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Contents , / ,
30 Turning Syria inside out
With foreign fighters invading the rebellion, millions of Syrians fleeing civil war, and a brutal president determined to hang on, good guys and workable solutions are disappearing in a country no longer itself
36 Stacking library shelves How Washington is pushing Islamic propaganda into local communities. Where’s the ACLU when we need it?
40 Casualties of war
Alarming suicide rates among combat veterans beg for new help from the military and ministries
46 David and Goliath Second-term congressman James Lankford lacks the so-called credentials to take on Washington establishment‚ but he will anyway
50 Growing in a loophole
In the era of Obamacare, Christian medical bill-sharing groups are rapidly adding members : ; / /
5 News 12 Quotables 14 Quick Takes
5
19 Movies & TV 22 Books 24 Q&A 26 Music
19
57 Lifestyle 59 Technology 60 Science 61 Houses of God 62 Sports 63 Money 64 Religion
36
40
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3 Joel Belz 16 Janie B. Cheaney 28 Mindy Belz 54 Raymond Ibrahim 67 Mailbag 71 Andrée Seu Peterson 72 Marvin Olasky
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“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, Angela Lu, Edward Lee Pitts
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5/15/13 11:33 AM
KRIEG BARRIE
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Joel Belz
Speaking terms
What happens to free speech in a regulatory era?
>>
KRIEG BARRIE
N what all the fuss is about. All this ruckus, I mean, in the military where our wonderful folks in uniform are being told they’re not going to be allowed to evangelize their colleagues. Or sometimes, if parties to the debate aren’t quite sure what the word “evangelize” means, we’ll use the term “proselytize” instead. Nobody seems sure which of the two is worse. But I say this is much ado about nothing. It’s no big deal, whenever the bothersome blather of one citizen begins to invade the peace and quiet of another citizen, to try to find some way to quiet the offender. There’s always someone capable of thinking up an appropriate muzzle, and then applying it. In fact, I’ve got a special plan ready to apply to the current problem in the military. I got the idea from the phone company. They refer to it as a “do not call” arrangement. If you sign up for “do not call,” it becomes illegal for salesmen, fundraisers, promoters, politicians, and other arm-twisters to call your number. If they do so—and especially if they persist—you can properly charge them with breaking the law. “Do not call” policies, I’ve discovered, are pretty common stuff. So using pretty much the same approach, I thought, what would be wrong with arming each member of the military with a sort of “do not evangelize” card? Then, whenever some ardently religious person begins imposing his or her faith on some soldier, all said soldier need do is to flash his “do not proselytize” card. If the “evangelist/proselytizer” persists, just call the cops, or in this case, the military police. But normally, of course, we won’t get near the place we need such drastic action. Just showing the card should do the trick. But hold on! Wait just a cotton-pickin minute. What’s wrong with this picture? What’s wrong is that we would even think of the possibility of approving yet further restrictions on the freedom of speech. What’s wrong is that we’ve quietly bought into the mindset of the thought police. We’ve inched down the road toward thinking there are people
Email: jbelz@worldmag.com
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smart enough to decide which freedoms of speech should be protected and which can be compromised. By suggesting the analogy of the “do not call” policies of the phone company, I tempted you to agree that there might well be times when it’s OK to shut someone else up for a while. Did you scream in protest when you read my opening proposal? Did you ask, “Where on earth, Joel, are you headed?” Like the self-centered culture around us, we’ve become more jealous for our own space and our own peace and quiet than we are for the freedoms that make us a vibrant society. We live in a regulatory era, and we live under a government that has one of its hallmark distinctives the habit of adding daily to the great catalog under which we must all live. (Catalogs, incidentally, are bigger and more burdensome than decalogues). Don’t our friends in the military have a sufficiently regimented life as it is—without adding restrictions about who may engage in what religious talk? One of the beauties of he First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution is its sweeping “no exceptions” approach to the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press, the freedom of religion. The “no yelling FIRE in a crowded theater” exception, like the “no handling rattlesnakes or drinking poison” as a mode of worship, are not that hard to understand. Beyond that, though, our whole inclination should be toward expanding—not constricting—such basic liberties. What’s so ironically outrageous about the bureaucrats’ suggested restrictions on free speech among military personnel is that anyone anywhere even thinks about imposing such limits on the very uniformed people who have pledged their lives to protecting our freedoms. We should be ashamed to let such thoughts cross our minds. And yes, I am ashamed of my opening paragraphs. A
JUNE 1, 2013 • WORLD
5/15/13 11:35 AM
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Dispatches News > Quotables > Quick Takes
MAY 10: Rescuers in Bangladesh retrieve garment worker Reshma from the rubble of an eight-story building days after it collapsed. STRDEL/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
>>
EDITOR’S NOTE: We’ve changed our Dispatches news section. The next six pages give you a quick look at Bangladesh and other events throughout the first two weeks of May. For details, and to stay abreast of stories now and throughout the next two weeks, visit worldmag.com.
JUNE 1, 2013 • WORLD
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T h u r s d a y, M a y
Don’t offer hope? At National Day of Prayer ceremonies in Washington, D.C., Rear Admiral William Lee told of meeting with a -year-old soldier who had shot himself in a suicide attempt. Lee referred to pressure not to talk about God or offer a Bible, but said he would not back down from “my right under the Constitution to tell a young man that there is hope.” London
May Day Thousands of European workers turned out for traditional May Day protests, this year demanding more government bailouts to fight record-high unemployment. In California, Yahoo announced that working moms will receive up to weeks of paid maternity leave and working dads up to eight weeks.
Sexual sin
Persecution
Online lynch mobs demanded that ESPN suspend Chris Broussard. The sportswriter, asked about NBA player Jason Collins’ announcement that he’s both a practicing homosexual and a Christian, said, “If you’re openly living in unrepentant sin, whatever it may be, not just homosexuality, adultery, fornication, premarital sex between heterosexuals, whatever it may be, I believe that’s walking in open rebellion to God and to Jesus Christ.”
The independent U.S. Commission on International Freedom released its annual report and said the U.S. government should make religious liberty a higher priority. North Korea sentenced Christian missionary Kenneth Bae to years of hard labor, with the apparent goal of using him as bait to elicit a visit from a high-profile American.
Wrongs and rites The U.S. Department of Justice appealed a judge’s decision that young teens have the right to buy “morning-after” pills over the counter without input from any adult. President Obama said “solid scientific evidence” indicates the minimum age should be . Rhode Island became the th state to legalize same-sex marriage.
Terrorism In Massachusetts, police arrested three young friends of accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev for allegedly lying to investigators and trying to destroy evidence. In Washington, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel did not rule out arming Syria’s radical Islamist rebels, and the Obama administration invited for friendly talks a top official of Sudan’s genocidal regime.
CREDIT MAY DAY: GEORGE HENTON/ BARCROFT MEDIA/BARCROFT MEDIA/LANDOV • BAE: FAMILY PHOTO • LEE: HANDOUT • HAMILTON: HANDOUT
We d n e s d a y, M a y
Engaged Bethany Hamilton, , whose story was told in the movie Soul Surfer, has announced her engagement to a Hawaiian youth minister, Adam Dirks. Hamilton’s left arm was severed in a shark attack, but she recovered and went on to become a professional surfer. The two met in and have not set a wedding date.
WORLD • JUNE 1, 2013
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SUICIDE: MARK WRAGG/ISTOCK • GOSNELL: YONG KIM/MCT/LANDOV • TANZANIA: AP • PORTILLO: GEORGE FREY/EFE/NEWSCOM • WUXOR: SHI JIANXUE/XINHUA/LANDOV • KRUSINSKI: ARLINGTON COUNTY POLICE DEPARTMENT
Dispatches > News
SUICIDE: MARK WRAGG/ISTOCK • TANZANIA: AP • PORTILLO: GEORGE FREY/EFE/NEWSCOM • WUXOR: SHI JIANXUE/XINHUA/LANDOV • KRUSINSKI: ARLINGTON COUNTY POLICE DEPARTMENT
CREDIT MAY DAY: GEORGE HENTON/ BARCROFT MEDIA/BARCROFT MEDIA/LANDOV • BAE: FAMILY PHOTO • LEE: HANDOUT • HAMILTON: HANDOUT
F r i d a y, M a y
Suicides The Centers for Disease Control announced that suicides among Americans to have jumped percent since , with the biggest jump ( percent) among men ages to : Analysts say the prolonged economic downturn has depressed many. More Americans now die by suicide than in vehicular accidents.
Retreat
Tanzania S a t u r d a y a n d S u n d a y, M a y -
Rage
In Utah on Saturday, soccer referee Ricardo Portillo, , died from internal head injuries after a -year-old— mad about a penalty during a recreational league game—punched him in the face. On Sunday, terrorists in Tanzania set off an explosion in a church, killing two people and injuring . Four Saudis and four Tanzanians were arrested for the bombing.
The Obama administration won’t force Tyndale House Publishers to provide contraceptive and abortifacient drugs to its employees after a federal court dismissed the government’s appeal of a November ruling. That ruling had blocked enforcement of the contraceptive mandate for companies with over employees to provide coverage for medication that can cause abortions.
Tightropes On Sunday, Chinese tightrope walker Adili Wuxor, his eyes blindfolded, walked across a steel wire feet above the ground and even balanced on it upside down. Israeli aircraft destroyed advanced Iranian weapons in the area of Damascus, vowing to prevent the weapons from falling into the hands of Lebanon’s Hezbollah, which announced its intent to defend Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Outraged U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel expressed “outrage and disgust” after the Air Force officer overseeing the branch’s sexual assault and prevention program was arrested for sexual assault. The officer, Lt. Col. Jeffrey Krusinski, , was reportedly removed from duty immediately. Krusinski, who had assumed the post in February, was reportedly intoxicated when he allegedly groped a woman he didn’t know on the night of May .
Worldmag.com: Your online source for today’s news, Christian views
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JUNE 1, 2013 • WORLD
5/15/13 11:03 AM
Dispatches > News
Forgiven? South Carolina voters sent former governor Mark Sanford to Congress, despite his disappearance while governor to be with his Argentinian mistress. Democratic candidate Elizabeth Colbert Busch, sister of comedian Stephen Colbert, outspent Sanford - as national Republicans abandoned Sanford, but at a victory rally Sanford called himself an “imperfect man … saved by God’s grace.”
Sweet land of liberty Three Cleveland women escaped from decade-long slavery. Amanda Berry and two others were imprisoned in a house not far from where they disappeared. Berry managed to get to a neighbor’s house and call : “Help me, I’m Amanda Berry. I’ve been kidnapped and I’ve been missing for ten years and I’m here—I’m free now.”
Affordable? In Long Beach, Calif., city officials said they will make sure part-time employees work fewer than hours per week so they do not have to provide their health insurance: Under the “Affordable Care Act,” those working hours or more must be covered, so millions across the country will lose hours and money. The California Supreme Court ruled that cities and counties can ban medical marijuana dispensaries, which sell pot to sick or bored people who obtain a recommendation from a sympathetic physician.
Squashed One day after posting a video of himself squashing a spider, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie announced he had gastric band surgery: Doctors inserted a silicone device around his stomach so he can feel full despite eating less.
CREDIT
Removed Authorities in Tehran removed Iranian-American pastor Saeed Abedini from solitary confinement on May —a day after he turned . Abedini has been languishing in Iran’s notorious Evin Prison since September, when authorities arrested him on charges of crimes against the state (including sharing his faith) allegedly committed a decade ago. Led by Abedini’s wife, Naghmeh, more than , people have signed a petition for his release, and more than , have written letters of encouragement. Abedini’s health is thought to be deteriorating amid beatings and withheld medical treatment.
BERRY: TONY DEJAK/AP • MARIJUANA: YARYGIN/ISTOCK • SANFORD: RAINIER EHRHARDT/AP • CHRISTIE: JULIO CORTEZ/AP • ABEDINI: ACLJ
M o n d a y, M a y
WORLD • JUNE 1, 2013
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HEARING: J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE/AP • TSARNAEV GRAVE: ROBERT A. MARTIN/THE FREE LANCE-STAR/AP • SOMALIA: SCHALK VAN ZUYDAM/AP • WALL: URIEL SINAI/GETTY IMAGES • ALI: FAROOQ NAEEM/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Tu e s d a y, M a y
BERRY: TONY DEJAK/AP • MARIJUANA: YARYGIN/ISTOCK • SANFORD: RAINIER EHRHARDT/AP • CHRISTIE: JULIO CORTEZ/AP • ABEDINI: ACLJ
HEARING: J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE/AP • TSARNAEV GRAVE: ROBERT A. MARTIN/THE FREE LANCE-STAR/AP • SOMALIA: SCHALK VAN ZUYDAM/AP • WALL: URIEL SINAI/GETTY IMAGES • ALI: FAROOQ NAEEM/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
F r i d a y, M a y
After days
Eric Nordstrom (right), the State Department's former regional security officer in Libya; Gregory Hicks (center), former deputy chief of mission in Libya; and Mark Thompson, the State Department's acting deputy assistant secretary for counterterrorism
Two and a half weeks after a building collapse in Bangladesh, the death toll pushed past ,, but rescuers brought out from the rubble one woman. Elsewhere in Bangladesh, Islamist groups attacked Christian homes and churches, with a death count of at least .
We d n e s d a y, M a y
Cover-up Three U.S. State Department whistleblowers offered dramatic revelations during a hearing about the Libyan attacks last Sept. that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three others. They showed that senior State Department officials knew the Benghazi attacks were a terrorist assault, yet the Obama administration developed a “monstrously false” blame-the-YouTube-video cover-up. Counter-terrorist experts remain angry about orders they received not to go to the defense of the Americans under attack: “We live by a code, and that … says you go after people who are in peril.”
After days Muslims buried the body of apparent Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev in a Virginia Muslim cemetery. Many Massachusetts cemeteries and funeral homes had turned away the corpse, with Rep. Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., claiming “the people of Massachusetts do not want that terrorist to be buried on our soil,” but retired Vermont teacher Paul Keane offered a spot at his family plot in Connecticut, on condition that it be dedicated to the memory of his mother, a Christian who taught him to “love thine enemy.”
Pushed to the Wall
T h u r s d a y, M a y
Somali deaths A new report on Somalia’s recent famine revealed that it killed about , people in two years, with half of the victims under the age of . Islamic extremists refused to allow aid groups to deliver food, and Islamists now seem unwilling to give up without another deadly fight.
Liberal Jewish women tried to wear prayer shawls (traditionally restricted to men) next to the Western Wall in Jerusalem, but thousands of girls from Orthodox schools got there first and crowded them out. Hundreds of police officers held back throngs of blackhatted Orthodox men who demonstrated against the liberal women, sometimes throwing at them water, candy, and a few of the white plastic chairs that cluster near the Wall.
Murdered Gunmen shot and killed a high-profile Pakistani prosecutor as he drove to CREDIT
work on May . Chaudhry Zulfiqar Ali, who was shot times, had been investigating several important cases, including a terrorist attack in Mumbai, India, and the assassination of Pakistan’s former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto. Ali told the BBC in April that he had been receiving death threats related to multiple cases.
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JUNE 1, 2013 • WORLD
5/15/13 11:08 AM
Dispatches > News M o n d a y, M a y
Outrage and intrusion
S a t u r d a y a n d S u n d a y, M a y -
Pakistan election
Praying and debating Syrians gathered in cities and prayed for an end to the crippling violence in their land. Dozens of rockets, shells, and mortars exploded near places set aside for prayer. In the United States, Sunday talk shows included arguments about what State Department and White House officials knew of the attacks last September that killed four Americans in Libya, and when did they know it.
Gosnell guilty of murder After days of deliberation, a jury found Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell, , guilty of three of the four first-degree murder charges prosecutors filed against him. The jury also found him guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the case of patient Karnamaya Mongar, who died after overdosing on anesthesia; guilty of aborting babies older than weeks (Pennsylvania’s limit); and guilty of corruption and conspiracy. Several others involved in the case also await sentencing. Four of Gosnell’s former employees pleaded guilty to murder and testified against him during the trial. Four more, including his wife, Pearl, pleaded guilty to lesser charges.
CREDIT
Died Christian philosopher and best-selling author Dallas Willard died from cancer on May at age . Willard, who taught philosophy at the University of Southern California for years, was an ordained Baptist minister and best known for his writings on Christian spiritual formation. His books include The Spirit of the Disciplines, The Divine Conspiracy, and Renovation of the Heart.
PAKISTAN: DANIEL BEREHULAK/GETTY IMAGES • GOSNELL: YONG KIM/MCT/LANDOV • WILLARD: GREG SCHNEIDER
National elections left former Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, head of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, in position to become prime minister once again. Pakistan’s democracy seemed unlikely to lead to any increase in liberty: Many winning candidates criticized Christians and other religious minorities and seemed unwilling to protect them from Islamist attacks.
WORLD • JUNE 1, 2013
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ROMEIKES: MATT ROSE • NADAL: JASPER JUINEN/GETTY IMAGES • HASAN: BELL COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT/AP • NANDIPATI: ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES DREAMLINER: TED S. WARREN/AP • PISTORIUS: MARTIN RICKETT/PA WIRE/AP • HANNEMAN: HENRY RUGGERI/CORBIS/AP
Democrats joined Republicans in decrying an IRS targeting of conservative groups. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., said, “Government agencies using their bureaucratic muscle to target Americans for their political beliefs cannot be tolerated.” President Barack Obama at a midday press conference called the IRS action “outrageous.” Later in the day, the Associated Press issued a fierce story attacking the Department of Justice, which “secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative’s top executive called a ‘massive and unprecedented intrusion’ into how news organizations gather the news.”
May 26
Rafael Nadal of Spain enters the French Open as an underdog due to his world ranking. But the three-time defending champion’s status—as well as his reputation for success on Roland Garros’ clay courts—means that all eyes will be on him when the French Open begins its two-week tournament. Serbia’s Novak Djokavic is the No. ranked player in the world.
Tu e s d a y, M a y
PAKISTAN: DANIEL BEREHULAK/GETTY IMAGES • GOSNELL: YONG KIM/MCT/LANDOV • WILLARD: GREG SCHNEIDER
ROMEIKES: MATT ROSE • NADAL: JASPER JUINEN/GETTY IMAGES • HASAN: BELL COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT/AP • NANDIPATI: ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES DREAMLINER: TED S. WARREN/AP • PISTORIUS: MARTIN RICKETT/PA WIRE/AP • HANNEMAN: HENRY RUGGERI/CORBIS/AP
Homeschoolers lose An appeals court panel ruled that the Romeike family should not be granted asylum in the United States (see WORLD, May ). The homeschooling Romeikes fled Germany in after officials insisted that their children attend only government-approved schools, and an immigration judge granted the family asylum in . The Obama administration (which has ordered that homosexuals be given asylum) appealed, and the appeals court agreed that harsh treatment of religiously motivated homeschoolers was not persecution.
LOOKING AHEAD May 29 Jury selection for
the case of accused Fort Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan begins at the Texas army base. The Army psychiatrist has been charged with murder counts after his mass shooting on Nov. , at Fort Hood. With a conviction, Hasan faces life imprisonment or the death penalty.
No.
May 30
Top juvenile orthographers will gather for the final round of the Scripps National Spelling Bee. Last year’s champion, San Diego’s Snigdha Nandipati,, correctly spelled guetapens, a synonym for trap, to win the grand prize. This year, spellers during the preliminary rounds will be tested not only on their spelling of words but also on definitions of those words. The televised finals will proceed as usual.
Minnesota became the th state to legalize same-sex marriage, and the second (along with Iowa) in the Midwest. The law will take effect August .
. For more about these stories of the past two weeks, breaking news throughout the second half of May, and website-only writing by Mindy Belz, Janie Cheaney, Andrée Seu Peterson, Marvin Olasky, and others, visit worldmag.com.
