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Contents , / ,
36 Walking wounded
The Iraq and Afghanistan wars have produced more amputees than in recent U.S. combat history, but one young warrior and his wife discover life is fragile, and love is bigger
44 Volunteer scout
Kitty Millard has become an expert at tracking down Vietnam veterans and reuniting them with long-lost buddies
48 Food and loathing
44
54
Eating disorders wreck lives and families, but grace can heal the physical, mental, and spiritual wounds
54 Hope for the poor Poverty in the United States is at a two decade high, but local groups—like the Hope Award winner—that connect work and faith to charity provide lasting relief
NOTE TO READERS: This issue went to press before Nov. . For breaking election news, please visit worldmag.com. We will analyze election results in our Dec. issue.
7 News 16 Human Race 18 Quotables 20 Quick Takes
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25 Movies & TV 28 Books 30 Q&A 32 Music
: . ;
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61 Lifestyle 64 Technology 66 Science 67 Houses of God 68 Sports 70 Money 72 Religion
LUKE SHARRETT
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3 Joel Belz 22 Janie B. Cheaney 34 Mindy Belz 75 Mailbag 79 Andrée Seu Peterson 80 Marvin Olasky
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“The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof; the world and those who dwell therein.” —Psalm 24:1 EDITORIAL editor in chief Marvin Olasky editor Mindy Belz managing editor Timothy Lamer news editor Jamie Dean senior writers Janie B. Cheaney, Susan Olasky, Andrée Seu Peterson, John Piper, Edward E. Plowman, Cal Thomas, Gene Edward Veith, Lynn Vincent reporters Emily Belz, Daniel James Devine, Angela Lu, Edward Lee Pitts correspondents Megan Basham, Mark Bergin, Anthony Bradley, Alicia M. Cohn, John Dawson, J.C. Derrick, Amy Henry, Meghan Keane, Thomas S. Kidd, Michael Leaser, Jill Nelson, Arsenio Orteza, Tiffany Owens, Stephanie Perrault, Emily Whitten mailbag editor Les Sillars executive assistant June McGraw editorial assistants Kristin Chapman, Katrina Gettman
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Opposing the truth-trashers Join a truth-telling team that takes the enemy very seriously
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KRIEG BARRIE
A told me many years ago that a publishing enterprise, to be successful, needs a good enemy. “And I don’t mean that just in general,” he said. “You need someone who, when you’re talking to your subscribers and your supporters, is easy for them to visualize with an ugly face and with horns on. Mention this adversary, and right away, your readers’ blood pressure will go up several degrees.” “Don’t let yourself fall into the trap,” he warned, “of becoming the March of Dimes after polio got licked.” So who, I ask years later, is WORLD’s enemy now? What evil people or causes do we need to keep highlighting if we’re going to persuade you to keep reading WORLD, keep renewing your subscription when it comes due, and keep sending us a few gift subscriptions now and then for your friends? The list is long. The organization that publishes WORLD was first established to oppose theological liberalism. The “liberals” in the church were the enemy. Later, as our focus shifted to a broad spectrum of worldview issues, the enemy became abortion advocates and those who devalued life in favor of personal “freedom.” The foe included statist education, which more and more by definition became godless education—from elementary to secondary to college to graduate level bureaucracies. The adversary included big socialistic–type government, overweening in its power and inclination to squeeze out personal and religious liberties in favor of the “common good.” But increasingly, during the years we’ve been publishing WORLD, it’s become clearer and clearer that the “enemy” most important for us to keep in focus is the dishonest and untrustworthy news media out there that so constantly and predictably make it hard to oppose all those other enemies. More and more, those media outlets present a false or at least badly warped view of what’s going on in the world. WORLD’s specific task is not so much to make the case for pro-life organizations; not so much to argue for choice in education; and not so much to fight for
