran Europe. The Christian task is to mess up satanic works.

I have no indication that The Great Escape’s screenwriter and director were applying Lewis, but I cannot avoid doing so: We are called to spiritual guerrilla warfare. We may die in the process, but we’ll say to Christ what another captured escapee says to Bartlett a moment before they die: “Tunneling kept me alive.

I’ve never been happier.” A

REX FEATURES/AP

S  —July , —signs suddenly appeared at prisoner of war camps in Germany: “ESCAPE FROM PRISON CAMPS IS NO LONGER A SPORT.” Those signs meant the Gestapo had murdered  escapees from Stalag Luft III. A terrific film you might watch this summer, The Great Escape (), commemorates that heroic-turned-tragic adventure.

Let’s review the reality, the movie, and the metaphor.

The reality: A -year-old British air force squadron leader, Roger Bushell, organized the great escape. As “Big X” of the camp escape committee, he proposed that the prisoners dig not one but three tunnels—Tom, Dick, and Harry—so if prison guards discovered one, others could be continued.

Bushell’s goal was  escapees. When warned that embarrassed Germans would take revenge on those caught after such a large foray, he said, “Everyone here in this room is living on borrowed time. By rights we should all be dead!” It was to fight Nazis to the utmost, he added, that “God allowed us this extra ration of life.”

Guards discovered one tunnel, but  prisoners got out through another. Only three eventually made it to freedom outside Germany, and Bushell was one of the  shot, contrary to the Geneva Convention. After the war,  Germans eventually paid for this war crime (and others they had committed) by forfeiting their own lives.

The movie: Great characters include Capt. Virgil Hilts, played by Steve McQueen, who tries escape after escape and ends up each time in solitary confinement, tossing a baseball against a wall. The prisoners enjoy camaraderie as they find devious ways to fool their common enemy, the German jailers, and they also sacrifice themselves for each other: Hilts goes out individually and lets himself be caught so he can bring back information that will make possible the large escape.

The philosophical question of the movie comes in dialogue between “Roger Bartlett,” the character modeled on Roger Bushell, and “Group Captain Ramsey,” the limping senior British officer at the camp, modeled on Stalag Luft III’s real-life Herbert Massey, who had lost half his leg. Ramsey asks Bartlett concerning his massive escape plan, “Have you thought of what it might cost?” Bartlett responds, “I’ve thought of the humiliation if we just … knuckle under and crawl. Surely, you don’t advocate that, do you?”

Ramsey then points out that Stalag life could be worse: “No matter how unsatisfactory this camp may be, the High Command have still left us in the hands

Email: molasky@wng.org

7/2/14 4:18 PM

Renewing MINDS Excellence-driven higher education begins with stellar faculty

U

nion University faculty members excel as scholars, authors and national speakers. They invest in their students through award-winning classroom teaching, mentoring and collaboration on research.

In a close-knit learning community our students are challenged to grow intellectually and integrate their faith in every program of study. As a result, Union graduates excel in top graduate schools and in careers around the world.

Come experience Union’s Christ-centered academic excellence for yourself.

REX FEATURES/AP

uu.edu/welcome Jackson, Tennessee

E X C E L L E N C E - D R I V E N

15 OLASKY.indd 3

|

C H R I S T- C E N T E R E D

|

P E O P L E - F O C U S E D

|

F U T U R E - D I R E C T E D

7/7/14 2:17 PM

15 OLASKY.indd 4

7/8/14 3:12 PM