June 4 Oscar Pistorius,
June 1
The nightmare for Boeing’s troubled Dreamliner may be over. After gaining clearance from the Federal Aviation Administration, United Airlines resumed use of the jetliner in May for flights between Houston and Denver. The FAA has also given Nippon Airways the goahead to use the jumbo jet for transpacific flights from San Jose, Calif., to Tokyo beginning June . The botched roll-out of the plane was caused by electrical failures on a Japan Airlines flight on Jan. .
the double leg amputee known as the “Blade Runner,” may have excited fans with his sprinting abilities at the Olympic games, but he faces a tougher audience on June . On that day, Pistorius goes on trial for murdering his girlfriend at his Pretoria, South Africa, home on Feb. . Pistorius has claimed he thought Reeva Steenkamp was an intruder, but prosecutors have charged the track star with premeditated murder.
CREDIT
Died Jeff Hanneman, ,founding member and lead guitarist for the heavy metal band Slayer, died May from complications related to a spider bite. Topeka, Kan.–based Westboro Baptist Church announced it would protest at the funeral for Hanneman. Slayer fans are making plans for a counter-protest that would drown out the noise of the controversial church. Stay connected: Sign up to receive email updates at worldmag.com/email
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JUNE 1, 2013 • WORLD
5/15/13 11:15 AM
Dispatches > Quotables
‘Thanks to the #ACA, 1 in 3 women under 65 gained access to preventive care—like birth control—with no out-of-pocket costs. #HappyMothersDay.’ WHITE HOUSE tweet promoting Obamacare in advance of Mother’s Day. A follower responded, “Can’t wait to see how you guys chat up Father’s Day. Ouch.”
GIULIO ANDREOTTI, former prime minister of Italy. Andreotti, who first entered Parliament in , died on May at age . In that time Italy has had more than governments.
‘#me.’ HASHTAG for million photos on Instagram, demonstrating the popularity of the “selfie,” or self-shot photo from a phone.
‘$2,906,721’ Total compensation paid to GRAHAM SPANIER,, former president of Pennsylvania State University, during the - school year, the highest among public university presidents. Spanier was forced out that year and indicted in the Jerry Sandusky sex abuse scandal. The median salary for public university presidents was ,, up . percent from the previous year. Ohio State’s Gordon Gee, who received . million, reportedly had expenses including for a shower curtain at the school’s presidential mansion.
WORLD • JUNE 1, 2013
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CREDIT
U.S. Rep. MICHAEL E. CAPUANO, D-Mass., on reports that the IRS flagged groups with “tea party” or “patriot” in their names for special investigation in the run-up to the election.
ANDREOTTI: PLINIO LEPRI/AP • CAPUANO: ANDREW HARRER/BLOOMBERG/GETTY IMAGES • OBAMA: CHARLES DHARAPAK/AP • SELFIE: GUIDO MIETH/GETTY IMAGES • SPANIER: GENE PUSKAR/AP
‘Aside from the Punic Wars, for which I was too young, I have been blamed for everything else.’
‘I spent my youth vilifying the Nixon administration for doing the same thing. If they did that, there should be hell to pay.’
CREDIT
ANDREOTTI: PLINIO LEPRI/AP • CAPUANO: ANDREW HARRER/BLOOMBERG/GETTY IMAGES • OBAMA: CHARLES DHARAPAK/AP • SELFIE: GUIDO MIETH/GETTY IMAGES • SPANIER: GENE PUSKAR/AP
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The crew of the battleship New Jersey has a message for the namesake’s governor: Please return the captain’s silverware. Donated to the first U.S.S. New Jersey by then-Gov. Edward H. Stokes in , the -piece silver service in question was transferred to the most recent U.S.S. New Jersey battleship when it was commissioned in . Though it’s unclear how the silverware ended up at the New Jersey Governor’s Mansion in Princeton after the ship’s decommissioning in , ship museum CEO Philip Rowan sent New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie a letter recently asking that the governor’s staff return the priceless set back to the ship in preparation for a May celebration aboard the converted museum ship.
Have a taste for French fries smothered in brown gravy and cheese curds? The Canadians call it poutine. Jones Soda calls it their newest flavor. Following up on flavors such as turkey and gravy soda and bacon soda, the specialty soda maker says it will soon release a poutine-flavored Jones Soda. “With a nice balance of rich, savory gravy over a starchy potato base, and accented with those fatty, cheesy notes you expect in a plate of poutine, we believe we’ve developed the perfect liquid version of this undisputedly Canadian delicacy,” Jones Soda marketing manager Andrew Baumann said. The company said the poutine drink will be available only in Canada.
FIGHTING BLIND He may be past his prime and he may be blind, but no one punches
Gordon Besaw and gets away with it. The -year-old blind veteran was attacked as he walked to an appointment at a VA hospital in Oklahoma City on April . According to the former Army Special Forces soldier, -year-old Christopher Andrew approached and asked him if he was blind. “I said yes. He said, ‘I can make you see before you see God.’” Then Andrew punched him in the face. “He said, ‘I can make you see again’ and he punched me in the head again,” Besaw said. “I’m like, ‘Man, you’re not going to like the way this is going to go.’” Besaw instructed his guide dog to sit still, then groped for his attacker. Once in his grasp, Besaw used his training to hip toss his attacker, fling him to the ground, and put him in a chokehold until police arrived. They arrested Andrew and charged him with aggravated assault.
WORLD • JUNE 1, 2013
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ILLUSTRATION: KRIEG BARRIE • BATTLESHIP: AP • SILVER: THE WASHINGTON TIMES/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS • SODA: HANDOUT • POUTINE: HANDOUT • BESAW: HANDOUT
It’s not what police say John Jacobson stole that surprised investigators. It’s what they found in his pocket. According to Washington County, Ore., sheriff’s deputies, Jacobson stole a case of beer as it was being unloaded outside a store on May . The delivery driver then chased the Portland native, and eventually a sheriff’s K- unit flushed him out of the woods. When deputies searched him at the county jail, they found a live mouse in his pocket. After Jacobson’s booking, his father arrived at the jail to claim the mouse. No word on whether the father posted bail.
Worldmag.com: Your online source for today’s news, Christian views
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Dispatches > Quick Takes
Apparently Jarvis Sutton wanted only three things out of life. Unfortunately for him, he asked the wrong people. Sutton, a -year-old St. Petersburg, Fla., resident, was arrested April after calling approximately times asking the dispatcher to bring him some goodies. “The defendant admitted to calling because he wanted Kool-Aid, burgers and weed to be delivered to him,” the arresting officer wrote in an official report. The requests landed Sutton in the Pinellas County jail.
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Elisangela Borborema Rosa of Arraial do Cabo, Brazil, now knows how a hunted whale feels. Rosa’s husband was reportedly cleaning his spear gun on May when he accidentally fired a harpoon. The harpoon then entered Rosa’s mouth and hit her spine, coming within less than half an inch of killing her, according to doctors. Doctors predict a full recovery for Rosa, , and a police officer in Arraial do Cabo told the Associated Press that authorities will investigate the incident: “Everything indicates it was an accident, but we are investigating. We don’t think the husband tried to kill her.”
Just in time for summer, Norway has a job that should allow the worker to be outdoors while simultaneously staying cool. That’s because the governor’s office of Norway’s Svalbard islands has indicated the need this summer for a polar bear watcher. Located between mainland Norway and the North Pole, Svalbard is home to the most northern city of more than , people in the entire world and has more polar bears living on the island (,) than humans (,). The person hired for the position will keep watch for polar bears that get too close to research scientists working on the island. According to the governor’s office, applicants need to have a loud voice to scare off bears and know how to use a rifle.
When John Dodds laid eyes on the World War II–era bomber jacket at a Washington, D.C., Goodwill, he fixated on one particular patch—the name badge. For Dodds, an assistant general council for the Air Force, the find was a treasure. The -year-old jacket still had lieutenant’s bars and a nd Bomber Group patch. It also had a name tag sewn into it. Working on a hunch that if Robert G. Arand was still alive, he may want his jacket back, Dodds paid for it and began sending emails. Within a day, Dodds had made contact with Arand, now a -year-old veteran living in Ohio, and promised to mail him back his jacket. Arand says he doesn’t know how the jacket made it from Ohio to the nation’s capital, but he suspects his wife donated it to charity more than years ago.
A group of New Jersey teenagers collected more than , cans of food for charity—and may have made the world’s largest canned food pyramid in the process. Bolstered by a ,-can donation from supermarket chain ShopRite, the teenaged members of the Cranford, N.J., Teen Advisory Board scoured pantries across the city to come up with enough cans of food to begin construction of the food tower on May . Working for hours, the group of teens stacked all , cans into a -foot-tall pyramid, a height good enough for a Guinness World Record once verified. When the teens deconstructed the pyramid four days later, they donated the cans to three local food banks.
JUNE 1, 2013 • WORLD
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Janie B. Cheaney
The heart of the matter
Homosexuals and the rest of us sinners are who we are, and that is the problem
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WORLD • JUNE 1, 2013
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Therefore, says the world, it must be accepted. Our nation is dedicated to the pursuit of happiness, and how is happiness possible if you can’t be who you are (as long as it hurts no one else)? The rejection that used to be the homosexual’s lot has shifted, so quickly we’re taken aback. It’s okay to be gay; what’s not okay is to deny someone’s identity. In other words, the burden gays used to bear is now squarely on the Bible-believing church. Some Christians say that abortion is a far greater threat to society than same-sex “marriage” because millions of souls have been lost to abortion, in comparison to a relative handful of homosexual spouses. But if abortion is a greater threat to society, same-sex “marriage” is poison to the church, a direct hit to her prophetic role and biblical authority. To claim that God has absolute right over what we do with our bodies is a very tough sell, and always has been. When church and culture were roughly on the same track, it wasn’t so apparent. Now it’s not only apparent but glaring, all the more as the church remains true to her Lord and His Word. But with God, nothing is hopeless. In his memoir, Out of a Far Country, Christopher Yuan describes how he became a Christian while serving time for drug-dealing. He confessed his orientation to a chaplain who reassured him that, “actually the Bible doesn’t condemn homosexuality.” Christopher eagerly pored over the book the chaplain gave him, comparing its arguments to what the Bible said. Reluctantly, he had to conclude that traditional teaching was right and the gay-justifying revisions were wrong. What then? Liberation came when he realized God was not calling him to be straight, but to be holy. “My identity was not ‘gay’ or ‘homosexual’ or even ‘heterosexual,’ for that matter. But my identity as a child of the living God must be in Jesus Christ alone.” Jesus is at the center, where He belongs. God give us courage to keep Him there. A
KRIEG BARRIE
I in March, Sen. Rob Portman, social analyst Charles Murray, and writer Jonah Goldberg—conservatives all—said that same-sex “marriage” is all but certain, and America will have to adjust. For Portman it’s personal, for Murray it’s practical, for Goldberg it’s logical, and each in his own way made a plausible case. The fact is, brothers and sisters, where this issue is concerned our backs are to the wall. So-called gay rights (for lack of a better term) is the third great civil-rights movement of the last years, and the most vexed. Here’s why: Racism challenged society, feminism challenged the family, but sexual identity challenges our very being. “Male and female he created them” (Genesis :), but what does that even mean? “Mere” homosexuality has morphed into LGBTQ, not an identity but a range of identities with unfixed borders. A young man I’ve known from an early age was raised in a Biblebelieving church among peers who casually mocked “fags.” He knew he was different and prayed earnestly through his teen years that God would change him. God didn’t change him, and eventually he gave up the struggle and accepted himself. “This is who I am,” he says. Christopher Yuan, son of high-achieving Chinese immigrant parents, faced the same dilemma and the same conclusion: His identity was inseparable from his sexuality, and by his early twenties he knew he couldn’t change it. He was and would always be gay. That’s the heart of the problem—of all problems. “This is who I am” unwittingly bares the human soul. Sin is not primarily a matter of what we do but of who we are. We are liars, idolaters, adulterers, hypocrites, perverts. That is why we lie (to ourselves especially), worship the creature rather than the Creator, stray from our true lover, pretend righteousness we don’t have, and misuse God’s gifts to our own selfish ends. But most of those sins can be hidden, even within the church. The homosexual’s peculiar burden is that his sin can’t be hidden.
Email: jcheaney@worldmag.com
5/14/13 4:06 PM
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Reviews Movies TV > Books > QA > Music
Grandiose Gatsby MOVIE: The Great Gatsby is visually stunning, and it takes F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story beyond the bounds of believability
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BY MEGAN BASHAM
Email: mbasham@worldmag.com
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T’ that Baz Luhrmann, the director responsible for previous colorful exercises in anachronism like Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge, has a distinct artistic vision. But of the many things his Gatsby is—brash, sly, and visually riveting—there is one thing it isn’t: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby. To start with, everything in Luhrmann’s version of The Great Gatsby is bigger. Bigger past the bounds of believability. Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton), previously a mere loutish, run-of-the-mill blueblood, becomes the villainous son of the richest family in the United States. The “cheerful red-and-white Georgian colonial” he and Daisy inhabit grows to a sprawling estate worthy of Downton Abbey’s Crawley family. And Gatsby’s unruly parties, originally populated by socialites, gangsters, and a variety of odd hangers-on, become behemoth bashes that would put even Louis XIV’s Versailles revelries to shame. Expanded most of all though is Jay Gatsby himself, who arrives on the scene, not, as in the book with a case of awkward mistaken identity, but with a literal explosion of fireworks and a sparkle in his blue eyes so mesmerizing it’s rivaled only by “The Wiz” who romanced Elaine on Seinfeld. Thanks to Leonardo DiCaprio, the tragic, insecure elements of Gatsby remain intact, but you get the feeling he was working against his director to maintain them. Even as Luhrmann stays true LARGER THAN LIFE: DiCaprio as to the novel’s basic events and uses much of its dialogue, the film’s Jay Gatsby and seemingly minor tweaks alter the story’s overall impression. Here Mulligan as Daisy we find no irony in the moniker “the great.” Buchanan.
JUNE 1, 2013 • WORLD
5/14/13 5:13 PM
Reviews > Movies & TV
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WORLD • June 1, 2013
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on her real life—but rather an unstable, and frankly, boring waif. In fact, it is only when MOVIE Lurhmann leaves his source material (as opposed to just exaggerating or misinterpreting it) to inject heavy by Stephanie Perrault doses of modern sensibility that the movie gets interestFrom time to time, a faith-based movie comes out in ing, presenting a startling limited release. Christians understand the power of contrast between the Jazz numbers and feel obligated to support the film, despite its Age and our own. artistic weaknesses. With a thumping score Such is the case with King’s Faith, a PG-13 flick highby Jay-Z and jarring injeclighting the struggles of Brendan King (Crawford Wilson), a tions of hip-hop imagery young man aging-out of the foster care system with a drug and aggressively contempoand juvenile detention record. rary choreography, The film focuses on Brendan’s newfound faith and the Luhrmann draws a connectenacious love of foster parents Mike and Vanessa Stubs tion between America’s (James McDaniel and the lovely Lynn Whitfield). It’s an excesses past and present. inspiring story on paper, but the film doesn’t deliver. Fitzgerald called the extravApart from King, the other personalities are awkward agance and vulgarity of and flimsy, like paper dolls mouthing platitudes. Seasoned Gatsby’s ilk “the raw vigor actors McDaniel and Whitfield can’t rise above the mediocre that chafed under the old script, and while Crawford Wilson shows the possibility of euphemisms.” Today, when stronger acting chops, director Nicholas DiBella relies on a socialite’s career (even her Wilson’s moody good looks and sad eyes in lieu of character entire family’s career) begins development. with a well-publicized sex DiBella’s effort is commendable and his source material— tape and rap impresarios the transformative power of the gospel—unparalleled. But brag about their former lives the film fails as a work of art because it doesn’t reflect the as drug dealers and pimps, triune reality of God—the ultimate Artist. there are no more eupheDorothy Sayers, Christian essayist, author, and literary misms, no more chafing. No commentator, believed human creativity is triune in nature. matter what happened at She said novel writing (a near-relative of film-making) has the end of Fitzgerald’s book, three aspects: the idea of the book, the w riting of the book, Lurhmann’s and the reading of the book—the boisterous “Idea, Energy, and Power.” Ideally soundtrack these elements—mirroring Father, proclaims, Son, and Holy Spirit—create a For the weekend of May 10-12 today three-in-oneness coalescing into according to Box Office Mojo Gatsby’s the perfect work of art. cautions: Quantity of sexual (S), violent faith in Knowing many creative works (V), and foul-language (L) content on a 0-10 scale, with 10 high, from kids-in-mind.com money fall short of perfection, Sayers making the explained, “the Idea is feeble, the S V L man 1̀ Iron Man 3 * pg-13....................3 7 4 Energy ill directed and the Power 2̀ The Great Gatsby * pg-13.....5 6 3 regardless conspicuously lacking.” 3̀ Pain and Gain r........................ 7 7 10 of how the That sums up King’s Faith. 4̀ Tyler Perry Presents man makes Though an admirable attempt to Peeples pg-13............................. money expose the plight of older children 5̀ 42* pg-13.......................................3 4 4 would be in foster care and the vital role 6̀ Oblivion* pg-13.......................... not4 6 5 rated wellfoster families play in their lives, 7̀ The Croods * pg........................ 1 3 1 placed. Raw the film fails to pull “Idea, Energy, 8̀ Mud* pg-13...................................3 5 5 vigor and Power” into the synchronous 9̀ The Big Wedding r................ 7 3 6 reigns. A tension of triune art. 10 Oz The Great ` and Powerful * pg...................2 4 2
King’s Faith
Box Office Top 10
*Reviewed by world
5/14/13 5:19 PM
Wuthering Heights: Ecosse Films • storeis: Roadside Attractions
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king’s faith: Faith Street Film Partners, LLC.
One of the biggest reasons for the movie’s missing note of cynicism is the shift in Nick Carraway. Inexplicably, Luhrmann begins with our narrator in a sanitarium, the events on West Egg apparently having driven him to a mental breakdown. There’s nothing in the book to suggest this, and as a result, Nick’s sharp observations on class and morality are rendered unreliable. This isn’t helped by a wide-eyed, naïve performance from Tobey Maguire that is utterly at odds with the clever, cautious everyman Fitzgerald created. Here, Nick doesn’t seem so much a friend to Gatsby as a disciple. But it is to Daisy’s character that Lurhmann’s overthe-top vision does the worst damage. As played by the lovely Carey Mulligan, she is so luminous, so innocent, so fragile and conflicted, Gatsby’s five-year obsession with her becomes completely warranted. Luhrmann makes so much of the affair the book tosses away with a few lines (nonexplicit scenes of Gatsby and Daisy in bed, along with Tom’s unseen but noisy dalliance with his mistress, account for the movie’s PG-13 rating), it’s as if he wants us to buy into the mirage as much as Gatsby does. Because of this, when the crucial moment of the story comes, it feels emotionally stunted and unrelated to anything that has passed. Daisy is revealed to be not a “careless” woman toying with an old flame’s affections—a woman who wants to back out when that flame threatens to intrude
DVD
Wuthering Heights by Alicia M. Cohn
king’s faith: Faith Street Film Partners, LLC.