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a free market view of economics. Our task is first, last, and always simply to tell the truth about what’s going on in the world—with full confidence that God will use that truth to highlight who the bad guys really are, to smoke them out of the hiding places the mainstream media have so generously allowed them. (And through the whole process, we never dare forget Jesus’ tough instruction to “love our enemies”!) WORLD doesn’t have to engage in propaganda or public relations. We don’t have to embellish the truth. We don’t have to make good people, good organizations, and good causes look better than they really are. All we have to do is to tell the truth. A true story—any good journalist’s most treasured product—is a powerful tool. But truth-telling is also a costly enterprise. Writing PR copy is less expensive than writing a well-sourced, carefully confirmed, and doublechecked news story. Telling the truth occasionally offends an advertiser, and we lose that revenue. But our obligation is first to our readers. We work for you, and not first and foremost for our advertisers. And yes, sometimes our truth-telling also prompts a reader to cancel his subscription. That hurts. That’s why, once a year, I’m privileged to use this space in WORLD to invite you again to help us oppose our main enemy—the truth-trashers, or anyone who puts dampers of any kind on our freedom to be truthtellers. You’ve already subscribed to WORLD. But now, your gift of , , , or more offers us liberty to encourage our reporters, writers, and editors to spread their journalistic wings in the tumultuous months just ahead. There’s a self-addressed envelope right next to this column—or even easier, visit our website, worldmag.com, and click the “donate” button. Some readers, noting this comes toward the end of the tax year, regularly provide gifts of , or ,. And every year, I am bold to see if there might be a few of you ready to commit to a three-year gift of , annually. Those who say “yes” to that challenge, I’m guessing, are folks who take the enemy very seriously—but who take even more seriously the power of truth-telling to put that enemy on the run. To all of you: Welcome to our truth-telling team. A
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Dispatches News > Human Race > Quotables > Quick Takes
Unprecedented Superstorm Sandy leaves waves of destruction and weeks of cleanup
ALLISON JOYCE/GETTY IMAGES
BY EMILY BELZ in New York
>>
S from Haiti to New York City—at least once it came ashore along the New Jersey coast on Oct. . It shut down all air travel in the Northeast— including hundreds of flights from overseas—and brought floods onto the runways of New York’s LaGuardia and John F. Kennedy airports. It shut down the New York Stock Exchange for the first time since the / attacks. It shut down the federal government for two days and prompted officials at the Labor Department to consider delaying the critical final jobs report before the election—all unprecedented. The massive natural disaster slammed to a halt the presidential campaigns for a day and brought President Obama off the trail and back to the Oval Office. In the critical final days of the campaign, Superstorm Sandy overwhelmed all other news.
For a period, the storm marooned Manhattan and one of the largest population centers in the United States from the rest of the world, flooding tunnels and prompting authorities to shut down all bridges into the city. For New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, one of the largest transit systems in the world, the storm was the worst in the subway’s -year history. The MTA shut down trains for days and at press time had no estimate of when it would be running again: “Our subway system and salt water do not mix,” said MTA chairman Joseph Lhota. In the flooded Queens neighborhood of Breezy Point, the storm sparked a fire that wiped out at least homes. It tossed a tanker on the shore of Staten Island. It brought unseasonal snow to the Appalachians. Sandy was miles wide and cut power to at least . million people. It swallowed up Atlantic City, DISASTER: Water N.J., where it made its most floods the Plaza direct hit, and washed Shops in Manhattan.
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10/30/12 5:24 PM
Dispatches > News
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LOOKING AHEAD UN follies With three spots
Eclipse
The moon will align just right to create a total eclipse of the sun for residents of the sparsely populated northern area of Australia on Nov. and . A broad swath of Pacific regions such as New Zealand and southern South America expect to be in the moon’s penumbra and will be treated to a partial eclipse.
open for Latin American and Caribbean countries and only three nations on the ballot, Venezuela seems a shoo-in to win a seat on the UN Human Rights Council in elections on Nov. . Last summer, human rights advocates testified against Venezuela’s bid, noting that an authoritarian state ought not serve in such a capacity. But UN diplomats have never shied away from hypocrisy. China, Russia, and Cuba presently sit on the council.
Thanksgiving football
For the first time, three television networks will enjoy a slice of Thanksgiving football pie. The NFL’s newest television agreement with Fox, CBS, and NBC allows for each to broadcast a game to fans on Nov. . Detroit hosts Houston for the noon game on CBS, while Washington travels to Dallas for the p.m. game on Fox. NBC’s night game will feature the Jets hosting New England.
Black Friday
The day after Thanksgiving is regularly the busiest shopping day of the year, earning the nickname “Black Friday” for putting retailers “in the black.” Nov. also marks “Buy Nothing Day,” promoted by environmental and consumer groups in what they say is a protest against the commercialization of the holidays.