Wuthering Heights: Ecosse Films • storeis: Roadside Attractions
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The most recent film version of Wuthering Heights strips the romance from Emily Brontë’s classic novel. If, as has often been depicted, the relationship of Heathcliff and Cathy is a love story, it is one that contradicts love’s definition in 1 Corinthians 13:4-7. Never has that been more clear than in the 2011 version recently released to DVD, though British director (and co-screenwriter) Andrea Arnold falls short explaining the forces behind it. Arnold’s version focuses on Heathcliff, casting him as the sole black character (the novel describes Heathcliff as a “dark-skinned gipsy” of indeterminate race). The racial difference has the effect of externalizing the obstacles between Heathcliff and Cathy and re-contextualizing the inequality that allows Cathy to escape an unhappy home while adopted child Heathcliff cannot. The movie crafts a brutal environment defined by a patriarch who observes the rituals of religion but not the spirit of Christianity. Mr. Earnshaw (Paul Hilton) forces “heathen” Heathcliff through a baptism. He also slaps and whips his children while telling them to ask for God’s forgiveness. The racial and religious subtext makes the first part of the movie thought-provoking, but dissipates once Heathcliff and Cathy grow up. Cathy, still a child, marries out of the family and Heathcliff runs away. When Heathcliff returns as a young man (terrific first-time actor James Howson), what seemed an understandable bond between two neglected children has inexplicably transformed into a sociopathic obsession that drives him to torture puppies and make out with a corpse. By contrast, Cathy (Kaya Scodelario) seems nearly blameless, making Heathcliff more unsympathetic. Arnold’s movie does not tell the book’s story of Cathy’s and Heathcliff’s children, and does not offer character redemption or lessons learned. The movie’s one success is the rich cinematic experience, achieved through extreme close-ups and minimal dialogue. The film is not rated, but beware male nudity (in profile), strong language, physical and verbal child abuse, graphic killing of farm animals, and the disturbing behavior described above.
See all our movie reviews at worldmag.com/movies
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DOCUMENTARY
Stories We Tell by Emily Belz
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“Who cares about our family?” asks the sister of actress/writer/director Sarah Polley, in Polley’s first documentary, Stories We Tell, currently in limited release. Who cares about any of our lives? Well, we all care about telling our stories—even the worst storytellers among us write status updates. Polley tries to understand this urge to find a narrative in our lives and to tell it. This particular story is about her mother Diane Polley’s adultery, Diane’s early death from cancer, and how her children and husband perceived what happened. It’s really not about Sarah Polley’s family, but a family. The ordinary nature of the Polley family’s dysfunction makes it poignant. Polley reveals in the trailer for the PG-13 film that she may be the result of her mother’s adultery. At one point Michael Polley, Diane’s husband, describes to Sarah how her mother considered aborting her. Diane’s doctor (who in the film describes himself as pro-life) encouraged her to keep the baby. Michael tells Sarah, in one of the film’s most emotional moments, “It’s amazing how close you were to never existing.” What Sarah candidly shows is a family very lost after her mother’s death and the subsequent revelation about her affair. All but one of the children, and even Michael, attempt to justify her unfaithfulness as “finding love.” The son who admits he felt disappointed in his mom is the only child who stayed married after learning of the affair— the three daughters all got divorces. As the title reveals, this is not a film about Sarah’s selfdiscovery but about storytelling. As the film opens we see a crew setting up for an interview with Sarah’s sister as she talks about how nervous she is. Sarah shows different family members contradicting each other on small details, or disagreeing with how the story should be told. One character tells Sarah, “The crucial function of art is to tell truth.” Though Sarah Polley seems unsure about any deeper truth behind her family’s story, she shows that she is a very good storyteller.
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Reviews > Books
Best in show?
Houghton Mifflin makes some good choices in its annual series but leaves out a lot BY MARVIN OLASKY
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W I in the third quarter of the th century, gatekeepers of all kinds called themselves objective, and for a time I believed them. Walter Cronkite ended his CBS newscast by saying, “And that’s the way it is.” The New York Times said it had “All the news that’s fit to print.” In high school I had big textbooks that informed me I would read within them World Literature, American History, or Biology. Halfway through the first quarter of the st century, such assumptions of objectivity are no longer fashionable, except among those who have items for sale that they hope to label “the best.” That’s why I decided to read much of Houghton Mifflin’s “the best” series. The annual volumes began in with The Best American Short Stories, expanded in with The Best American Essays, and grew fat from to by adding titles in Sports Writing, Mystery Stories, Science and Nature Writing, Travel Writing, Nonrequired Reading and Comics. Only two labels have failed to survive—The Best American Recipes and (aha) The Best American Spiritual Writing—so some customers still relish the idea that they’re buying “the best.” I’m skeptical. Some of “the best” essays were good—“Getting Schooled” taught the difficulty of public school teaching, “My Father/My Husband” showed the misery of Alzheimer’s, and “How Doctors Die” argued that physicians don’t want to spend their last days amid ventilators and tubes—but I’ve read ones just as good every week. Throughout the books, the almost-total absence of Christian perspectives was particularly striking. “The best” science and nature writing, of course, embodied evolutionary perspectives: “Scientists are currently debating whether we and octopuses evolved eyes separately or whether a common ancestor had the makings of the eye.” The volumes of sports writing and mysteries had the least propaganda. Nevertheless, here’s one recommendation: To read great sports writing, save your money and visit for free the SI Vault (sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault). There you’ll see some pieces by Thomas Lake, our interviewee on page .
WORLD • JUNE 1, 2013
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Christopher White’s Come Follow Me (Thomas Lowe, ) clearly shows how we are to become disciples and organize churches. White emphasizes the importance of decentralization and the problems of hierarchy: Pastors should be shepherds and servants, not lords and CEOs. Eric Metaxas’ Seven Men: And the Secret of Their Greatness (Thomas Nelson, ) vividly profiles seven men who professed faith in Christ and are worth following. Erwin Lutzer’s The Cross in the Shadow of the Crescent (Harvest House, ) shows how the best defense against Islam is a Church that resists moral compromise: Sadly, consumerism and a watering down of the gospel message are frequent. Craig Keener’s two-volume Miracles (Baker, ) takes us from New Testament accounts to miracle stories beyond antiquity and concludes that miracles then and now are indeed possible. Some writers have argued that the writing of the U.S. Constitution was semi-miraculous, but Gregg Frazer’s The Religious Beliefs of America’s Founders (University Press of Kansas, ) builds a case that it was a logical outcome of the “theistic rationalism”—a hybrid of natural religion, Protestantism, and reason—that animated the thinking of many Founders. William Voegeli’s Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State (Encounter, , ) shows how far we’ve moved from the Founders’ vision. Ron Benrey’s The Day God Flipped My Switch (Greenbrier, ) describes one writer’s breakthrough concerning the Trinity. It didn’t make sense to him until he realized that a literary trinity helped to explain the real one in a way he could understand: Benrey the Author sits at his computer. Benrey the Character is the protagonist of the story, traveling within the world the Author created. Benrey the Narrator animates the characters and orchestrates what Benrey the Author wants done. (As with all analogies to a reality beyond our earthly comprehension, if this helps you, run with it, and if it doesn’t, drop it.) —M.O.
Email: molasky@worldmag.com
5/14/13 5:30 PM
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NOTABLE BOOKS Recent Christian novels > reviewed by
Damascus Countdown Joel C. Rosenberg What if Israel launched a preemptive strike on Iran? Joel Rosenberg, in his eighth novel, approaches that scenario with his mix of fast action and debatable end-times interpretations. Damascus Countdown features The Twelfth Imam, a leader determined to unite Muslim countries into one Caliphate—and after Israel’s attack he still has two nuclear warheads and is bargaining with other countries for more. As the UN Security Council plays with a resolution condemning Israel for unprovoked and unwarranted acts of aggression, it’s the mission of David Shirazi, the CIA’s top man in Iran, to find and disable the warheads, stop the Imam, and save the world from cataclysmic disaster. Naturally, Shirazi also wants to make it home for a date with an old flame. Harvest of Rubies Tessa Afshar Sarah—cousin of the biblical prophet Nehemiah—is an outsider in Babylon, both to the larger Persian culture and her Jewish family and friends. After her mother dies in Sarah’s childhood, her father withdraws emotionally, leaving Sarah to be raised by an ill-suited aunt. When Sarah teaches herself to read, she earns her father’s respect as well as an opportunity to serve as Senior Scribe in the Babylonian king’s palace. When Sarah’s ingenuity earns her a husband she can’t refuse, the animosity she feels toward him reveals a hunger and emptiness that can only be healed through God’s grace. Author Tessa Afshar’s Iranian roots lend credibility to the setting and cultural context, and the storytelling is adequate. Though Mountains Fall Dale Cramer Say “Amish fiction,” and it’s unlikely that Mexican bandits, corrupt federales, devastating hurricanes, or Catholic revolutions come to mind—but in this series finale, the Amish community in Mexico faces all of these and more. Caleb Bender’s son has been killed, bandits are on the way to uproot them, and Miriam, Caleb’s oldest unmarried daughter, is ready to risk being banned from the community in order to marry a local farmhand. One pressure after another forces the Benders to rethink the difference between God’s laws (defined too simplistically as love) and those of their community. The familiar device of moving Amish characters from legalism to love remains intact here, but well-paced action, interesting character development, and a fresh setting bring the story to a mostly satisfying conclusion.
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Kai’Ro Returns Judah Ben As a minister to urban youth, author Judah Ben knew that a book like The Pilgrim’s Progress is too much of a stretch for urban kids. In this second book in a series, Ben continues his retelling of John Bunyan in simpler language, with former drug-dealer Kai’Ro returning to the City of Doom to spread the gospel: With remnants of sin in his heart, and a local drug-lord out to crush him, Kai’Ro will have to learn to trust his King even under severe persecution. His pregnant girlfriend, Evangeline, fleshes out urban challenges for young females, including the temptation of abortion. With dialect and metaphors lifted from the city streets, Ben—like the Christian rappers who’ve influenced him— illustrates how urban living may be captured for Christ. To see more book news and reviews, go to worldmag.com/books
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SPOTLIGHT When Amazon.com announced on March its purchase of Goodreads.com, the world’s largest web community for book reviews and recommendations, some pundits quickly cried “monopoly.” Some claimed Amazon’s ability to mine data about Goodreads’ million readers would cripple other online booksellers, including Barnes & Noble. Others expressed privacy concerns as well as fears that the site’s neutral space could be undermined by Kindle buttons and pay-for-review schemes. For its part, Goodreads assured its users that “Goodreads will continue to be the wonderful community we all cherish.” The March issue of Businessweek has more information about the sale. As publishing principalities duel, some books show how God continues to use His humble— often powerless—servants. A recent children’s picture book by the daughter of missionaries Jim and Elisabeth Elliot demonstrates that truth, detailing her time among the Auca Indians. Although occasionally overwritten, Pilipinto’s Happiness: The Jungle Childhood of Valerie Elliot (Vision Forum) conveys Elliot’s wonder at God’s creation and her thankfulness for His provision. –E.W.
Valerie Elliot Shepard as a child with her mother, Elisabeth Elliot
JUNE 1, 2013 • WORLD
5/14/13 5:34 PM
Reviews > Q&A
Providential perspective Homeschooler turned sportswriter Thomas Lake shares stories that are more than chance collections of circumstance By Marvin Olasky
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major effect on my development and helped me get the chance to become a better writer because all those hours weren’t spent passively watching television. Do you think you’re more introverted or extroverted? Definitely more introverted. I was a very shy kid growing up. I didn’t know if I’d be able to do this work because the foundation of reporting is being able to go knock on a stranger’s door and ask for their story. I’m still sometimes terrified when I have to do that, but the work has forced me to give it a try so it gets a little bit easier. For some reason a lot of journalists are shy, and doing this work helps them overcome that. You concentrated in journalism at Gordon College in Massachusetts— graduating in 2001— and then spent seven years mostly at small newspapers. In college, I worked at The Salem News, which had every day a little graphic of a little red witch riding a broom. Then Georgia, then back up to eastern Massachusetts, then down to Jacksonville, then Pasco County (Fla.), then back up to Atlanta. Your big break came in 2008 with the writing of your first Sports Illustrated story, “Two on Five.” As you
labored on that, what difference did your familiarity with the Bible make? I had written a draft of it already and shown it to my wife. She said, that’s not very good—a lot of times she likes what I do and this time it just wasn’t right. So one Saturday I locked myself in the spare bedroom and thought, how can I make this story feel the way it should feel? The story was about a moment of glory for two boys who had won a basketball game they had no business winning—miraculous, but that glory was fleeting and it just faded away. I thought, how can I give that feeling to this story? I remembered my favorite chapter from the Bible, Ecclesiastes 12. I opened to that chapter, read it over and over again, finally got the inspiration that I needed, and wrote the first sentence of the story, which was probably one of the best I’d ever done. (The first sentence: “If you could unbreak the bones and erase the scars, recall the bullets and sever the chains, recap the bottles and catch all the smoke, if you could swim 16 years up the river of time and find a town called Stevenson, you just might see something glorious.”) At Sports Illustrated you often come up with your
own story ideas—do you gravitate toward particular kinds of stories because of your worldview? It does seem that I go after stories where people do something heroic at a certain cost to themselves. That element comes up again and again, often when I’m not even looking for it. Tell us about your tornado story. About four years ago a tornado came through downtown Atlanta, Ga., right as the SEC basketball tournament was being played. A college basketball game was going on, Alabama against Mississippi State, and Mississippi State was winning. Alabama had the ball and a chance to tie the game. The team’s best shooter, Mykal Riley, took the shot from about 28 feet: He throws it up, it hits the rim, bounces around, hits the backboard, goes in right at the buzzer, and ties the game. Sends it into overtime. Eight minutes later, when the tornado came roaring past the Georgia Dome, thousands of people who would have been walking outside in the path of the tornado were instead safely inside the dome. It literally was a shot that saved people’s lives. And as you dug into the story ... It was even more
Robin Nelson/Genesis Photos
Thomas Lake is a Sports Illustrated senior writer. A recent Gospel Coalition article on him began, “It may surprise you to learn the finest young sportswriter—perhaps the finest young writer period—in America is a Christian.” Your mom and your dad, a pastor, homeschooled you and your five siblings—how did that prepare you for your job as a writer? It was pretty free-form. A lot of going to the library—the whole pack of us in the station wagon— and we would check out 40 or 50 books at a time and sit around reading them. We had lesson plans for learning math and all that, but a lot of it was pursuing our intellectual curiosity, and that’s what I get paid to do: Think of something I’m curious about, and go find out the rest of the story. It’s a privilege to be able to do that. You had no television until age 14, which today would be considered cruel and unusual punishment prohibited by the Constitution. We thought it was [laughter], but it wasn’t up to us. I think about that now and am grateful for it. Time that would have been spent watching TV we spent playing outside or reading. That had a
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Robin Nelson/Genesis Photos
amazing than that. It turned out that Mykal Riley learned to shoot on a special basketball court that his grandmother had installed with overhead lighting in her backyard. The only reason she was able to afford to install that court is because of a life insurance payout she had received when a crazy man something like 15 years earlier had shot to death her daughter along with three other people. It was hard to know what to make of the whole thing, but the bottom
Email: molasky@worldmag.com
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line was that this very, very bad thing had started a chain of events over 15 years ago that led to something wonderful happening. The challenge was to piece it all together, to find that cause and effect from A to Z. Most reporters looking at this would see a chance collection of circumstances. Did you think about this in terms of Providence? It made it easier that Mykal Riley and his parents certainly looked at it that way, and Riley
would pray as he was taking every shot. There could be a danger sometimes in imposing a certain sensibility on a story when the facts don’t call for it, but in this case it all fit together because the main characters all believed this is how it went. And you took those beliefs seriously. Another reporter would think that Riley and his parents were talking nonsense, and he might go in an entirely d ifferent direction. It’s true.
There’s a lot of talk about being unbiased, being objective, not letting your own preconceptions get in the way of the story. But that’s impossible. Each of us has a way we see the world and a lens through which we view things, so we’re all going to bring a different perspective to the story. A —Some of Lake’s articles are available free at sportsillustrated. cnn.com/vault. To read the tornado story, go to sportsillustrated.cnn. com/vault/article/magazine/ MAG1153064/index.htm
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Lonely legend
‘The Possum’ lived and died with the choices he made BY ARSENIO ORTEZA
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WILLIE GOES ON
Willie Nelson was born just one year and two weeks after George Jones, but he sounds no closer to calling it quits on his latest album, Let’s Face the Music and Dance (Sony Legacy), than he has at any point in his prolific, varied, and storied career. In some ways, Let’s Face the Music, which includes two Irving Berlin songs and one by Frank Loesser, is typical Nelson. He has, after all, been branding songs from the Great American Songbook with his uniquely laid-back Texas imprint and growing ever more adept at echoing his uniquely brittle voice with his similarly brittle guitar since ’s quintuple-platinum Stardust. But by calmly stirring tunes by Django Reinhardt, the Platters, and Carl Perkins into his new album’s mix, he also reminds his fans that there’s no such thing as “typical Nelson.” —A.O.
WORLD • JUNE 1, 2013
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JONES: RICK DIAMOND/WIREIMAGE/GETTY IMAGES • SEPULVADO & JONES: TOBY CANHAM/GETTY IMAGES
H included “No-Show Jones” because of his penchant for missing concerts in the s and “The Possum” because of his deep-set eyes. But “the Greatest Country Singer Ever” is the nickname that will most likely stick. No sooner had George Jones passed from “living legend” to just plain legend on April at the age of than accolades began flooding in. “He was without question and by far the best!” said Barbara Mandrell. “What a great voice,” echoed Ray Stevens, “and a great friend.” “We have lost another piece of history,” summarized Hank Williams, Jr. “He will be missed by many.” It’s unlikely, however, that anyone will miss him more than Charlie Daniels. “[His] voice was a rowdy Saturday night uproar at a back-street beer joint,” Daniels eulogized at Jones’ funeral, “the heartbroken wail of the one who wakes up to find
the other side of the bed empty, the far-off lonesome whistle of the midnight train, the look in the eyes of a young bride as that ring is placed on her finger, the memories of a half-asleep old man dreaming about the good old days. “George,” Daniels concluded, “had a song for everybody.” The numbers alone back Daniels up. From “Why Baby Why” in to “One Woman Man” in , Jones scored over top- country hits, nine of which reached No. . At least three of those—“She Thinks I Still Care,” “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” and “The Grand Tour”— attained instant-classic status. He recorded top-selling duet albums with Melba Montgomery, Gene Pitney, Tammy Wynette (his third wife), and Merle Haggard. He even sang hymns and spiritual songs. Country Church Time appeared in , followed by Homecoming in Heaven (), Old Brush Arbors (), We Love to Sing About Jesus (with Wynette, ), and In a Gospel Way (). Jones’ decades of alcoholism and drug addiction and his autobiography, in which he attributed his eventual sobriety solely to his fourth and final wife, Nancy Sepulvado, suggest he may never have fully internalized the faith about which he sang. But one would be hard pressed to tell from Jones’ gospel recordings themselves. “Were you ever in the valley where the way is dark and dim?” he intoned on the Passion Play-worthy “Cup of Loneliness,” a song he co-composed. “Did you ever drink the cup of loneliness with him?” With or without Him, Jones poured himself many cups of loneliness. And in , he was admitting as Sepulvado and Jones much. “By an early age, I found / I liked drinking,” he sang on his last solo country top- hit “Choices.” “Now I’m living and dying with the choices I made.” As always, he sounded both entirely convincing and entirely convinced.
Email: aorteza@worldmag.com
5/14/13 5:41 PM
GILLES PETARD/REDFERNS
Reviews > Music
NOTABLE CDs
New or recent releases > reviewed by
Chelsea Light Moving Chelsea Light Moving When Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon announced the dissolution of their -year marriage in , a pillar of the utopian-punk counter culture that they’d represented collapsed. This album, Moore’s first since then, is what that collapse sounded like. Abrasive, occasionally vulgar, and semi-coherent at worst, it’s enough to give acolytes of such stuff pause. Perhaps not coincidentally, the song called “Burroughs” is about William S., whose infamous shooting of his wife may or may not have been an accident.
Fiction Family Reunion Fiction Family Not counting “Guilt,” an indictment of TV evangelistdriven scrupulosity that feels—and is—dated, the apparently tossed-off simplicity of this second installment in the collaboration of Switchfoot’s Jon Foreman and Nickel Creek’s Sean Watkins belies depths worth plumbing. The insolubility of the sacramental love celebrated in “Up Against the Wall” evokes reality at its most intimate. And the capacity of the hooky refrain that goes “You can have Los Angeles / Just give me back my girl” to resonate with the Californication generation should not be underestimated.
Minute by Minute The James Hunter Six
Love Has Come For You
GILLES PETARD/REDFERNS
JONES: RICK DIAMOND/WIREIMAGE/GETTY IMAGES • SEPULVADO & JONES: TOBY CANHAM/GETTY IMAGES
Had this -year-old blue-eyed-soul (and all-otherthings-R&B) singer been born one generation before he was, he might now enjoy an acclaim commensurate to that enjoyed by Van Morrison, whose inclusion of Hunter as guest vocalist on one of his mid-’s albums and tours speaks volumes. Too bad that, unlike Morrison’s at a similar age, Hunter’s voice has begun fraying around the edges, thus doing a disservice to the vintage sounds for which he otherwise still has an obvious affinity.
Steve Martin & Edie Brickell Brickell is Mrs. Paul Simon and the former New Bohemian whose one hit turns this year. Martin is the comedian-actor-author whose one hit turned years ago. And neither of their pasts matters a whit on this striking collection of Brickell-Martin compositions for banjo and dulcet alto voice. Let’s just say that Alison Krauss and Union Station have competition—and that the only shame is that “When You Get to Asheville” doesn’t include “Say ‘Hi’ to WORLD” on its to-do list.
To see more music news and reviews, go to worldmag.com/music
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SPOTLIGHT Because of his rendition of “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart,” Al Green usually gets credited with discovering the soul potential of Bee Gees ballads. But Jerry Williams—a.k.a. Swamp Dogg—actually discovered it first when he wrapped his voice around “I’ve Gotta Get a Message to You” on his album, Rat On!, which along with two other early-Swamp Dogg longplayers, Total Destruction to Your Mind (), and Gag a Maggot (), has just been reissued by Alive Records. Part of what has made Williams an underground legend is his capacity for explosively soulful unpredictability. Part big-voiced belter, part Fred Sanford, he exemplifies what “diversity” meant (or at least sounded like) before it became a humorless, oxymoronic talisman of the left. And although not every Swamp Dogg out-of-thebox lyric qualifies as wisdom (Williams wouldn’t inveigh against “killing babies in the womb” until ), his “total destruction to” the box itself just might.
JUNE 1, 2013 • WORLD
5/14/13 5:40 PM
Mindy Belz
Wedding bills Finding the meaning in matrimony, and other forms of commerce
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Thankfully, Christians living in a vibrant community have ways out because fellow believers are ready to help. My church has a kind of lending library for weddings—down to tablecloths, vases, and candle holders—and keeps an active list of church members who are ready to assist, from baking to serving to carting things. But bringing the meaning back is about more than cutting costs. It’s about being “the makers of manners,” as Shakespeare would say. That means we can let go of things for pure show and instead serve those who surround the bride and groom on their wedding day, reflecting for a wider world not only a happy marriage but a happy community too. And that’s about investing not only in the wedding day but also in the process of getting there, and making it all good. I started asking people who’ve known my children, and a few who just know me, to help with things I know they enjoy doing (and are good at). This was the universal response: “I’d be honored to do that.” To ask and to receive is humbling. But freeing. It opens the door to a wider conversation about the state of American commerce, and its heart-silencing, independent (and expensive) tendencies. Successful early American enterprises, led by John Winthrop and other Puritans, insisted on careful planning and, for that time, a flagrant disregard of social classes. They depended habits of thrift, hard work, and interdependence. Cotton Mather, the Puritan pastor, would later complain that the work ethic of the Puritans “begat prosperity and the daughter devoured the mother.” It worked so well we could forsake first principles and rest in our riches. Weddings, and other occasions, are a great time to return to first principles, then enjoy the riches. A
KRIEG BARRIE
I’ about commerce these days because our family is engaged in more than its reasonable share of it. Among my children are two weddings this year. You may congratulate me, because it’s some of the best news to arise in any family, and our hearts are glad. But it’s also true that we live in a culture that silences our hearts, as my pastor said recently. Even in this happiest season, a time to celebrate love. Many things we take “to heart” are actually passions of the flesh—and that’s why Peter warns us “as sojourners and exiles” to abstain from those passions because they “wage war against your soul” ( Peter :). Through months of planning and anticipation I’ve had more encounters with “passions of the flesh” posing as must-haves, and with forces in our culture ready to silence my heart and numb my soul to the deeper, lasting joy of these sublime occasions. To put it another way, the to-do list reigns, the budgetbusters rule, and the meaning of marriage gets lost. Wedding commerce has made a booming secular market of what once was a church-centered event and, in many Christian communities, a sacred rite. The Knot, Pinterest, and Martha Stewart—not to mention we who know better—can turn weddings into commercial fetes and drain them of their purpose: To seal before God and men that “profound mystery” (Ephesians :) when a man leaves his father and mother to be united to his wife, and the two become one flesh. In the United States today’s betrothed couple or their family, according to one extensive survey, will spend on average , for their wedding (honeymoon not included). That’s what my parents spent on their first family home. For many newlyweds that signifies another concrete slab-sized debt layered onto a matching pair of college loans, a car loan or two, and a mortgage. After an immersion in this alternate universe— venue and vendor shopping, rental this and that, guest lists and per guest pricing—I was not only in sticker shock but weary of the meaninglessness and impersonality of it all. It’s not for nothing that Steve Martin in Father of the Bride lost it in the grocery store over hot dog buns and yelled: “George Banks is saying NO!”
Email: mbelz@worldmag.com
5/14/13 5:55 PM
The American Revolution Taught by Professor Allen C. Guelzo
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5/14/13 5:55 PM
Turning Syria
INSIDE
OUT With foreign fighters invading the rebellion, millions of Syrians fleeing civil war, and a brutal president determined to hang on, good guys and workable solutions are disappearing in a country no longer itself
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by mindy belz
p h o t o b y D I M I TA R D I L KO F F/A F P/G e t t y I mag e s
n northeast Syria the grass rises high, lush, and vivid green as spring turns to summer. The fertile valley of Hasaka province, nursed by the Khabur River and wedged between borders with Turkey and Iraq, grows most of Syria’s wheat, rice, vegetables, and even cotton. Neighbors are so close, and both borders so historically fraught, they hover like unwelcome shadows. But this is northern Mesopotamia, once a stronghold of churches and Christian centers of learning among the oldest anywhere. From here came the oldest Syriac liturgies still in use. From here went the earliest missionaries, carrying Christianity to central Asia, India, and China. Hasaka province is also home to some of the oldest cities in the world—marked now by excavations of vast tells with names in Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus. Christians preceded the
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NEW NORM: A man walks amid destruction in the northern city of Aleppo on April 10.
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i Two Saudi-backed groups under variations of the name Jabhat al-Tahrir al-Souriya al-Islamiya mount a force estimated at 40,000. i A third group of about 15,000 named Ahfad al-Rasoul is supported by Qatar. i Perhaps the most dangerous, the al-Nusra Front, draws support from alQaeda in Iraq and has been designated by the U.S. State Department a foreign terrorist organization (meaning it’s capable of exporting terror to Western targets). These aim to put in place an Islamic jihadist state following an anticipated overthrow of Assad. As bloody battles and Islamic stridency unfold in the northeastern cities of Hasaka, Christian churches and homes are targets. In the town of Ras
B
assam Ishak is well versed in what it’s like in Hasaka to run out of options. When he was 11 years old the government confiscated all the land owned by his Syriac Christian family— over 1,200 acres in Hasaka province. Overnight his father lost his business and all his possessions: “We had to move to a new town, change our home and schools, and borrow money to survive.” Now 52, Ishak remembers taunts and threats to his family from the newly ruling Ba’ath Party. For 22 years his father Said Ishak was a member of Parliament, widely known as a devout Christian and as an opponent of the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party—even
Benjamin Hiller/Corbis
Arabs, Turkmen, and Kurds in the province, and for centuries the groups have lived alongside one another. More recently, starting in the 1950s, discoveries of petroleum reserves made Hasaka strategically important, home to Syria’s small but lucrative oil industry. Resource-rich and demographically diverse, Hasaka this year has become a pivotal battleground in Syria’s two-year-old civil war. Rebels since February have taken over significant portions of the province—including oilfields essential to the survival of the regime led by President Bashar al-Assad. As they’ve done so they are demonstrating the problems for the United States in funding the opponents of Assad: Just which ones? Armed fighters who began in 2011 as the Free Syrian Army have fractured into dozens of militant groups. They include the Farouq Brigades, a jihadist group of defectors from the Syrian Army that emerged from the historically Christian city of Homs early in the fighting. And jihadist forces from outside Syria have grown:
Ras al-Ayn
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TOP: BULENT KILIC/AFP/Getty Images • BOTTOM: Raad Adayleh/AP
MOST DANGEROUS: Three men from the radical Islamist group al-Nusra in one of their headquarters in Syria.
al-Ayn fighters burned homes and destroyed churches in March. Al-Nusra set up Sharia councils to carry out extremist Islamic laws. Christian families now regularly receive threat letters warning them to leave or be killed. The result: Religious cleansing that threatens to empty longstanding Christian villages. Hasaka church officials say the province had at least 300,000 Christians less than a year ago and now has less than 180,000. Hasaka province, then, is a snapshot of the vicious devolution of what began in 2011 as one of the more peaceful and organized “Arab Spring” uprisings. It also illustrates the complex questions facing U.S. and other Western leaders under increasing pressure to do something to diffuse the chaotic fighting that has displaced an estimated 5 million Syrians—nearly a quarter of the population—according to the latest UN figures. It’s increasingly difficult to determine who—if anyone—deserves Western support. Yet Western intervention to many seems inevitable, with over 70,000 killed, mostly civilians, and threats growing of loosed chemical weapons and a wider war in the Middle East. Like Hasaka province itself, the prospects of a future under either Islamist rebels or the government with its cruel authoritarianism hem in Syrians from both sides.
Benjamin Hiller/Corbis
TOP: BULENT KILIC/AFP/Getty Images • BOTTOM: Raad Adayleh/AP
DISPLACED: Syrians flee after Syrian aircraft bombed the strategic border town of Ras al-Ayn in November.
before it seized power in 1963 and Hafez al-Assad took charge in 1970. The father of the current president began nationalizing property, targeting and imprisoning political opponents. The family survived for a time in Damascus but emigrated to the United States in 1981. “In Syria if you choose opposition you either go to jail or you leave the country,” Ishak told me. In America Ishak worked as a civil engineer. He and his wife had three children and became active in the Washington, D.C.–area Church of the Apostles, an evangelical Anglican congregation. But the desire to see a pluralistic democracy in Syria ran deep: When Hafez alAssad died and his son Bashar became president in 2000, Ishak sensed an opportunity for a new era. He returned to Damascus, opened a
Christian bookstore on Straight Street in Damascus’ Old City (and later one in Hasaka) and became an outspoken advocate for minority rights and greater freedom. He became director of the Syrian Human Rights Organization and joined the Syriac Unity Party, formed largely to protect the rights (and land) of the country’s ancient Christian population. At the time observers viewed the younger Assad, then 34, as mild- mannered, studious, and open to reform. Few realized the young president— groomed for over six years by his father—would prove as ruthless a dictator. Already, the Assad regime in 2000 was the longest-lasting in the post-World War II Middle East. Hafez al-Assad survived by crushing opponents and
holding fast to an alliance with the Soviet Union. But his was a secular regime that involved minorities and came down hard on Muslim extremists. A 1983 massacre by Assad’s army of Sunnis in the city of Hama left an estimated 25,000 dead, mostly civilians. Intentionally, Assad left behind crushed buildings and bodies buried under layers of concrete—along with thousands of homeless—to remind the rest of the country of the destruction destined for anyone he considered opponents. The Assad creed: “Fight a hundred wars, demolish a million strongholds, and sacrifice a million martyrs” to consolidate power.
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hirty years later that creed is playing itself out in an unrelenting civil war. It began with a brutal crackdown on street demonstrations in early 2011, with Assad forces using teargas and firing on demonstrators from helicopter gunships. By July the Free Syrian Army formed under
Ishak J u n e 1 , 2 0 1 3 • W O R L D
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THE OTHER SIDE
TARGET: The Armenian St. George Church in Aleppo after it was burned during fighting between rebel fighters and Syrian government forces last October.
defected Assad commanders, and by August the leading political opposition met in Turkey to form the Syrian National Council (SNC). Bassam Ishak was one of the SNC founders. He now admits to naïvely advocating a negotiated transition to democracy—but learned Assad “has no real political tools … only force.” Ishak lived under surveillance and a travel ban, along with several hundred human rights activists, for five years. State security suddenly lifted the ban in under so-called “reforms” in the early days of the uprising. But then Ishak received threatening phone calls, essentially ordering him to leave the country. Did you fear for your life? I asked. “No, I feared for my freedom,” Ishak said. He fled Damascus in September , traveling only with a briefcase containing his laptop, and leaving behind his family. He lives in a neighboring country he does not want disclosed and “travels around a lot,” he told me. An insider to a civil war overtaken by outsiders, Ishak has a growing concern over Islamist groups in Syria. During early Assad years, he said, under the name of land reform many Christians lost their land to Muslims. Today, he said, “the revolution is treating us no better as gangs targeting Christians with kidnappings and ransoms have forced the Christians to run out of the country.” Still a member of the SNC, he is reluctant to support its umbrella group formed last year (with tacit U.S. support) called the Syrian National Coalition. It represents all opposition groups and has won recognition as the legitimate power in Syria from the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and others. “They are not home to us,” Ishak said. The Coalition seeks to marginalize Syria’s Christians (who number more than . million), he believes, and “doesn’t have legitimacy with Syrian people but with countries outside.” Six months ago Ishak became president of the Syriac National Council, a new organization representing
ARCHBISHOPS: SANA • CHURCH: STRINGER/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Not all Syrian Christians believe, as Bassam Ishak does, in engaging the political process to oppose President Bashar al-Assad. Behind the brutality of Assad’s regime and his father Hafez, Christians found a level of freedom and protection. Assad himself is a minority, an Alawite, and has cracked down on Islamic extremists who persecute Christians elsewhere in the Middle East. Many Christians also don’t believe loyal Syrians in the opposition who want democracy can prevail against outside jihadist factions. “Politically the rebels and regime opponents want good for average Syrians,” said one Christian in Aleppo, not named for security reasons. “Practically and logically, if you want something good for your family or relatives, you should first show it and practice it, not come with guns and rockets to say that you love me and are interested for my good life and future.” Christians stand to suffer inordinately among Syria’s many ethnic and religious groups, with untallied deaths and displacements of up to half the population in Hasaka province and elsewhere, and particularly in Aleppo, Syria’s largest city. Many Christian leaders have been kidnapped, mostly by rebels, and a leading Greek Orthodox priest was killed outside Damascus (while Yazigi trying to secure the release of a kidnap victim). In April two leading clergymen in Aleppo–Greek Orthodox archbishop Boulos Yazigi and Syrian Orthodox archbishop Yohanna Ibrahim—were kidnapped and are still believed held by rebels. They were on a mission to gain the release of other Christians also captured by rebela. Christians find themselves “in a very unique and frightening” situation, Ibrahim said Aidan Clay, Middle East analyst for International Christian Concern, when they don’t openly support either rebel groups or the Assad regime. “While many Christians have publicly denounced the brutality of President Assad and by no means support the regime, most Christians see little hope in an alternative government which, they fear, will be led by Islamists,” Clay said. In Aleppo—with nearly a quarter of its population Christian—rebel forces have particularly targeted Christian enclaves. Those areas for months have been without electricity, telephone and other services. Hospitals mostly run by Christians in the city have been shelled. Regular mortar fire continued into May—damaging Christian homes, killing dozens, including Christians who came to Aleppo after losing their homes to rebels fighting in surrounding villages. Despite the dangers, Christians in cities, including Aleppo, Damascus, and in Hasaka, gathered on May for a special day of prayer. Turnout was significant, despite thunderstorms and rocket fire that preceded the services—and for the first time brought together believers across many denominations. “I am not sure how long those ‘good guys’ [opposition groups] will keep dealing with the American regime. I am sure one day the Lord will hear our voices and prayers,” said the Aleppo resident. —M.B.
WORLD • JUNE 1, 2013
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5/14/13 10:47 PM
JM LOPEZ/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Many Christians prefer Assad-led stability to rebel chaos
SURVIVING: Syrian couple Michael Oberi, 53, and Sarbi Magarian, 51, sit in their room in a Christian retirement home in Aleppo. They have no electricity or telephone lines, and little idea of what’s happening in the outside world.
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ARCHBISHOPS: SANA • CHURCH: STRINGER/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Christians in Syria and among the diaspora in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere: “We want a new Syria that’s tolerant of pluralism, based on rule of law, with all identities respected equally. And we want the historic land of Christianity to keep its land.”
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S N Council represents a break by minorities from the jihadist-leading Coalition. Its members are seeking recognition of their own. In April Ishak and other Council leaders met in Washington with lawmakers and officials at the State Department. Now that the U.S. government has committed to humanitarian aid to rebel groups, the
Syriacs are requesting aid for Syriac Christians along with a security force and provision for Christian medical facilities and charities. At the same time, the Syriac group opposes special asylum status for Syrian Christians to take refuge in the United States or elsewhere. Ishak believes the push to allow Christians to leave Syria is part of the Islamist groups’ religious cleansing agenda. “Our ancestors have lived there for thousands of years. This is a new form of invasion to us,” he said. Granting a higher profile to Christian and other minority groups, the United States could find common ground with an otherwise foe on Syria: Russia. Russian Orthodox Church leaders are pressing Moscow to do more to support Syria’s Christians, according to Lauren Homer, who heads an international law firm in Washington with extensive work on religious liberty cases in Russia and the Middle East.
Agreement on protecting minorities can be the start of a political solution, said Homer, and U.S. officials indicated it was a point of discussion in Secretary of State John Kerry’s May visit to Moscow. For now, a negotiated political solution is opposed by many in Congress and by analysts who call for a “military transition government.” But any military solution, or military aid, is likely to involve Saudi-backed and other jihadist groups. “We made huge strategic mistakes by allowing Islamist groups to be set up in Iraq and Afghanistan,” said Homer. “If that happens in Syria it will become an Islamic state. Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel will have myriad new problems, if they can continue to exist.” And Syria’s Christians, and their heritage, also will be threatened with extinction. A For more information about Syria’s humanitarian crisis and the aid groups helping, go to worldmag.com
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How Washington is pushing Islamic propaganda into local communities. Where’s the ACLU when we need it? by M A RV I N OL A S K Y
STACKING LIBRARY SHELVES A, like schools, have a long tradition of local control. In Minnesota librarian Barbara Fisher told Library Journal readers how she chose books: “I know my community, and I know what their interests are.” Wisconsin librarian Abigail Goben wrote about choosing books based on reviews, patron requests, and librarian blogs: “We’re a chatty bunch and love recommending things to each other.” The National Endowment for the Humanities has a different process. Earlier this year NEH, as part of a “Muslim Journeys” project, shipped to local libraries and humanities groups books chosen by five “national project scholars” known for their positive appraisals of Islam. We’ll go book-by-book through some of the choices, but four critics of Islam who reviewed for WORLD the -book collection all said it was one-sided. Alvin Schmidt, author of The Great Divide, said the selection “conveys the message that Islam is a peaceful religion,” which is “the biggest, unmitigated lie in circulation today.” Andrew Bostom, author of Sharia versus Freedom, said the books “whitewash” Islam and “amount to ‘dawa’—Islamic proselytization.” Jihad Watch director Robert Spencer said, “This is an egregiously propagandistic selection of books, designed not to give readers a balanced view of jihad, but solely a positive one.”