VETERAN: ANTHONY BEHAR/SIPA PRESS/AP • VENEZUELA: DAVID FERNANDEZ/EPA/NEWSCOM • ECLIPSE: SAM YEH/AFP/GETTYIMAGES • NFL: HANDOUT • BLACK FRIDAY: JOHN MINCHILLO/AP
away famous boardwalks in Ocean City, Md. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg called it a “once-in-a-long-time storm.” Manhattan went dark when the storm hit Oct. , with midtown and lower Manhattan losing power. Times Square’s outrageous lights still glared over empty streets. A power substation exploded in lower Manhattan. Battery Park was under water and water gushed into the cavity where construction continues on the new World Trade Center. With emergency personnel overwhelmed by calls, they boated to stranded citizens in Staten Island and other boroughs as the floods peaked late Monday evening at the high tide, some rescues taking place via Twitter as one New York Fire Department dispatcher monitored the social network. “We don’t get a lot of rowing experience,” noted one New York policeman as a crew rowed over waterlogged streets to tie a rope to a stranded vehicle before it floated away. At New York University’s Tisch Hospital, one of the city’s largest, backup generators failed after power went out—a nightmare scenario for patients relying on machines like ventilators. In the darkness, the staff carried babies from the neonatal intensive care unit down flights of stairs to a fleet of ambulances waiting to evacuate them to other hospitals with power. Relief efforts took off the next morning— and are likely to continue into the weeks ahead. Three percent of New Yorkers identify themselves as churchgoing Christians, but that makes the Christian community tightknit. City churches worship together once a month in a service called Citywide Worship. That translated to an immediate network of churches responding to the storm, even as many of them were flooded themselves. On Oct. , several, including the network under Trinity Grace Church, had already set up relief funds. At Redeemer Presbyterian Church’s Upper West Side congregation, members offered their homes to those without. Hope for New York, affiliated with Redeemer, was coordinating relief efforts among churches—most of them in the city neighborhood base. In Sunnyside, Queens, Grace Fellowship pastor Jon Storck simply walked out with his congregants into that neighborhood to offer their services to any in need. A
Veterans Day
As the United States honors its veterans on Nov. , many of those veterans are not doing well in the struggling economy. While Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers reveal veterans as a whole are outperforming non-veterans in the job market, veterans of the two post/ wars are faring much worse. The unemployment rate for post-/ veterans was . percent as of September.
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10/30/12 5:27 PM
Rated in the Top 2% of U.S. Universities Regent University: Virginia’s Only Recipient of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni’s Highest Rating.
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Regent University is one of only 21 universities nationwide to receive an “A” rating by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA)—from more than 1,000 schools reviewed—and Virginia’s only university to earn this honor.* What standards of academic excellence secured ACTA’s highest rating? The commitment to critical core subjects including composition, literature, U.S. government and history, economics, mathematics, and science. From programs that demand critical thought to renowned faculty who inspire transformed character, Regent University is shaping accomplished students to make a lasting and positive difference. At Regent, preparing well-rounded future leaders isn’t an elective. It’s essential. Discover how Regent can prepare you for today’s marketplace. *Source: www.whatwilltheylearn.org
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10/24/12 3:37 PM
Dispatches > News
Documentary dustup
friend or foe? Afghan national police officers.
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drama: A couple walk by a poster for 2016: Obama’s America (top); D’Souza.
Insider fire A man in an Afghan police uniform killed two U.S. Special Operations soldiers, bringing to 55 the number of coalition troops killed in such “insider” attacks this year. The man escaped after killing the soldiers. This year Afghan soldiers and policemen have shot more coalition troops than the Taliban has directly, according to The Wall Street Journal. The Taliban has specifically called for the insider attacks to frustrate U.S. efforts to build relationships with locals and develop Afghan security. A wedge is opening between the two sides: In the wake of attacks last month American military leadership limited U.S. joint patrols with Afghan forces. U.S. troops will hand the country’s security over to Afghan forces when they leave in 2014.