NEH’s five scholars—Giancarlo Casale, Frederick Denny, Leila Golestaneh Austin, Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, and Deborah Amos— made the final selection of the books. GhaneaBassiri told WORLD, “The purpose of this project is to give everyone who wishes to engage in dialogue about the issues it raises an opportunity to do so.” But Spencer sees a different desire at work: “All the scholars are disposed to obscure the links between Islam and terrorism.” A different breed of scholar, Daniel Pipes, may be in the best position to critique NEH’s campaign because he has the kind of academic pedigree— Harvard Ph.D., years of study in Egypt, knowledge of Arabic and other languages, teaching at the University of Chicago and Harvard, and service on the board of the United States Institute of Peace—that NEH relishes. But his and their purposes are different, Pipes told me: “Where I try to help readers understand ... how Islamism came to be
the main vehicle of barbarism in the world today, NEH would rather shield the reader’s eyes and pretend this unpleasantness is not happening.” Adam Francisco, another scholar with a prestigious doctorate—from Oxford University, where he studied Islam—was also struck by “the pretty weak selection of books. There’s not a critical scholarly one among them, and certainly not one that has anything negative to say about Islam.” Francisco also noted the adulation of Islam’s founder, with “the absence of any discussion of the violence (execution of - Jewish men, the early jihads, etc.) and sexual impropriety (his / year old wife, illicit intercourse, etc.) associated with Muhammad.” Of course, if the five critics I contacted had emphasized all their favorite books, libraries might also have received an unbalanced list—but why didn’t the selection committee include a mix of perspectives? Why not a balanced group of books that would not whitewash Muslim opposition to religious liberty (one new poll shows percent of Egyptian Muslims favoring the death penalty for those who leave Islam) and denigration of women? The books cost approximately retail, making the total cost , plus shipping and handling. Some of the libraries/humanities councils will typically receive , each to create local programs centered around a lecture on Islam, so there’s another ,. Throw in three
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videos sent to all the libraries along with the usual bureaucratic costs, and we’re still not talking big bucks: Since two foundations contributed, the cost to taxpayers is only about ,. But when readers want to learn about Islam at their local libraries, they’re likely to get only one side of the story— and for Muslim proselytizers, that’s priceless.
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ONE SIDE OF THE STORY: Christopher A. Bean, director of Shenandoah University libraries, with books from the “Muslim Journeys” project at the school’s library.
was standard NEH—see which scholars are highly regarded by other scholars— and asserted that the books’ emphasis is more cultural than political. Asked why the booklist didn’t include a work by the leading U.S. scholar of Islam over the past half-century, Bernard Lewis, she said his works are already “very widely available.” That’s half-true: A check of public libraries chosen at random from the NEH’s list of Muslim Journeys recipients showed half of them with Lewis’s most accessible look at Islam, What Went Wrong?, and half without. Caldera also said the NEH, rather than ignoring Lewis, had given him its highest award, a Jefferson Lectureship. True, but that was in during the Reagan-Bush years. Caldera also pointed to one of the books, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, as a work critical of Islamic fundamentalism, and she’s right: It’s an excellent graphic novel that I’ll also discuss at worldmag.com.
BEAN: RICH COOLEY/THE NORTHERN VIRGINIA DAILY • MATTSON: M. SPENCER GREEN/AP
’ at some of the books. (I’ve read most of the , either while teaching about Islam at The University of Texas or more recently, and Alvin Schmidt—who has a Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska and is a retired Illinois College professor—has read those I haven’t, so these annotations are from both of us, and others as quoted.) The Story of the Qur’an by Ingrid Mattson, former president of the Islamic Society of North America (which Robert Spencer calls “a Hamas-linked Muslim Brotherhood front group”), is a propagandistic account of how Islam’s sacred scripture came into being. Mattson refers very briefly to a counter-theory developed by John Wansbrough and other scholars, but readers would not know that the origins of the Quran are highly in dispute. Muhammad: A Very Short Introduction: Jonathan A.C. Brown, in Adam Francisco’s words, “accepts unquestioningly some of the most spurious sources as matter of fact. Why? Because this is what the Muslim tradition demands.” Brown does not even mention Ibn Warraq’s The Quest for the Historical Muhammad, which shows that the real Muhammad was probably nothing like the character depicted in the orthodox Muslim story. The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in
Medieval Spain: Maria Rosa Menocal writes about “peaceful Islam” and ignores the centuries of persecution Christians and Jews experienced while Muslims ruled and dominated Spain. Dario Fernandez-Morera summarizes the real history in “The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise” in The Intercollegiate Review, Fall, . The House of Wisdom: Jim Al-Khalili argues that Islamic discoveries in science led to Europe’s cultural awakening. Hmm: Muslim scientific discoveries pertained mostly to mechanical devices rather than experimental science. Renowned scholar Bernard Lewis is a better source of information on Islam and science. Minaret: The NEH website accurately notes that “Leila Aboulela [is] challenging the perception that Islam is oppressive toward women and incompatible with a Western lifestyle. In their novels, the central female characters find empowerment through their Islamic faith.” Given the dismal facts, another word for Abouela’s attempt: propaganda. A Quiet Revolution: The NEH website accurately notes that Leila Ahmed’s defense of women’s veil-wearing represents “a ‘complete reversal’ of her expectation to find that the resurgence of the veil meant a step backward in Muslim women’s pursuit of gender equity.” I could go on book by book, but the critiques would be repetitive: You’ll find more descriptions online in a “Muslim Journeys” tab at worldmag. com. Why so one-sided? Eva Caldera, NEH’s assistant chairman for Partnerships and Strategic Initiatives, told WORLD’s Whitten, “There are many negative views in the United States around Muslims and Islam, and I don’t know that those negative views are necessarily based on a lot of information. … What these books offer is some additional sources of information.” Caldera said the process of choosing “national scholars” for the Muslim Journeys project
Ingrid Mattson, author of The Story of the Qur’an
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without recommendation is easy—so what are good ways to respond to the NEH’s pro-Islam slant? One member of Congress, Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C.), who learned that Craven Community College in his district was one of the bookshelf recipients, said, “It is appalling to me that a federal agency like NEH is wasting money on programs like this.” He asked the college to add books about Christianity. Neither reporters nor other members of Congress backed up Jones, and the story died. But evening the score with books on Christianity wouldn’t give readers better insights into Islam: Local libraries would still offer only one side of the story. I’d suggest supplementing the Muslim Journeys books with some that give another side. A starting point is Lewis’s What Went Wrong?, which shows how Islam’s multi-century Middle East decline came because Muslim leaders, instead of allowing individuals to think for themselves, set up obstacles to freedom, economic
development, and scientific initiative. Other books by Lewis, including The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last , Years, are also valuable. It’s strange that the NEH, looking for great works of Muslim literature, did not include Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Palace Walk, the first of Mahfouz’s Cairo trilogy, shows life, especially for women, under Quranic social authority. Mahfouz opposed Islamists and contended (through a character in one of his novels) that “they wish to drag us back centuries.” Islamists retaliated in by knifing Mahfouz in the neck: He recovered, but his right arm was paralyzed until his death in . The work of Egypt-born British historian Bat Ye’or is also crucial: Either The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians under Islam or Islam and Dhimmitude (both published by the Fairleigh Dickinson University Press) would introduce readers to a key Muslim concept. From Muhammad’s time to the present, dhimmis were and are conquered people who have to pay extra taxes and put up with enormous scorn and abuse in return for not being murdered. Overall, these scholarly books show that “human rights” is a meaningless term within Islam. Readers who want a shorter book could turn to The Myth of Islamic Tolerance: How Islamic Law Treats Non-Muslims, edited by Robert Spencer. (Emily Whitten asked one of the national scholars, Giancarlo Casale, the NEH’s expert on the “connected histories” of Muslims and non-Muslims, to comment on Bat Ye’or’s work on dhimmitude. Casale said, “I am not very familiar with the writings of Bat Ye’or.... It is a status that is in some ways troubling to modern notions of tolerance and equality, because it involved systematic legal discrimination against non-Muslims. On the other hand, it also provided a legal framework to protect the lives and livelihoods of non-Muslims under Muslim rule on a permanent basis.” )
To provide an alternative view to Mattson and Brown’s apologetic for the Quran and Muhammad, one of Ibn Warraq’s books—The Origins of the Koran, Which Koran?, or The Quest for the Historical Muhammad—should have been on the NEH’s reading list. Those looking for background on the idea that the Quran emerged long after Muhammad’s death could go to John Wansbrough’s Quranic Studies, or (for an easier read) Robert Spencer’s Did Muhammad Exist? (Of course, it would have taken an unconventional scholar to have recommended a critic of Islam like Ibn Warraq—someone like Rice University professor David Cook, who teaches courses in the history of Islam. In Understanding Jihad, Jihad another book that the NEH should have promoted, Cook wrote that Ibn Warraq has been “devastating in pinpointing the weaknesses in Muslim orthodoxy” and in academia’s “systematic failure to critique the foundational texts of Islam as those of other faiths have been critiqued.”) A fifth need is for memoirs to provide an alternative view to the glowing pro-Islamism of Aboulela and Ahmed. Ibn Warraq edited Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out, which includes moving testimonies by brave men and women now threatened with death because they saw the inadequacy of Islam and refused to pretend. Those wanting to know more about women under Islam could go to Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel or Wafa Sultan’s A God Who Hates. Sultan told WORLD, though, that her message is not one Americans want to hear: “It’s hard for you to believe that people can be evil.” Librarians could reassert the tradition of local library control by stocking these and other unconventional works. For more reading suggestions from Daniel Pipes, other scholars, and myself, please go to the Muslim Journeys tab at worldmag.com. In that folder you’ll also find a list of the recipients of NEH largesse and other materials. A —with reporting by Emily Whitten
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casualties of war Alarming suicide rates among combat veterans beg for new help from the military and ministries
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E’S THREATENING to kill himself, and I don’t know what to do. …” Don Lipstein heard those words from his daughter-in-law on the phone as he left work on March , . They didn’t ring true. Joshua, Lipstein’s son, was finishing his Navy career in Norfolk, Va. His wife lived in Texas where they planned soon to start a new life. Don Lipstein worked in Pennsylvania. Maybe his daughter-in-law wasn’t reading the situation right, Lipstein thought. He called his son. Joshua had endured hardships. After spending two tours in Iraq where his Navy Riverine Squadron patrolled rivers, Joshua planned on making the military his career. But the discovery of a brain tumor led to a -hour surgery and permanent hearing loss in his right ear. No longer medically cleared for regular missions, Joshua spent his shifts monitoring security cameras. An addiction to pain killers led to a stint in rehab where he met a heroin addict who soon got Joshua hooked. Then Joshua’s mother died of cancer. Still Lipstein had a hard time believing his son could be suicidal. Those doubts vanished when he heard the pain in his son’s voice. Joshua was crying. Joshua never cried. “Dad, I’m so sorry,” Joshua repeated over the phone. “I love you.” “If we can get you off the drugs your life will look so much better,” Lipstein pleaded. He tried to think of ways he could keep his son on the line and call at the same time. “Do you have a gun with you?” he asked. “Yes.” “Can you do me a favor and take the bullets out?” “I can’t do that, dad.” Joshua did give his current location. Maybe that meant he wanted help, Lipstein hoped. Then his son’s voice grew strong. “Dad. I’ve got to go. I love you.” The line went dead. Lipstein felt his heart rip out of his body. He called and spoke to Joshua’s best friend, but help arrived too late.
Joshua died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. He was . AFTER NEARLY 12 YEARS of sustained military conflict overseas, the American casualties of war extend to the home front. A record active-duty soldiers killed themselves last year, exceeding the number of combat deaths for the year in Afghanistan. The problem extends beyond current troops: A veteran commits suicide every minutes, for a rate of each day, according to a new study. Soldiers return home still coping with old traumas only to face fresh anxieties as they leave the military and try to build new lives in a tough economy. The suicide numbers are rising despite the Pentagon and the Veterans Administration spending millions and introducing hundreds of suicide awareness programs. A culture that stigmatizes mental illness leads to many suffering in silence, not wanting to be seen as the weak link in their unit and fearful that counseling could stunt their careers. Yet the trauma of war is real. Roadside bombs hit Marine Tom Bagosy’s convoy five times during a deployment to Iraq in late . He manned a gun from his vehicle’s roof, his body exposed. He told his wife, Katie, how a sniper bullet once came so close he could feel it passing by his head. Katie worried, but at least he talked. The more grim Tom’s missions became, the more Katie heard from him. At a military briefing for spouses, Katie spoke up, saying she already knew her husband would need help when he returned. Other wives looked at her like she was crazy. You don’t know that yet, they said. Give the guys down time when they return. Be patient. Depending on the survey, anywhere from to percent of all troops develop Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The number of veterans receiving mental health treatments has risen from , in to . million in
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HONORING HIS SON: Don Lipstein at his home with a memorial to Joshua.
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Office, which opened in 2011, found 900 suicide fighting activities across all departments. This fall the office will finish its inventory and promises to streamline suicide prevention. Meanwhile, military families are confused about where to turn for help. Soon after his second deployment ended, Tom Bagosy began having suicidal thoughts. Katie and Tom once fought in the kitchen over a gun. He won the struggle and drove off in his truck only to return later that night acting calm. The next day the family drove to the White House for the annual Easter Egg roll. As Tom battled suicidal thoughts, he argued with his doctors over treatment. He told Katie that he felt like nobody listened to him. When he caught Katie trying to hide his ammunition, he shrugged it off: “I have ammo all over,” he said. “So don’t even try.” On Mother’s Day in 2010, Tom told Katie he had done what he was supposed to do by bringing his two children into the world and serving his country: “It’s time for me to step back and let some other man take over my family.” The next day, Tom appeared calm and drove to Camp Lejeune, N.C. Katie called Tom’ base psychologist. Officials decided to put Tom in a treatment facility. Tom seemed cooperative while waiting for an escort to take him to the hospital. But those watching him let their guard down, and
Robin Rayne Nelson/Genesis
2012. That figure will likely continue to rise: The full manifestations of untreated PTSD often peak about a decade after the inciting incident. For Katie Bagosy, the man she married died in Iraq. The person who returned in his place was distant, irritable, and impatient. He drank, played video games, and awoke from nightmares not knowing where he was. “He wasn’t anybody I would have chosen to marry,” Katie said. “But I made my vow, and I kept hoping he would get better.” A year after he returned, Tom turned to Katie and said, “I think I am going to be one of those people who will have PTSD for the rest of my life.” Still he wanted to join the Marines’ special operations forces. Medications and mental treatment would be barriers to getting a coveted invite to the Special Operations Command training. But in the summer of 2009, Bagosy shipped out to Afghanistan, a newly minted special forces Marine. This time he wouldn’t talk to his wife about his missions. She braced for what he would be like when he returned. The Pentagon and the Veterans Administration are investing $100 million to study suicides. To fight the stigma against mental illness, the Army began embedding behavioral specialists within units so soldiers have easy access to mental heath experts they can get to know. The Air Force is putting mental health professionals in the same clinics as primary care physicians. That way, its military personnel may not know what type of doctors their colleagues are seeing. The Army has increased its mental health professional staff by 35 percent while the VA has a goal of hiring 1,600 new mental health providers by the end of June. (A January report showed that about 950 veterans receiving VA care attempted suicide each month between 2008 and 2010. Another VA study found that 30 percent of high-risk mental heath cases did not receive the promised follow-up visits.) The agencies bolstered the capacity of crisis hotlines such as Vets4Warriors and its collection of suicide prevention programs with acronyms like the Marines’ RACE (Recognize, Ask, Care, Escort). They’ve thrown so many programs and initiatives at the problem that the Pentagon’s Defense Suicide Prevention
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Tom bolted out the door. A group of Marines chased after him. Tom reached into his truck and pulled out a gun. He pointed it at them. As they backed off, Tom drove away. A few minutes later, with Military Police in pursuit, Tom stopped his black Sierra GMC truck in the middle of the road and shot himself with a pistol. He was 25. “I don’t think he wanted to die,” Katie said. “He didn’t want to feel the pain. I probably wasn’t thinking the way I should have been thinking. It was a very intense, emotional time. To me it is still the war that killed him.” Some non-profit groups are trying to help family members after suicides. The Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors (TAPS) provides free peer-based emotional support groups, seminars, and retreats for adults and a “Good Grief Camp” for children. This Memorial Day weekend more than 1,000 survivors in different stages of grief will come to the nation’s capital for the TAPS’ annual conference. The attendees will include Don Lipstein. The first three months after his son died, Lipstein felt frozen. He’d wake up, breathe, and, at day’s end, not recall much of anything he had done. But at TAPS events he found people who had experienced the same loss. They felt safe enough to laugh together one minute and cry the next. “People don’t look at you like you are crazy,” Lipstein said. Determined to honor his son by finding something positive out of the tragedy, Lipstein became a peer mentor coordinator for TAPS. He matches those newly mourning a military suicide with those who lost a loved one and are farther along in their grieving journey. “Two years out from Joshua’s death I can say that I am able to put my story behind me and focus on other people’s stories,” Lipstein said. “The pain doesn’t go away, but it does become a little bit easier to deal with.” Some groups are also joining the battle, determined to ensure that the spiritual element of healing isn’t ignored. Inside the military, Army chaplains set a goal of having 50,000 soldiers and family members attend “Strong Bonds” “I kept hoping he would get better”: Katie Bagosy; mementoes and photos of Tom (below).
marriage retreats over the final three months of 2012. With the National Guard responsible for more than 50 percent of those who fought in recent wars, the Oregon National Guard is part of a pilot program, “Partners in Care.” It matches area faith-based organizations with Guard and reserve units. Outside the Pentagon, Military Ministry, a division of Cru (formerly known as Campus Crusade for Christ) commissioned the biblically based Combat Trauma Healing Manual and a companion workbook for wives called When War Comes Home. “You can’t read through the Psalms of David without realizing that he was a sufferer of post- traumatic stress and cried out many times for God’s healing and support,” said Jeff Oster, Military Ministry’s executive director. The organization also partnered with the American Association of Christian Counselors to produce a 30-hour training video for professional counselors on how to deal with PTSD using a Christ-centered approach. But scores of hurting veterans are leaving the military and returning to their small hometowns, many in rural areas far from military bases and the nonprofits catering to soldiers. “What we need is lots and lots of churches that will take the plight of military families to heart,” said Chris Adsit, the lead author of Military Ministry’s two workbooks. “The good shepherd leaves the 99 sheep and searches for the one lost sheep.”
Robin Rayne Nelson/Genesis
Five months into his 2004 deployment to Iraq, Josh Renschler, 21, stood on top of his vehicle when a mortar round hit a perimeter fence, hurling a four-foot long steel picket towards him. Renschler woke up three days later at a hospital in Germany. He spent two months in a military hospital in California recovering from head and back injuries. All he wanted to do was get back to his unit in Iraq. Instead he underwent more medical treatment at his home base in Fort Lewis, Wash. He struggled with seizures, migraines and numbness in his legs. When his old unit came back, he avoided them. Soon the unit redeployed to Iraq without him. Renschler became obsessed with watching news reports about the war. One night in May 2007, Renschler recognized faces on his television screen. Six members of his old squad had been killed when an explosive device tore though their vehicle. The next morning Renschler put on his uniform and went to his unit’s rear detachment. They assigned him to escort the bodies to their final resting places. He followed his old battle buddies to funerals from Washington to Mississippi. Seeing the families grieve, Renschler felt guilty for not being in the vehicle with the rest of his squad. Six months later he left the army. Renschler took a job at an island prison in Washington. It became a breeding ground for his anger and hate. Fights gave him such an adrenaline rush that he sometimes provoked the inmates. After breaking up a large melee about a year into his job, Renschler couldn’t calm down. When he slumped into a chair, his coworkers thought he was having a heart attack. Hospital doctors told him he had suffered a panic attack. Renschler lost his job.
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opened it to the first step he Renschler and his family saw in bold print: “Where started attending Northwest Was God?” It was the same Community Church in question he had been asking Lakewood, Wash. He went, himself. He read through the but he didn’t understand how book, learning about the God could allow horrible spiritual component to his things he had witnessed to battles. happen. Matt Vanderfeltz, a By the end of church member and retired Renschler was sharing the lieutenant colonel, latched gospel with others. He went onto Renschler. He wouldn’t back to the VA counseling take no for an answer when session and gave his he invited Renschler to coffee workbook to one of the older or a meal. Unemployed, veterans. With his church, Renschler had no excuse he started a retreat for when Vanderfeltz asked him soldiers called Operation to a men’s retreat. When New Normal. It led to weekly Renschler began to talk about meetings where attendees the issues he was having, could fight the trauma they Vanderfeltz promised to walk felt together. alongside Renschler to help “I can relate to the him find the best solution. brokenness inside of people,” Without Renschler asking for Renschler said. “I have help, members of the church something I can give them, began showing up at his and that is the fact that this doorstep with a car full of isn’t how it has to be forever. groceries. Unsigned cards with There is the hope that comes in Safeway gift cards from believing that God has would arrive in the mail. a plan, and no matter how Renschler started going to we screw it up, He can make a VA outpatient-counseling good out of the evil that we program, where he saw experience in our lives.” Vietnam veterans who had Adsit, the workbook’s been coming for years but author, prays were still broken. Renschler that more told Vanderfeltz that he didn’t LIVING AND churches reach want to end up like that. SERVING: out to veterans: Vanderfeltz found a copy of Renschler (above) “Frankly if we the Military Ministry and his wife and children. are going to workbook. But Renschler, not rely on the VA much of a reader, hid it away. and the With Renschler still jobless, the banks started to Department of foreclose on his home and repossess his truck. He Defense it’s a faced his third back surgery. Lying in bed one very difficult, afternoon in the middle of , with severe back and I would pain and a migraine headache, Renschler looked up even have to on the top of a shelf and saw his gun. He visualized say hopeless, putting it to his head and pulling the trigger and situation. Not thought about the relief he’d feel when it was over. because the VA and DOD aren’t doing everything they can, He pictured the bullet escaping the barrel and going through but because they simply must cut out the most important his head. He sat up. element, and that is God.” Suddenly he saw an image of his wife finding him dead. He Renschler has spent the past year in full-time ministry as imagined her having to tell their children. The pain that he an area director for Men of Valor, a new faith-based military would cause them seemed greater than any physical pain he charity. He’s witnessed to numerous soldiers who have had endured. He decided at that point that it wasn’t a good attempted suicide, seeing their lives renewed by the gospel: solution, but he had to figure out something else fast. He was “You don’t have to be a psychologist to help a soldier.” A not in a good place. He remembered the workbook. When he
‘no matter how we screw it up, [god] can make good out of the evil that we experience in our lives.’
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Second-term congressman James Lankford lacks the so-called credentials to take on Washington establishment‚ but he will anyway
David and Golıath by J.C. derrick
our chairs and a couch surround a glass-top coffee table in Rep. James Lankford’s Capitol Hill office. On it mementos sit neatly arranged: military coins, tickets to an Oklahoma vs. Oklahoma State football game, and pieces from the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which took place within his district. There’s also a Bible—Lankford’s mom gave it to him when he professed faith in Christ at age 8, and he was sworn into Congress on the same Bible in 2011—35 years later.
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Some items don’t need explanation, but why the sling and five rocks? “A friend of mine made that sling and put five smooth stones around it, saying, ‘Go to Washington and take down the giants,’” the Republican lawmaker explained. Lankford, 45, now in his second term, is taking on the biggest giants Washington offers: Attorney General Eric Holder over Justice Department scandals, and now former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over the Benghazi scandal—not to mention federal budget-cutting, human trafficking, and other issues. Lankford has made a name for himself as someone who soaks up information, asks hard questions, and is helping to
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in Washington, D.C.
p h o t o b y D R E W A N G E R E R / T h e N ew Y o r k T i m e s
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fill a leadership void in Congress—even though he arrived in Washington with no prior political experience. His work as a freshman prompted colleagues to unanimously elect him the Republican Policy Committee chairman—the fifth-highest House leadership position—for the 113th Congress. The Policy Committee considers what issues might be on the horizon weeks or months down the road, meaning virtually every issue falls in Lankford’s domain. But colleagues refer to him as a “sponge” for retaining information. At a May 8 hearing on the 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others, Lankford landed in the spotlight (see sidebar). Seconds after Rep. Darrell Issa, chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (OGR), called for a 10-minute break during six hours of testimony, four members—including those most active in the investigation—spontaneously gathered at Lankford’s desk for a strategy session. Issa told me Lankford’s leadership on the Benghazi investigation is “particularly impressive when you consider that James doesn’t come from a State Department or national security background.” Lankford earned an education degree at the University of Texas and a master’s in divinity from Southwestern Theological Seminary, then spent 14 years as the director of Falls Creek Camp in Oklahoma—the largest Christian camp in the nation with more than 50,000 annual visitors. “I assumed I was going to be there forever,” Lankford told me. But the camp director grew unsettled in 2008. He felt God was telling him to “get ready,” but he couldn’t figure out why, even after much prayer. Just before the 2008 election, Lankford heard that Mary Fallin, then representing Oklahoma’s fifth district in Congress, was considering a run for governor in 2010. “That’s what I want you to do,” Lankford felt God saying to him. “Well, that’s insane,” he thought. “That’s not even rational.” Lankford didn’t tell his wife Cindy because, he said, “normal people” don’t go tell their wives, “Hey, let’s quit our job and run for Congress. That’d be fun.” Three days later, while Lankford reviewed congressional district boundaries online, his wife walked up behind him and peered over his shoulder: “What are you looking at?” she said. “County statistics,” he responded. After a pause, she said, “We’re about to run for Congress, aren’t we?” Lankford resigned in early fall 2009 and spent the next 15 months in his first political campaign, winning a seven-way primary, a runoff, and a general election (with 63 percent of the vote). What Lankford lacked in political connections he
made up for with social media prowess, an army of Christian campers and their parents, and pure substance on the issues— which he discussed at length in hundreds of “in-home coffees” with voters. Rep. Tom Cole, a Republican from Oklahoma’s fourth district, said all seven primary candidates came to visit him. “Lankford just had this ability to connect with people—not that the others didn’t, but his was clearly superior,” he said. “He built a great relationship with voters in the district.” Twenty-two years of youth ministry helped with more than campaigning: OGR chairman Darrell Issa knew it took a lot of organizational skills and a level head to run such a large camp. “He could be the adult at the table,” Issa says he thought, and immediately installed Lankford as a freshman subcommittee chair. Lankford’s seminary training also provided a great foundation for lawmaking, especially coming from an institution committed to the inerrancy of the Bible. He said it translated easily into studying the Constitution and understanding the authors’ intent. Lankford isn’t afraid to share his biblical approach to law making—even with President Barack Obama. In March, Obama visited the Republican Conference to field questions, and Lankford went first: He told the president the story of Hezekiah, a good king who made some foolish decisions and wasn’t concerned about the consequences, since the prophet Isaiah said judgment would come in future generations. Lankford told Obama that Washington politicians are doing the same thing with their children’s future and asked if they could agree in principle that the budget needs to be balanced. Obama couldn’t agree. It wasn’t the first time Lankford tangled with the president. Last year, Lankford spearheaded a bipartisan, ABILITY TO CONNECT: bicameral effort to crack down Lankford prays with his family on human trafficking by after winning the Republican g overnment contractors. nomination for Oklahoma’s Legislation passed the House fifth district (top); campaigning in Oklahoma and was awaiting action in the City in 2010 (below). Senate when Obama—five weeks before the 2012 election—used large portions of Lankford’s bill to issue an executive order, then called a press conference to tout his administration’s effort to combat human trafficking. White House staff later acknowledged to Lankford that it was his initiative they borrowed. Back in Lankford’s office, his glass-top coffee table holds a reminder of what he says is the most important problem
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facing the country: the federal debt. In the display sits an authentic trillion bill (that’s ,,,,) from Zimbabwe, where corruption, prolific spending, and the government’s printing of massive amounts of money led to hyperinflation. “That would not even buy a loaf of bread” when the African country’s economy collapsed, Lankford said. “If you continue to print money and think that’s going to fix the debt problem, it doesn’t. It just accelerates the demise of your economy.” When Lankford speaks to Oklahoma business leaders he stays on the national debt: “If we do not resolve our debt issue, and we don’t get in balance, what we have known as a structured economy will begin to fall apart,” he told me. “And a lot of other things won’t matter at that point.”
Many in Lankford’s congressional class share his view, and they have more numbers to do something about it: The Republican class comprises more than one-third of the GOP majority, making it the largest class of the Republican conference that Lankford chairs. “This is a pretty extraordinary rise, to move this far this fast, and without alienating your peers,” Cole said. Cole and other lawmakers believe Lankford could eye other offices—Oklahoma governor, Speaker of the House, or U.S. Senator. But Lankford said running for Congress wasn’t on his radar, so he won’t guess what God has in store for him next. “My calling is to the person of Christ and when He said, ‘Follow me,’ I follow Him,” he said. “[When] He assigns me His tasks, that’s what I do.” A
Questions and answers Lankford draws out key Clinton responsibility during May Benghazi hearing
WORLD • JUNE 1, 2013
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Lankford: “Mr. Hicks, when you arrived in July, did the facilities in Benghazi meet the minimum OSPB [Overseas Security Policy Board] security standards set by the State Department?” Hicks: “According to the regional security office—at the time in Tripoli, John Martinec—they did not.” Lankford: “What about the facilities in Tripoli?” Hicks: “Again, according to the regional office, John Martinec, they were very weak.” Lankford: “Were they close to meeting the standards?” Hicks: “No, sir.” Lankford: “Mr. Nordstrom, before you left as RSO, did the facilities have the number of security personnel that you had requested?” Nordstrom: “No, they did not.” Lankford: “There are a very, very small number of facilities worldwide that are considered by GAO [Government Accountability Office] critical or high threat level for personnel in our different embassies and consulates. Tripoli and Benghazi— were they listed as high threat level?” Nordstrom: “They were.” Lankford: “By statute, who has the authority to place personnel in facilities
that do not meet DIRECT STYLE: Lankford during minimum OSPB the hearing on standards?” Benghazi. Nordstrom: “… Since we were the sole occupants of both of those facilities, Benghazi and Tripoli, the only person who could grant waivers or exceptions to those is the secretary of state [Hillary Clinton].” Nordstrom had drafted some of the requests for additional security and expected them to reach Clinton, who visited Libya in and had made normalizing relations a top priority. Lankford told me only two options exist: “Either she should have known, or she did know.” Lankford was pleased with the information revealed at the May hearing, but he said much remains to be solved, including why security was so porous that diplomats requested gun training, and who gave special operations forces orders to stand down while the attack continued. —J.C.D.
CLIFF OWEN/AP
Rep. James Lankford, R-Okla., almost didn’t get named to the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (OGR) until fellow Oklahoma Rep. Tom Cole went to bat for him shortly after he arrived in Washington in . Committee chairman Darrell Issa consented to the late addition and told Cole a few weeks later, “I thought I was doing you a favor, but it turns out you were doing me a favor.” Lankford’s non-combative but direct style has earned respect from leadership and troves of information from witnesses. He became a point person in the investigation into the Justice Department’s Fast and Furious campaign, voting with the majority to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress. Holder withheld information relating the sale of guns in Mexico that later ended up in the hands of drug cartels. In May he played a key role in drawing out State Department whistleblowers over the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. Democrats said requests for additional security facilities in Libya never reached former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s desk (echoing Clinton’s sworn testimony in February). Lankford cast doubts on that claim in a brief exchange with witnesses Gregory Hicks, former deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Libya, and Eric Nordstrom, a regional security officer (RSO) in Libya:
Email: jderrick@worldmag.com
5/15/13 9:59 AM
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BILL-SHARING: The Hesses review paperwork.
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Growing in a loophole In the era of Obamacare, Christian medical bill-sharing groups are rapidly adding members by Da niel Ja me s Dev ine |
p h oto s b y A da m C ov i n g to n /g e n e s i s
When
Obamacare reached its third birthday in March, House Democrats celebrated with reports of the healthcare overhaul’s early achievements: Seventy million additional Americans receiving free preventative care, 3 million young adults covered under their parents’ health insurance plans, and seniors saving $6 billion in Medicaid prescriptions. Those milestones weren’t reversing the country’s skepticism, though. A Kaiser Health Tracking Poll found just 37 percent of Americans had a favorable view of Obamacare, down 9 percentage points from three years earlier. The Heritage Foundation noted the law’s 18 tax hikes would cost Americans $836 billion through 2022, and that 7 million Americans would lose their employer-sponsored i nsurance by then. After 2014, Obamacare will make employee insurance too expensive for many businesses. For all its perceived benefits and harms, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act seems to be having one effect that liberals—and perhaps even conservatives—almost certainly didn’t foresee: Many Christians are leaving the insurance market to join healthcare sharing ministries, organizations where members pay for one another’s medical bills. These groups, though not technically insurance, oversee networks where thousands of monthly “gifts” cover members’ eligible medical expenses. Healthcare sharing ministries were increasing in popularity before the Affordable Care Act’s passage, but have seen a surge in membership in the past three years.
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Executives at the three major healthcare sharing ministries— Samaritan Ministries International in Peoria, Ill.; Christian Care Ministry in Melbourne, Fla.; and Christian Healthcare Ministries in Barberton, Ohio—all told me in interviews their new member growth accelerated after the passage of Obamacare in . Samaritan, the largest such organization and the only one that provided WORLD with annual figures, grew by about member households in and by about in . The next year—when the healthcare law was signed—Samaritan added , households. In and , more than , households joined each year. The organization added its ,th family in March, representing , individual members, and was on pace to surpass last year’s growth. “There are people out there who are looking for a pro-life, consistently Christian option, especially in the face of things like the birth control mandate,” said James Lansberry, the executive vice president of Samaritan Ministries. Lansberry said his organization had been growing consistently before the healthcare overhaul: “Rising healthcare costs have been around or years. The Affordable Care Act has only been around for three.” Howard Russell, the president of Christian Healthcare Ministries (CHM), said his organization has about , member families, with , of those added since April . (Disclosure: I’m a former CHM member.) “They’re flocking in,” said Russell. “I can’t say officially it’s [due to] Obamacare, but I can’t say it isn’t.” Tony Meggs, the president of Christian Care Ministry, which runs Medi-Share, said his group’s bill-sharing program had experienced accelerated growth since , at to percent per year. “There’s no doubt that there’s a part of our population that doesn’t like the idea of government encroachment into healthcare,” said Meggs. “It doesn’t matter if you come from the left side of the aisle or the right side of the aisle, you’re going to find something in that law you dislike.”
Medi-Share’s run-in with regulators prompted the Kentucky legislature to act
CHRISTIANS
who have recently joined the bill-sharing groups may not be doing so merely to flee Obamacare: When asked, some point to the rising cost of insurance. Terrell Hess, , a public school teacher from Early, Texas, said he and his wife had agreed she would quit her job as a school secretary when they had kids, but the or so his employee insurance policy took from his paycheck each month made the budget too tight. They de-enrolled from insurance, joined Samaritan in , and now pay a month for a family of four, allowing Hess’s wife to be a full-time mom. When his wife had their second child (a boy) last summer, Samaritan members reimbursed all the Hesses’ hospital bills, including for an emergency caesarean section performed after the baby’s umbilical cord became pinched during delivery. Hess appreciated the handwritten words of encouragement and prayers other Samaritan members offered: “You don’t just get a check in the mail, you get Hallmark cards.” “From the spiritual side, it strikes me that we ought to be showing a better way to the world,” said David Madeira, who hosts a morning talk show in Scranton, Pa. “The world is wrestling with this issue of how do we cover healthcare, how do we pay for things?” A company that hosted Madeira’s health savings account informed him in that, because of the impact of the new
With his evangelical church picking up the cost of their health coverage, the move made a lot of financial sense in a congregation of about people, where every penny counts. “In they carried , of our expenses and still paid less than when we were at Anthem,” said Anderson, whose medical bills last year amounted to more than , after his youngest son had a serious seizure and another son broke two bones. In January, though, Medi-Share temporarily ceased operations in Kentucky after Christian Care Ministry (CCM), the Florida-based organization running the program, lost a legal dispute with state insurance regulators. The cutoff affected more than people, including the Andersons, who chose to switch their membership to Samaritan Ministries.
HANDOUT
When a new Kentucky law takes effect this summer, it should end a decadelong legal battle that earlier this year forced families in the state to suspend or abandon their membership in Medi-Share, a healthcare sharing program serving more than , Americans (including me). Louisville pastor Darin Anderson’s family was one of those affected. Anderson, , left traditional insurance in to join Medi-Share, a move that lowered his family’s , monthly premiums to . The family also paid a lower family deductible than Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield’s fee of ,.
Anderson family
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Together, the three healthcare sharing ministries currently claim over , individual members. (Some smaller sharing ministries exist. One, Altrua HealthShare in Austin, Texas, did not return my calls.) Among the complaints conservatives have raised against the -page Affordable Care Act: It forces employers to pay for insurance policies covering birth control and abortifacients and forces individuals to buy insurance or pay a fine. But thanks to early lobbying efforts, Congress added a loophole to the law providing members of healthcare sharing ministries with an exemption from the individual mandate.