movie theater: PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP/Getty Images • D’Souza: Alberto Cristofari/A3/Contrasto/Redux • afghanistan: Rahmat Gul/ap
Following disclosures first reported by WORLD that King’s College President Dinesh D’Souza was engaged to a woman named Denise Odie Joseph while still married to his wife, D’Souza found himself in hot water not only with his college but also his partners in filmmaking. On Oct. 22, investors in the documentary 2016: Obama’s America sued D’Souza in San Diego Superior Court. The film, starring and directed by D’Souza, generated more than $32 million at the box office, making it the second-highest grossing political documentary in history (after Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11.) The suit charged D’Souza with breach of contract, claiming D’Souza used “revenues from the movie for projects unrelated to the movie.” The suit also alleged that D’Souza paid Joseph as his assistant “in order to justify spending funds on Joseph that were intended for the movie production and exploitation.” The investors also asked for a temporary restraining order against D’Souza to prevent further alleged diversion of funds. In a written 16-page response to the suit, D’Souza said the suit contained “many patently false statements.” D’Souza did not respond to a request for an interview. Superior Court Judge Kevin Enright denied the request for a restraining
order, and some media outlets incorrectly reported that the suit had been dismissed. But attorney Joseph Leventhal, who represents the Rancho Esperanza corporation formed by investors in the movie, said, “The lawsuit is still very much alive.” Meanwhile, at The King’s College, board chairman Andy Mills assumed the position of interim president after the board accepted D’Souza’s resignation as president on Oct. 18. “After careful consultation with the board and with Dinesh, we have accepted his resignation to allow him to attend to his personal and family needs,” Mills said in a prepared statement. “We thank him for his service and significant contribution to the College over the last two years.” When D’Souza came to The King’s College two years ago, the board of trustees hoped he would dramatically raise the profile of the school. He certainly did that: enrollment grew nearly 50 percent during the past two years, to nearly 500 students. But D’Souza also brought controversy. Within weeks of his appointment, D’Souza’s book The Roots of Obama’s Rage made The New York Times bestseller list. The book drew criticism—and not just from liberals— for its speculative theory that anticolonialism and a desire to “downsize America” drives Barack Obama’s political ideology. The book spawned the documentary at the center of the October lawsuit.
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10/24/12 3:41 PM
Dispatches > News
Over before it started
Medical services?
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Christian, and had to that point been somewhat protected from the worst fighting. By nightfall on Oct. 26, with reports of a car bomb, shelling, and gun battles, the daily toll stood at 70 deaths (down from the average of 150, according to the U.K.-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights).
Nigeria’s terror A Sunday morning Mass at St. Rita’s Catholic Church in northern Nigeria on Oct. 28 ended with a suicide bomber driving an explosives-laden vehicle through a church wall and detonating its payload. The explosion ripped a hole in the wall and roof of the church and killed at least seven people, injuring about 100. The attack in the city of Kaduna bore the marks of similar massacres by Boko Haram, an Islamic terrorist organization that has demanded Christians living in the predominantly Muslim north convert to Islam or face death. The group is responsible for at least 690 deaths this year, often during attacks on worship services. Nigerians living in the United States have called for the U.S. government to bring more attention to the escalating violence. The Christian Association of Nigerian-Americans (CANAN) asked the U.S. State Department to designate Boko Haram a terrorist organization. CANAN chairman James Fadele said the terrorist designation would send a serious message to political leaders and financial backers of Boko Haram. Fadele spoke at a Washington press conference on Oct. 23—three days after Nigerian authorities arrested a senior member of Boko Haram at the home of a Nigerian senator. The arrest deepened suspicions of official involvement with the terrorist group.
syria: AFP/Getty Images • nigeria: ap
The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals blocked Indiana’s law defunding Planned Parenthood Oct. 23, continuing an injunction that has been in place since the law passed in 2011. The appeals court ruled that the state couldn’t block Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood because the organization provides medical services that aren’t abortions. But according to a LifeNews’ analysis of Planned Parenthood’s own 2009 numbers, Planned Parenthood provided abortions to 97.6 percent of pregnant clients, while less than 2.4 percent of pregnant women received non-abortion services including adoption and prenatal care. Planned Parenthood of Indiana receives about $3 million in federal funds every year. The ruling came from a threejudge panel so the state can either appeal the decision to the full court or go straight to the Supreme Court. At least a dozen states have tried to block federal funding to Planned Parenthood in the last two years, according to the Susan B. Anthony List.
TRIAL BY FIRE: St. Kevork Church burnt during fighting in Aleppo.
10/31/12 9:16 AM
Luke Sharrett/The New York Times/redux
Hope flickered for Syrians trapped in the country’s civil war when the government announced a four-day ceasefire on Oct. 25 ahead of the Muslim holiday Eid al-Adha. It was the first truce adopted in the 19-monthold conflict, and signaled a potential breakthrough by UN-Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi—receiving, unlike other UN Security Council resolutions concerning Syria, support from Russia and China, key allies of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. But the optimism proved momentary, and reports of stepped-up fighting, particularly in the embattled northern city of Aleppo, never ceased. Rebels used a potential government pullback to move into neighborhoods of Aleppo’s old city that are predominantly
Christians report being increasingly caught in the conflict. In a rare interview with Western outlets, Syrian Orthodox Archbishop of Aleppo Gregorios Yohanna Ibrahim said rebels had taken control of his complex, housing a church and school. He said, “Syria is not Iraq, is not Egypt, is not Libya. … The coming constitution should mention all the rights of the religions. It should contain an opportunity to act in a positive way for all society.” But targeted attacks continue: A Greek Orthodox priest was found slain on Oct. 28 after he was kidnapped a week before near Damascus. Eyewitnesses said Fadi Jamal Haddad of St. Elias Church in Qatana had been “horribly tortured.” Another pastor in Damascus said he is receiving threats also, most recently a dead bird left in his backyard, its head cut off and laying beside the bird along with a knife. Another Christian leaving Damascus said in an email, “Please encourage your readers to pray for the Christians in Syria. They are being slaughtered.”