Email: ddevine@worldmag.com
5/15/13 8:57 AM
healthcare law, it would no longer be offering his HSA. Madeira signed his family up with Samaritan (they had been members in previous years), which covered $15,000 in medical bills when Madeira and his daughter flipped over a go-kart in 2011. He vividly remembers the accident: “I’m hanging upside down. I can smell and feel the cold gasoline running down my back. … And I look down and my arm has two elbows.” Today his arm has one elbow and an 8-inch t itanium rod. In addition to being a radio host, Madeira works for Infinity Concepts, a branding and public relations firm near Pittsburgh. Samaritan executives are in talks with Infinity about how to manage their unprecedented growth. The three organizations don’t attribute all their growth to the healthcare law, but to rising insurance premiums and a renewed interest among Christians in meeting one another’s medical needs. All three groups require members to sign a Christian statement of faith, abstain from tobacco and illegal drugs, and live by biblical principles such as abstinence from extramarital sex. “Usually when unbelievers hear about it, they’re a little miffed that they don’t have access to it,” says Madeira. The executives from the three ministries are optimistic about growth but admit they can’t predict the future. Until
handout
“I consider it a government intrusion,” Anderson said of the state’s involvement. “In my mind, a Christian nonprofit is much different than a multimillion-dollar insurance company. It baffles me.” A primary sticking point with state regulators was Medi-Share’s past method of using a trust account to process members’ medical bills. (In contrast, regulators ruled Samaritan legal because members directly reimburse each other.) Although Medi-Share amended its system in 2009 by establishing electronic bank accounts to facilitate direct payments between members, the state continued to press its case. It took involvement from the Kentucky legislature to reinstate the program. During this year’s session that
Obamacare is fully implemented, they won’t know all the rules and dynamics of the new health insurance market. They could lose some lower-income members who decide to switch to a government- subsidized insurance policy. Although states could potentially pose problems for healthcare sharing ministries through various A GROWING regulations, many have FAMILY: passed friendly “safe harbor” Terrell and Kayla laws giving legal recognition Hess with children to such groups. Earlier this Colby (left) and Cameron; a note year Kentucky shut down from Samaritan. Medi-Share in the state after a decade-long dispute, but legislators have worked out a resolution (see sidebar). The ministries don’t see any upper limit to the membership growth their sharing models could handle. Russell of CHM said growth would simply be “a matter of having the number of employees necessary to serve the number of members.” Growth seems inevitable: Enrollment in the state insurance exchanges will begin in October, and the penalty for not having insurance will begin next year, motivating the uninsured to seek individual health policies. According to a March study by the Society of Actuaries, an Illinois group that calculates insurance risks, by 2017 the number of people with individual insurance plans will more than double, to nearly 26 million. Meanwhile, claims costs for that group could rise by a third. Instead of getting insurance, though, many people could jump through the loophole and become healthcare sharing ministry members. A
concluded March 25, lawmakers overwhelmingly passed a clarification of Kentucky’s “safe harbor” statute, verifying that sharing ministries could operate without fear of violating insurance rules. Chief sponsor, Kentucky Sen. Tom Buford, said messages from panicked pregnant women and a couple planning to move across the state line so they could remain in Medi-Share prompted him to act. “We have Baptist, Catholic and Amish groups who do the same thing,” said the Nicholasville Republican, who estimated more than 3,000 state residents share medical bills. “If the state wanted to take them on, they could have shut them down too.” Buford’s bill will take effect June 25. Meanwhile, Medi-Share is waiting to meet
with state insurance officials to discuss resuming Kentucky operations. Once it secures final approval, Anderson intends to return to the organization. For the most part, states seem willing to allow sharing ministries to operate without interference. Nearly half already have safe harbor provisions, and other states are considering them, said former CCM president Robert Baldwin, who temporarily rejoined the organization as national policy director to resolve the Kentucky dispute. Baldwin pointed out that in over 19 years Medi-Share paid more than $26 million of Kentuckians’ medical bills and had only two complaints filed against it— from hospitals that said they should have been paid faster.
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Raymond Ibrahim
Persecution myth?
A new book claims Christian martyrdom was fabricated, but the present sheds light on the past
>>
failure to comply: Saint Sebastian, who was ordered killed by the Roman emperor Diocletian.
million Christians are being persecuted today, in an era when Western ideas of humanitarianism and religious tolerance have permeated the rest of the world—is it not reasonable to conclude that 2,000 years ago, when “might made right” and brutality prevailed, that Christians were also being persecuted then, especially when contemporary sources indicate as much? Consider the modern Islamic world alone, where most of today’s Christian persecution occurs. Today Christians under Islam are still being tortured, imprisoned, enslaved, and killed; their churches and Bibles are routinely banned or burned. Why? Because Islam is a supremacist cult, which brooks no opposition and demands conformity: Islamic law (see Quran 9:29) teaches that those who come under its hegemony must either convert, keep their faith but live as ostracized third-class citizens (dhimmis), or die. The supremacist culture of the Roman Empire was not much different. If today’s Muslims—acquainted with modern ideas of humanitarianism and tolerance—are still brutally persecuting the Christian minorities in their midst, are we seriously to believe that the warlike Roman Empire, which existed at a time when brutality and cruelty were the expected norm, did not persecute Christians, especially when the records say it did? Christianity was and still is the one religion that refuses to comply with its supremacist overlords, putting its beliefs above the preservation of life. Other religions approve outward conformity (Islamic law permits Muslims to outwardly renounce Muhammad if doing so will save their lives), while Christians have long had a habit of “annoying” their superiors by refusing to comply, even to save their lives. Just as Christ irked Pilot by refusing to utter some words to save his life, his disciples and countless other ancient Christians followed his example, and today modern-day Christians do the same. They continue to be persecuted for it. (Most recently in Iran, Islamic authorities are trying to force imprisoned IranianAmerican Saeed Abedini to abjure Christ, even as he resists under torture.) Historical texts aside, today’s Christian persecution helps to confirm yesterday’s Christian persecution. A —Raymond Ibrahim is author of the new book, Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians. A Middle East and Islam specialist, he is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and an associate fellow at the Middle East Forum.
Universal History Archive/Getty Images
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Christian martyrdom under the militant Roman Empire has long been an unquestioned historical fact, but Candida Moss in her new book The Myth of Persecution (HarperOne, March 2013) claims that many of history’s best known narratives of Christian martyrs were entirely fabricated. This thesis, as most modern-day academic theses concerning early history, is fundamentally based on conjecture, projections, and above all, anachronisms— the sort that earlier turned Christ into a homosexual hippie and Muhammad into a humanitarian feminist. Neither Moss nor anyone else can prove or disprove what the primary historical texts say—that Roman persecution of Christians was real, widespread, and brutal. We weren’t there. But from an objective point of view, is it not more reasonable to accept the words of contemporary eyewitnesses than it is the conjectures of a politically charged book that is separated from its subject by 2,000 years? Among other ideas unintelligible and inapplicable to the ancient world, Moss invokes “T-shirts,” “favorite athletes,” and “brands of soda” to “prove” that the ancient narrative of Christians tortured and killed for their faith was all a gag to make a profit: “Martyrs were like the action heroes of the ancient world,” Moss says. “It was like getting your favorite athlete endorsing your favorite brand of soda. … Of course, the prices were completely jacked up.” In short, the merit of Moss’ thesis rests in the fact that it satisfies a certain anti-Christian sentiment, a modern-day political perspective—and not that it offers facts or serious arguments. By projecting cynical postmodern perspectives onto the ancient Romans and Christians, the thesis is ultimately farcical. Even so, let’s tackle the myth charge from a different angle. Let’s leave the question of eyewitnesses, texts, and traditions, and instead rely on common sense—though it’s in short supply in the academic community. The fact is, we can often learn about the past by looking at the present. If at least 100
WORLD • June 1, 2013
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Professor Mark Gavin is a bestselling author and speaker who makes his living by disproving the existence of God. But what happens when extraordinary and unexplainable life events shake his faith in atheism? Will he turn his back on the very ideas that made him rich and famous? This provocative drama follows the intertwined stories of Gavin and two of his biggest fans, an aimless young man who can’t see beyond the next party and a young woman who can’t face her guilt after a tragic mistake. Each takes comfort in Gavin’s assertion that life is a series of random and meaningless events. But when “coincidence” brings all three together they must face the evidence before their eyes. 74 minutes.
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Will Wright dreams of playing baseball in the big leagues and is ready to sacrifice anything to make it happen. But in South Carolina during the 1920s, the only path to pro baseball is through the local textile mill team. Against the wishes of his wealthy father, Will leaves his family and privileged life behind to work in the harsh conditions at Newton Mill. When famous real-life evangelist, Billy Sunday (played by David Burke) comes to town, Will discovers that his sheltered life only masks his real need for repentance and forgiveness. This entertaining evangelistic movie recalls a bygone era while conveying relevant truths for today. 135 minutes.
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Notebook
Lifestyle > Technology > Science > Houses of God > Sports > Money > Religion
Pursuing Grace Brian Burkey and Grace Cho say cross-cultural marriage has its challenges, but also its beauty HANDOUT
by Angela Lu
>>
If trends continue, June will bring another spurt in interracial marriage. Here’s the story of one, Brian Burkey and Grace Cho, who met when a Korean friend invited Burkey to youth group at the Korean church that was also home to Cho’s family. Burkey became a Christian and started attending the church regularly as one of two non-Korean congregants. Cho and Burkey became good friends even though, “Brian was very, very shy, he didn’t talk a lot, and I remember he had a hard time just looking at
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11 LIFESTYLE and TECH.indd 57
me straight in the eye.” Once Cho asked Burkey on a date to watch Driving Miss Daisy, but he fell asleep during the movie. Afterward, they decided dating might ruin their friendship. A year later, they decided to try again. Cho was heading off to Purdue University in Indiana while Burkey was staying in St. Louis to finish high school. They kept in touch through phone calls, letters, and four-hour drives to visit each other. At first Cho’s parents didn’t think the two were 15 YEARS serious, but after a few AND years they started speaking COUNTING: out against the relationship. The Burkey family. When Cho returned home
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Notebook > Lifestyle
The number of interracial couples like the Burkeys is growing in the United States. About percent of new marriages in were between people of different races or ethnicities, compared to . percent in . Asians, including Hawaiian natives and Pacific Islanders, are most likely— percent—to marry someone outside their race. Some percent of Hispanics, percent of African-Americans, and percent of all whites marry someone of a different race. Public opinion about interracial marriage also has shifted dramatically in the last years. In , about percent disapproved of marrying “colored people.” In , percent of respondents said they approve, while percent said they disapproved. —A.L.
Some conservative Protestants have long opposed interracial marriage: Bob Jones University removed its rule against interracial dating in , and one rural Kentucky church lifted its ban on interracial couples only in . A Pew poll that year found only percent of white evangelicals saying “more people of different races marrying each other” was bad for society. (The figure for the country as a whole was percent; the wording of the poll was different from the poll cited above.) More evangelical leaders are speaking up about the issue. Minnesota pastor John Piper wrote in Bloodlines about his own racism growing up in the segregated South. Piper learned from studying the Bible and from experience that God’s sovereign grace levels all ethnicities. In a recent message at Wheaton College, Piper said, “Few things, I think, are more beautiful than when a Christian couple crosses racial lines, overcomes every racial prejudice, every ethnic slur, every gospelcontradicting fear, and then displays in a marriage the covenant-keeping commitment and love of Christ for his church.” —A.L.
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Changing attitudes
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for breaks, her mom would ask if she had found any Korean boys in college, and say she didn’t want her to date a white American. Like many Asian immigrant families, Cho’s parents wanted a Korean son-in-law who could speak Korean and understood the culture. But Cho felt frustrated because she didn’t think her parents had valid reasons to keep her and Burkey apart. She remembers thinking, “If they got to know him as a person beyond the color of his skin, they would truly understand why I care so much about him.” Over the next five years, Burkey went to seminary and Cho graduated from college—but the relationship dilemma remained. Several times they almost broke up because Burkey didn’t want to come between Cho and her parents. After praying and seeking counsel, they could see no biblical reason to break up, yet Burkey did not want to marry without her parents’ blessing. “I was very torn,” Cho, now , said about the dating process. “I wanted to know that it wasn’t just my will that I wanted to marry this guy, but that it was the Lord’s will.” She wanted her parents’ blessing. Cho’s non-English-speaking grandmother was the first to give the couple her blessing. She saw Burkey as a good man who loves God and tried to convince Cho’s parents—but they resisted. The youth pastor and church members also spoke positively about Burkey to her father, a church elder. One day, after Cho and Burkey had been together for six years, Cho had yet another tearful phone call with Burkey about their relationship. This time Cho’s mother asked, “Do you really care about him?” When Cho answered yes, mother and daughter went to her father. He asked the same question. When she answered yes, he gave his assent: “OK, well, you can date him.” A year and a half later the two married. Now, years later, Cho’s parents love Burkey, and her dad views him as a son. Burkey acknowledges a benefit of their long courtship: He was already familiar with Korean culture since he spent so much time at the Korean church. Still, cultural challenges remain. The two view the education of their three children, ages , , and , differently: Cho is more demanding, while Burkey has a more relaxed attitude. Burkey also had to learn about Korean family hierarchy. When Cho’s parents were struggling financially, the Burkeys moved in to help out. Even though the Burkeys were in their s with children, they had to respect her parents. “We weren’t on equal footing,” Burkey remembers. Burkey says cultural differences add a layer of difficulty to marriage, but also enlarge their perspective: “You realize my culture doesn’t have all the answers. You learn to respect and appreciate. You see beauty.” A
BUILDING A LIFE: Marci and Chris Johnson in Jena, La.
Notebook > Technology
Gateway gambling Nevada launches the country’s first legal betting website
BY DANIEL JAMES DEVINE
>>
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G S S no longer need to visit a Las Vegas casino to blow their dough. Nevada has opened the nation’s first legal gambling website that deals in real money, UltimatePoker.com. The site’s April launch was a milestone for internet gambling in the United States, and similar sites are expected to launch in New Jersey and Delaware later this year. Online gambling has been illegal in the United States because of a federal law. In federal agents shut down five major gambling websites, but later that year the Justice Department decided the websites were legal as long as they operated within state borders. Ultimate Poker stays square by only serving residents and visitors in Nevada: It requires players to register their cell phone and Social Security numbers so the website can determine their location and age (they must be years old). Station Casinos, a Las Vegas gambling group, launched UltimatePoker.com in hopes of luring new customers who might not want to visit one of its casinos.
That’s just the problem. “The government has opened a Las Vegas casino in every home, office, dorm room, and smart phone in the state, hours a day, seven days a week, days a year,” Les Bernal, the national director of Stop Predatory Gambling, told me by email. “Instead of working to expand the middle class through opportunity and efforts to improve social mobility, government is steering millions of citizens into deeper debt and more dysfunction.” Bernal said Nevada’s poker website was part of a larger lobbying effort to bring gambling to Facebook, as has already happened in the United Kingdom. (In the United States, Facebook gambling apps currently deal in game credits, not money.) Facebook’s first U.K. gambling app, Bingo Friendzy, caused an outcry last year for using advertisements with cartoonish, cuddly creatures that could have appealed to children. Could Facebook serve as a gateway to gambling for teens willing to lie about their age? We may find out soon. Zynga, creator of the popular Facebook game “FarmVille,” is planning to launch its own cash-stakes game in Nevada.
Tunes cafeteria On April , Apple’s iTunes Store celebrated its th birthday. Over the past decade music lovers have cheaply downloaded billion songs from the online storefront, often from the comfort of their bedrooms. ITunes has played a key role in ushering in the era of digital music sales. It appears to have played a key role in demolishing music industry revenue, too, according to CNNMoney. How? By a ratio of -to-, the most popular way to purchase an artist’s music on iTunes today is to buy a single song, for between cents and ., rather than purchase an entire album. Fifteen years ago, when CD sales were near their peak, fans willingly shelled out or more for an album even if they only wanted one or two songs from it. Not so in : U.S. data from the Recording Industry Association of America shows increasing sales of singles has corresponded with a drop in music revenue. Sales last year totaled . billion, half of the amount in , adjusted for inflation. —D.J.D.
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Notebook > Science
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It’s no secret sophisticated new medicine costs big money. Some cancer drug treatments are priced at over $100,000 a year, but patients are willing to pay, thanks to medical insurance and a sense of obligation to pursue the best treatment, even if it only prolongs life a month or two.
At 2½ years old, Hannah Warren has became the youngest person to receive an artificially grown organ. The Korean-Canadian girl was born without a windpipe and has breathed through a tube her entire life—until April, when doctors at a hospital in Peoria, Ill., implanted a windpipe grown in a lab using her own stem cells. The lead surgeon, Paolo Macchiarini, told The New York Times that Hannah looked bewildered afterward, since she was able to close her lips for the first time: “It was beautiful.” —D.J.D.
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Diet of the dead Cuts on the skull and jaw of a 400-year-old American settler offer the first archaeological evidence that early Jamestown, Va., colonists committed cannibalism. Researchers digging in a colony garbage pit last summer unearthed portions of a skeleton with precise cut marks they say indicate someone sliced away the flesh and broke open the skull. The bones belonged to a girl estimated to be 14 years old, who had likely died of other causes before being eaten. Historians have debated whether the Jamestown settlers committed cannibalism during the early winter months of 1610, although the colony’s president, George Percy, said as much in a letter years afterward. After running out of food during a siege by Powhatan Indians, Percy wrote, the English became so desperate they ate dogs, cats, mice, and shoe leather before resorting to “those things which seame incredible, as to digge upp deade corpes outt of graves and to eate them.” —D.J.D.
NOVARTIS: Spencer Platt/Getty Images • skull, reconstruction: Carolyn Kaster/ap • windpipe: Jim Carlson/OSF Saint Francis Medical Center/ap
Fresh wind
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What’s not so clear is why drugmakers keep charging more. In the medical journal Blood in April, more than 100 cancer experts complained the prices of drugs have become “astronomical” and raise “moral implications” about fair market value. One leukemia drug, Gleevec, cost $30,000 a year when drugmaker Novartis TOO MUCH?: A protest outside the Novartis headquarters in New York
released it in 2001, but by last year it had increased to $92,000. Broader trends are similar: “Cancer drug prices have almost doubled from a decade ago, from an average of $5,000 per month to more than $10,000 per month.” While acknowledging drugmakers must spend around $1 billion bringing a new medicine to market—due to research, safety testing, and advertising—the doctors said Novartis could have recouped the cost of developing Gleevec in just a couple years based on U.S. sales alone. An additional complication is that drug companies don’t charge the same prices in every country. Gleevec only costs about $29,000 in Mexico, for example (one-third of the U.S. price), so wealthier patients end up subsidizing poorer ones. Pressure from the medical establishment could be an effective way to lower prices, though. Last October, doctors at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City loudly announced they wouldn’t be offering a new, $11,000-per-month drug called Zaltrap to their colorectal cancer patients. The reason: Another, older drug works just as well and only costs half as much. Three weeks later, Sanofi, the maker of Zaltrap, cut the price of the drug in half.
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Notebook > Houses of God
Mich., survived the 1967 riots (at the time home of St. Agnes Parish) while most of the neighborhood burned to the ground. But church attendance afterward dropped—from 1,600 in 1964 to 162 in 1986. In 1981 the church hosted Mother Teresa, packed with an audience of 1,500. But it merged with Martyrs of Uganda Parish in 1989, then closed in 2006 due to high maintenance costs on its large, Gothic-style building and a declining congregation.
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NOVARTIS: Spencer Platt/Getty Images • skull, reconstruction: Carolyn Kaster/ap • windpipe: Jim Carlson/OSF Saint Francis Medical Center/ap
Martyrs of Uganda Parish, an African American Catholic parish in Detroit,
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Notebook > Sports
Called up
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Davis told me experiencing low points in his career helps him stay humble and keep things in perspective. During interviews, Davis consistently points to God as the author of his success, but he said such comments rarely make it into print: “I think people want you to take credit for the result of good work.” Davis’ outlook wasn’t always so biblical: He was baptized at the age of , but church fell to the wayside when he started playing with traveling baseball teams at age . For the next years, Davis was defined by his most recent performance on the field. Everything came to a head in in San Francisco: The Rangers were playing in their first World Series, but Davis, having lost the first base job three times in the previous months, was on the sidelines with the taxi squad (alternates ready to play in the case of an injury). One night, Davis awoke early in the morning and felt God saying, “You’ve waited long enough. It’s time for you to surrender.” Davis began devouring spiritual food: He read the Bible and books on prayer, quizzed other believers about their daily activities, and attended the team Bible study. Teammates Josh Hamilton and David Murphy—“two of the strongest Christian men I know”—discipled Davis in person, and Denton pastor Matt Chandler did the same via podcasts. Some might point to Davis’ on-field success as a natural result of his spiritual renewal, but he flatly rejects the prosperity gospel: “When you come to Christ and follow God with your whole heart, it’s not by any means going to get easier,” he said. “When I really started pursuing God—really He started pursuing me—it was tough.” Davis said, “It’s not anything we’re doing” that allows believers to be successful. “It’s what God has allowed us to enjoy,” he said. “The biggest reason I’ve been successful this year is because [I know] this isn’t all there is.” A
ROB TRINGALI/SPORTSCHROME/GETTY IMAGES
O A , , Chris Davis was living by himself in a one-bedroom apartment with two items—an air mattress and a TV. Actually, Davis says, there were three items, because the TV was sitting on top of the box it came in. Davis, then , was first baseman for the Round Rock Express, where every time a hometown ballplayer hits a home run, fans “pass the boot” to collect prize money. That’s how he got the TV. But in prize money was small consolation: Davis had been the Texas Rangers’ first baseman opening the previous two seasons, but he lost the job each time amid deep batting slumps. “I don’t know if what I’m doing is really affecting anybody,” he recalls telling his then-girlfriend, Jill, who is now his wife. Davis prayed and decided to put out a fleece: If he stayed in the minor leagues all season, he would hang up his spikes and go back to school, perhaps seminary. The next day Davis hit three home runs—and the next week he was recalled to the major leagues. Three months later, he was traded to the Baltimore Orioles, whom he led in with home runs. He also joined Babe Ruth and Jim Tobin as the only players since to hit three home runs in a game and earn a pitching win in the same season. (Davis pitched the final two innings of a -inning game in May). Davis finished with seven home runs in his final seven games, then picked up where he left off in : He became the fourth player in big league history to homer in the first four games of a season, and he set a record by driving in runs in those four contests. He went on to earn American League Player of the Month honors in April after finishing at or near the top of most offensive categories.