A new season A bitterly divided Supreme Court gets back to work By emily belz in Washington, D.C.
AFP/Getty Images
Luke Sharrett/The New York Times/redux
>>
After Chief Justice John Roberts read his shocking decision upholding President Obama’s healthcare law last June, Justice Anthony Kennedy read his dissent accusing Roberts of “vast judicial overreaching,” and then the 2011 term was over. Construction crews started intense renovations of the court building. Many justices left Washington for summer teaching posts in Europe. They didn’t do interviews, and the media were left to speculate about the aftermath of such a bitterly divided decision. Trusted Supreme Court reporters wrote that some of the conservative justices weren’t on speaking terms with Roberts. Justice Antonin Scalia made a rare public appearance on CNN and denied that he and Roberts, at least, had had a falling out. When the new term began last month, the press corps returned to analyze every tone of voice from the post-healthcare-decision justices. Had the dynamics between the nine changed? And did the healthcare decision signal Roberts’ drift to the left? At the first hearings of the term, there was no sign of animosity between the justices. They were as combative as ever on the matters in the cases, but not with each other. And on Oct. 10, at the biggest case of the term so far, Roberts showed no sign of drifting leftward. Abigail Fisher v. University of Texas weighs the University of Texas at Austin’s (UT) affirmative action admissions process, and could transform college admissions programs across the country. The justices, including Roberts, appeared ready to curb the ability to consider race in the college admissions process—what’s known as “affirmative action.” UT uses race as a factor in its “Personal Achievement
Index” used to judge applicants. Abigail Fisher, a white Texan who wasn’t accepted into the school in 2008, sued, saying the process put her at a disadvantage. A district court and the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the program. But the world of higher academia collectively spasmed when the high court agreed to hear the case,
because that could mean the court wants to revise the 5th Circuit ruling. More than 150 colleges and universities, public and private, filed briefs supporting UT’s program. Colleges have built their admissions processes on a 2003 Supreme Court ruling, Grutter v. Bollinger, which allows race as a consideration in admissions as long as it is one generalized factor among others. That was deemed constitutional in order to provide the “educational benefits of diversity.” At the Oct. 10 arguments, the justices said over and over that they had no idea how to determine when a
day in court: Abigail Fisher (center) outside the Supreme Court.
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school was sufficiently “diverse,” which would no longer justify affirmative action. Racial discrimination is subject to the strictest constitutional scrutiny in the courts, so if the “compelling interest” of diversity no longer exists, affirmative action falls. Roberts seemed ready to roll back the program, saying he saw no definite limits to universities’ power to use race in admissions to achieve a “critical mass” of diversity. He appeared to have Justices Scalia, Samuel Alito, and Kennedy on his side. (Justice Clarence Thomas never speaks at arguments.) Justice Elena Kagan, a former solicitor general under President Obama, recused herself from the case. With eight justices remaining, a deadlocked decision would mean the 5th Circuit’s decision upholding the Texas program stands. The court has yet to agree to hear major cases beyond the college admissions case. One potentially important case, Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, may decide whether f oreign corporations that commit human rights abuses in other countries can face charges in U.S. courts. Other cases are more esoteric— one debates whether a houseboat counts as a boat or a house. But the court is likely to hear at least one major case regarding traditional marriage laws, though it hasn’t officially accepted any of those cases. Awaiting the court’s consideration are appeals to California’s Proposition 8 as well as challenges to the federal Defense of Marriage Act. Lower courts have disagreed in their rulings on marriage, almost guaranteeing a high court hearing. But the court may be waiting for more cases before deciding which one to take. A
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10/30/12 6:08 PM
Dispatches > News
All in the family
A New York Times exposé of possible corruption surrounding China’s prime minister, Wen Jiabao, proved embarrassing to the country’s Communist Party. Though “Grandpa Wen” has crafted himself a reputation as a populist and spoken of his impoverished childhood, Times reporter David Barboza uncovered a partially disguised network of investments indicating Wen’s family members—including his wife, son, brother, and -year-old mother—have controlled assets worth . billion or more. Much of the family wealth accumulated after Wen became vice prime minister in , suggesting family members used clout to land lucrative business deals. (Lawyers for the family called the report “untrue” and denied Wen influenced any deals.) Wen has previously condemned the abuse of government power by officials’ family members, and Communist Party officials are trying to cultivate a reputation for rooting out corruption. Government censors tried to stop the report from reaching Chinese citizens: Only hours after the Times posted the story, they blocked the paper’s English and Chinese-language websites.