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HANDOUT
Sudden on-field success hasn’t been the most important turnaround in CHRIS DAVIS’ life BY J.C. DERRICK in Baltimore
Notebook > Money
Bill of the month
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I am and had chest pains in the night, so called my primary physician in the morning expecting to go in for a check-up. He immediately said, “Get to the ER and have an EKG,” so my daughter took me in about : on Friday morning. They did the EKG and finding no problem, the ER doctor for that day came to see me and said he wanted me to stay overnight and have more tests. After X-rays and other tests, I was moved to a room and was periodically checked for vital signs. I was told I was to have a stress test on Saturday and so waited without food or drink until afternoon when a doctor I had never seen came and spent a few minutes telling me that
the test could be dangerous and did I understand that? The test consisted of putting some medicine (the nuclear medicine?) into my IV, which caused me to pant heavily for a few minutes. Later that afternoon another doctor called me to say that he was releasing me and that the tests didn’t show perfection, but nothing really bad either. I never saw him to ask him anything more, but he left written instructions for me to see my primary physician and take aspirin and vitamin C. My daughter picked me up around seven on Saturday evening. On Monday
morning I called my doctor and asked him if I could get copies of the results of all the tests. He informed me I would have to go to the hospital for those. Several days later he had his nurse call me to see if I wanted to come in. I could think of no reason to do that. When I got the bill, I was appalled at the charges and even though my share was negligible I felt outraged at the lack of integrity, truth, or honesty it conveyed. Two of my daughters have done some medical billing and explained to me that they don’t expect the insurance company to pay the whole amount, but I cannot understand why they have to be so blatantly untruthful. There must be something we can do to bring straightforwardness back into our world! —Kathleen M. Newman
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Notebook > Religion
Campbellsville outcast Southern Baptist school’s dismissal of conservative outrages Southern Baptist leaders BY THOMAS KIDD
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colleges, such as Cedarville University’s decision last year to release theology professor Michael Pahl because Pahl does not hold to a literal Adam and Eve. More recently, the Southern Baptist-affiliated Louisiana College did not renew the contracts of three professors, reportedly because of the professors’ Calvinist theology. The Louisiana College controversy has become part of a broader one about the leadership of college president Joe Aguillard, who has survived two Board of Trustees motions this year to remove him from office. A special committee tasked with investigating Aguillard for misleading the board about expenditures and other improprieties recently voted - to exonerate him. Committee member Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, was one of the dissenting votes. Pahl’s case at Cedarville might appear unsurprising: a conservative Christian school dismissing a more moderate professor. But the Jarvis Williams scenario, to critics, represents the reverse, with a liberal-leaning school targeting a theologically conservative professor. Paul Chitwood, executive director of the Kentucky Baptist Convention (KBC), indicated that leaders of the state convention would initiate a dialogue to determine whether Campbellsville’s guiding “convictions are still compatible with the mission our Lord has given the churches of the
Kentucky Baptist Convention.” A meeting between Campbellsville and KBC officials took place in late April, and afterward Chitwood announced that the KBC and Campbellsville were “re-affirming their partnership,” and that the KBC had “received the assurance that those who believe the literal truthfulness of every word of the Bible are welcomed as students and as faculty members of the university.” Campbellsville president Michael Carter posted a “Position Statement” about the situation on the front page of Campbellsville’s website, never using Williams’ name but alluding to the “unfounded charges that have been thrown at Campbellsville University.” (He noted that the university does not comment publicly on personnel decisions.) Carter insisted that the university has not departed from its biblical, Baptist roots. The school’s goal for all students, Carter said, “is that they will come to know Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord and that they will be world changers and servant leaders for Christ.” Russell Moore, however, says that the college’s response to Williams’ situation spouts “vague pieties about wholesome Christian education,” while they force out “even the most token representation of conservative evangelical scholarship.” He is concerned that Campbellsville may want a “liberal faculty but conservative students and dollars.” A
COURTESY THE SOUTHERN BAPTIST THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY
T , Jarvis Williams would seem to be the ideal tenure-track professor. In he won a teaching award from the Campbellsville University student government; in he received a university commendation for his work on racial reconciliation and theology; and in administrators promoted him to associate professor. Williams has been a prolific writer, publishing three books in three years. But suddenly this spring, Southern Baptist-affiliated Campbellsville told him that he should not apply for tenure, and that they would only offer him a terminal one-year contract for the - school year. Williams’ dismissal has outraged a number of evangelical and Baptist leaders. Russell Moore, president-elect of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, told me that he is “very disturbed” by Williams’ case, as he considers Williams (who was unable to comment on this story) one of the only theological conservatives teaching at the school. Patrick Schreiner, a doctoral student at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (Williams’ alma mater) who first blogged about the case, asserts that, even as Campbellsville dismissed Williams, the school employs other “professors in the school of theology who reject biblical authority and biblical inerrancy.” The Campbellsville case follows a number of similar ones at Christian
Email: tkidd@worldmag.com
5/15/13 11:47 AM
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Mailbag ‘Gettin’ on board the gay marriage train’ April The overused chant that gay marriage is a civil rights issue is a straw man argument. It is all about societal acceptance. If same-sex is legalized, it sets a precedent that opens the door for an “everything goes” definition of marriage. We, as a society, don’t want to go down that road. —F N, Woodbridge, Calif.
Many people seem eager to suppress the truth that you can’t just make marriage mean whatever you want. —S D. B, Encinitas, Calif.
It is a comfort to have a voice like WORLD holding fast to a biblical worldview of homosexuality while so many in the secular and Christian worlds are shifting their convictions. —G C, Allegan, Mich.
‘In all the noise, sounds of silence’ April Thank you for your candid look at this complex situation. One hardly knows how to speak about homosexual marriage anymore, and your description of the thought processes of WORLD reporters is helpful. —S J, Spartanburg, S.C.
I have taught my congregation a new Shorter Catechism question that summarizes the Westminster Confession’s chapter on marriage: “Q.a. What is marriage? A. Marriage is a covenant of lifelong fidelity between a man and a woman to live together as one flesh, for their mutual benefit, and for the bearing of children.” As long as we associate
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marriage only with love and affection, we will continue to lose the argument on gay marriage. —B E, Drexel Hill, Pa.
This was one of the best Christian “position statements” on the issue I’ve read; it’s brief and biblically sound. We believers must not shy away from stating boldly the biblical position in love, and being willing if necessary to suffer for it. —G J, Newark, Del.
Evangelicals’ credibility on this issue is very low. Why are so many evangelical families so small, and so many couples intentionally childless? As John R. Rice wrote in , “Those who marry owe a duty to God, a duty to civilization, and duty to their mate and to themselves to bring children into this world and to rear them for God.” —M L, Aberdeen, Idaho
‘Countercultural warriors’ April I am part of the millennial generation and was glad to see my brave peers defending marriage. Blazing a trail is a messy and imperfect business, filled with hazards, but there
won’t ever be a trail unless someone does it. —D D E, Yamato-shi, Japan
‘Serious times’ April I would much rather die in combat, with my boots on, than be worked to death in a concentration camp. Communist “fourth regime” camps made Jews and Gentiles fund their own deaths through work, as the Nazi camp slogan “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“Labor Makes You Free”) put it. Friends who were inmates in Soviet camps told me how Nazi architects, engineers, and photographers came and recorded the smallest details so the Nazis could duplicate the camps in their territory. —P M, St. Charles, Ill.
This column was so meaningful. I was years old when that attack began, and the next year I was in the German woods moving south all winter long. I saw the stacks of dead bodies. —O W, Gastonia, N.C.
‘Default position’ April What a great article on the foolishness of our pursuit of college degrees. What is the root of the delusion that I should be able to go to a college I cannot afford, regardless of the consequences? Parents are failing to train their children to govern their desires and choices. —D C, Janesville, Wis.
‘Heather has two mommies’ April Since combining mitochondria and chromosomes from different eggs
JUNE 1, 2013 • WORLD
5/8/13 12:33 PM
Amy
Writıng Awards
f or biblic a l jou r na lism in secul a r newspa per s, m aga z ines, or w ebsites
First prize:
10,000
$
14 other awards: $
24,000
Any size publication: city or college newspapers, local or national magazines, news and views websites original reporting preferred Deadline for first half articles: July 15, 2013
SANTA CLARA, CUBA submitted by Douglas Marine
prior to fertilization occurs in vitro with a very low probability of success, the process would involve many eggs resulting in many embryos. Most of these would die. Since the U.K.’s Human Fertilisation and Embryo Authority began keeping records, on average embryos have been created—and killed—for every one baby born following IVF. The loss of innocent life associated with IVF rivals that due to abortion. —D S, Beaver Falls, Pa.
‘Braggin’ on their King’ April Thank you for introducing your readers to Trip and Andy. At I don’t quite get rap music but I have been looking for an alternative to the ugly side of rap to give to our teens. After listening to these two artists, all I can say is “Wow!” —K S, Zanesville, Ohio
For more information, go to worldmag.com/ amyawards
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‘Jungle journalism’ April Tucker Carlson’s venture is an encouragement. It takes courage
to stand against the media flow. —E. J, Durham, N.C.
‘Silent testimony in a region aflame’ April Thank you for your coverage in the magazine and on your website of Saeed Abedini’s unjust prison sentence in Iran. Every bit of media coverage helps return him home. —K F, Boise, Idaho
‘R-rated libraries’ April I agree with this feature story. When I realized early in my career as a public librarian how left-wing the American Library Association is, I ended my membership in favor of the Pennsylvania Library Association, which takes no political positions. I was also frustrated at the popularity of the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy. All sorts of people contribute by taxes and donations to the library, so we bought a set, but I’ve been very surprised
5/8/13 12:36 PM
Mailbag that many women who confess to be Christians were on the long waiting list. —D LR, Lebanon, Pa.
Health care for people of Biblical faith
Librarians might not have the personal power to withhold a book from someone because of “origin, age, background, or views.” But if libraries adopted a rating system, children would know what books are acceptable, parents would have an idea of their content, and librarians would have a basis for withholding books. —J N, Dallas, Pa.
‘Don’t waste your stink bugs’ April The woman who showed us our flat here in Zurich spoke only limited English. She admitted that one kind of bug got in sometimes but struggled to describe it. Finally she just held her nose and made a face. I said, “Oh, a stink bug!” She burst out laughing: “Yes! Stink bug! A good English word!” The Swiss are known for being reserved with foreigners but we bonded over stink bugs. —J S, Zurich, Switzerland
Corrections Boston Marathon runners included representatives of Run for the Fallen Maine, a group that honors all military members killed since / (“Heartbreak hill,” May , p. ). Branch Rickey was the general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers when he signed Jackie Robinson in (“Historic number,” April , p. ). Darius the Mede threw Daniel into the lion’s den (“Our daily bread,” April , p. ).
LETTERS & PHOTOS Email: mailbag@worldmag.com Write: WORLD Mailbag, PO Box , Asheville, NC - Please include full name and address. Letters may be edited to yield brevity and clarity.
If you are a committed Christian, you do not have to violate your faith by purchasing health insurance from a company that pays for abortions and treatments of conditions resulting from other immoral practices. You can live consistently with your beliefs by sharing medical needs directly with fellow believers through Samaritan Ministries’ non-insurance approach. This approach even 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 23,000* households of Samaritan Ministries share over $6 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 $355*, and is even less for one-person, two person, and single-parent (widowed/divorced) memberships.
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 February 2013
Biblical faith applied to health care www.samaritanministries.org
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5/10/13 3:50 PM
LIFE
one life:
commemorating the 40th anniversary of roe v. wade As we commemorate the 40 years since Roe v. Wade, Family Research Council offers resources both to inform and inspire. We inform about the risks and dangers of abortion and inspire pro-life advocates to make a difference.
For more information and resources, visit frc.org/onelife after Roe v. Wade
40 years
e is . . . , my nam
Hello
FAMILY RESEARCH COUNCIL
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KRIEG BARRIE
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Six women reflect on tragedy and hope.
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5/14/13 11:13 PM
Andrée Seu Peterson
Lesson from a clothes dryer Evil is never satisfied, and it has plenty of room for expansion
>>
KRIEG BARRIE
M to the basement of her apartment to transfer clothes from the washer to the dryer. I hadn’t seen communal laundry machines in a while, and as I slid quarters into the slots to slam the horizontal metal tongue into the ravenous mouth of the drying appliance, I noticed that besides the empty slots that received my coins, two on either end were plugged. “Good,” I thought. “It could be worse. I could be feeding the machine six quarters rather than four.” At the same time, I realized this was a temporary reprieve and that the unused slots anticipated a future cost increase. A time is coming when some faceless entity miles from here will decide that the beast needs more to satisfy it than it is getting now. My mind leaped to present cultural permutations and a chapter of the Old Testament. The former was the dizzying pace of world change, far faster and more morals-related than Alvin Toffler imagined in his obligatory college read, Future Shock. The Bible teaching was about culture change in a piece of real estate called Canaan that began the next phase of Israelite history: “They shall come back here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete” (Genesis :). The current occupants of Canaan were not yet as bad as they could be. How much worse was it possible to become before God saw fit to order everything that breathed annihilated? The Mosaic law, dispensed at Sinai as preparation for the takeover of dissipated Amorite territory, gives a hint as to how low you can go. We find the expected laws addressing the moral shortcomings of any people group: Honor your mother and father (Leviticus :); don’t be greedy but let the poor glean your once-gleaned grape vines (vv. -); don’t go around as a talebearer (v. ); don’t hate your brother or take revenge (vv. -). The reader naturally thinks: These people are just like us.
Email: aseupeterson@worldmag.com
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But then come the laws that seem foreign to us, or at least did until this century: Stay away from mediums (:); a man should not lie with a man (v. ); if a woman mates with an animal, kill them both (vv. -); don’t commit incest (v. ). In the past I found these laws distastefully unnecessary. Why would God enact rules against far-fetched behavior? In the first weekend of March, Yale University hosted a “sensitivity training” to foster acceptance of more unusual forms of sexuality. On Thursday the topic was the Harlem drag ball scene, featuring “the queer Black and Latino/a community of New York.” Friday was for “the vibrant community of sex worker activists,” focusing on the disgrace of U.S. policies that keep illegal sex workers in unsafe environments. On Saturday sexologist Dr. Jill McDevitt led an interactive forum that encouraged open attitudes toward bestiality, incest, and sex for pay. Now my Leviticus readings make more sense. God was not inventing perversions to legislate against: His law was a point-for-point rejection of the real sins of Canaan, ripened by extra years to an axe-ready demolition project. When C.S. Lewis wrote a book about demons, depicting them as beings whose cuisine is the souls of men, I thought it metaphor. But something undeniable is afoot in the never-satisfied appetite of sin. There is always room for the further expansion of evil in a society, just as there is room for expansion in the price of drying a load of wash. Men “fill up the measure of their sins,” while God’s slowness to act is kindness. But one day it all comes to a screeching halt. “The Lord will carry out His sentence upon the earth fully and without delay” (Romans :). Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of people should we be in lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of God, because of which the heavens will be set on fire, and the heavenly bodies will melt as they burn? Consider the clothes dryer; it tells it all. A
JUNE 1, 2013 • WORLD
5/8/13 12:26 PM
Marvin Olasky
Real commencement
Campus stalwart has spent decades helping students see beyond the shadowlands
>>
Knechtle at UT-Austin in
WORLD • JUNE 1, 2013
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universities of Rhode Island, Connecticut, Columbia, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Michigan, and Wisconsin, along with Duke, N.C. State, Florida State, and others. Knechtle differs radically from the brimstone preachers who scream that students are whores and whoremongers. He typically speaks for five minutes and then takes questions from students. I watched him years ago on the West Mall of the The University of Texas at Austin, and watched him again this year as a fluctuating audience of about listened, some with rapt attention. Knechtle responded with great self-control to most questions, stepping up the intensity only when wise guys sought his scalp: “I’m leaning more and more toward the students providing the first heat. If I provide the first heat, that can miscommunicate.” Knechtle typically uses low heat as he listens to students who want a good society but have nihilistic principles. He then pushes them to push their thinking to its logical conclusion: “I love how Nietzsche poured scorn on people who said, ‘I don’t believe in God, but I’m going to borrow from Christianity all the goodygoodies, like meaning or objective morals.’” When Knechtle propels students toward an understanding of where their theories will land them, he shows what Britain’s Edmund Burke wrote about the French Revolution more than two centuries ago: “In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows.” Knechtle says he has learned over the years that evidence of biblical accuracy does not change hearts. He asks students to make “a decision of the will, to say ‘I want to know God, if God is there.’” He recalls his brother Stuart’s experience as a Princeton student who would answer questions from his classmates until midnight, then turn to them and say, “Gentlemen, if these intellectual questions are really keeping you from Christ, we’ll pull an all-nighter. But if the real issue is ‘I want to sleep around’ … then let’s face that and stop hiding behind these intellectual smokescreens.” Knechtle says those Princeton students, and the tens of thousands he has spoken with, know that acceptance of Christ means “I’m going to have to change my lifestyle, and I don’t want to change my lifestyle.” Knechtle says, “The main reason an atheist doesn’t find God is the same reason a criminal doesn’t find the police—he’s running away.” Some students walk away from that—but those who listen can celebrate commencement. A
CHRISTIAN SANELLI
W “” because students, once schooling is done, enter “real life.” In that sense “dying” is the most radical commencement, as we move from what C.S. Lewis called the shadowlands into a far sunnier existence. In life, the commencement each of us should most remember is not an academic degree ceremony but the time we professed faith in Christ. That’s when we end our total captivity to sin and start occasionally doing things right. Given this concept of Christian commencement, who has been the most effective commencement speaker on any college campus during the past years? My redefinition knocks out a prime contender, Kermit the Frog, who received an honorary “doctorate of amphibious letters” when he spoke at Southampton College’s commencement in . It also leaves out most of this year’s luminaries, including President Barack Obama (Ohio State and Morehouse), Vice President Joe Biden (University of Pennsylvania), Julie Andrews (University of Colorado), Stephen Colbert (University of Virginia), Arianna Huffington (Smith), and Deepak Chopra (Hartwick). The preliminary college commencement schedules showed one place where students could hear a speech that would help them commence: Johns Hopkins on May , where famed neurosurgeon Ben Carson was on tap. Sadly, some students opposed that invitation because Carson stands up against two juggernauts, evolution and gay rights. Carson said he did not want to be the center of attention on a day when the students should be central, so he withdrew. What about students elsewhere? Who helps them commence? One person has, for years: Since Ronald Reagan’s first term, -year-old Cliffe Knechtle has been on the road threefourths of the time from September through May, answering student questions daily for two to four hours in outdoor public areas of MIT, Harvard, and at the
Email: molasky@worldmag.com
5/8/13 12:21 PM
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