Oil optimism
The United States is poised to become the world’s largest oil producer
>>
I , one bright spot grows: U.S. oil production has risen sharply and could increase percent this year, driven by high oil prices and new drilling technology. Industry experts say they’re stunned by the new domestic oil boom. It may accelerate over the next four years regardless of White House policy. A study released in October by the research firm IHS predicted annual U.S. “tight oil” production—oil extracted from rock formations—will increase nearly percent by . Hydraulic “fracking,” the same breakthrough drilling technique responsible for the recent natural gas boom, has unlocked shale oil deposits in Texas, North Dakota, and other states. The technology works by pumping sand and fluids underground at extreme pressure, cracking rock layers and releasing gas and liquid hydrocarbons. By , U.S. oil and gas production will generate billion in federal and state lease and tax revenues, and add , jobs to the economy. The Energy Department predicts total U.S. hydrocarbon production (including biofuels) will reach . million barrels a day next year. That would position the United States to become the world’s largest oil producer within the next few years, unless Russia or Saudi Arabia raises its output. The oil surge is a paradox given the Obama record: Although permit approvals to drill on federal land fell by one-third under the president, he has presided over a percent increase in domestic production. However, much of the increased oil drilling is occurring on private and state lands, which the president has little control over. “When the president sort of claims credit for the rise during his term, he’s being disingenuous,” says Kenneth P. Green, an energy policy analyst at the American Enterprise Institute. Rather than speed up production, his administration has produced “moratoria on drilling, slower permitting, less leasing, less land being available for leasing in the first place.” The boom, spurred by expensive oil and fracking technology, is thriving in spite of those obstacles.
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JIABAO: HOW HWEE YOUNG/AP • PUMPJACK: CHARLIE RIEDEL/AP
Many Christians pray for persecuted believers year-round, but advocacy groups mark particular days each year for focused prayer. The World Evangelical Alliance, a N.Y.-based group, encouraged Christians to observe the International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church on Nov. (See “Not forsaken,” Nov. , ). Other advocacy groups—like Open Doors USA—designated Nov. as a day for American churches to observe the day of prayer, while still others used Nov. , All Saints’ Day. Said D.C.-based International Christian Concern: “What matters is that you take the time to educate your congregation about the plight of their persecuted brothers and sisters.”
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10/29/12 10:02 AM
Dispatches > Human Race NAMED Care Net appointed Roland C. Warren to succeed Melinda Delahoyde as president and CEO. Warren served more than a decade as president of the National Fatherhood Initiative.
War II bomber pilot, he opposed the Vietnam War and promoted social liberalism.
CROWNED Students at West Feliciana High School in Louisiana on Oct. crowned
Guangcheng (left) and Bale
SENTENCED A Milan court sentenced former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to four years in prison for tax fraud over a scam involving the purchase of U.S. film rights. The scandalridden former head of state, , still has two appeal levels remaining and may not go to jail.
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DIED Three former Democratic contenders for the White House—Sens. Walter Mondale, John Kerry, and Gary Hart—joined South Dakotans to pay respect to Sen. George McGovern, whose presidential campaign energized the liberal vanguard of the Democratic Party. McGovern, whose office was targeted by President Richard Nixon in a Washington burglary that spiraled into the Watergate scandal, died Oct. at age . A decorated World
Mary Margaret Burns, a classmate with Down syndrome, as this year’s homecoming queen. Her selection was no prank, a fellow classmate on the homecoming court told American Conservative blogger Rod Dreher: “All of us on court wanted Mary Margaret to be crowned queen. … She was not chosen because of her disability, she was chosen because of the huge heart she has and the ability to make anyone smile.”
DIED Harvard biblical scholar Frank Moore Cross, who helped to supervise findings in Qumran that became known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, died Oct. at . Moore was among a small group of scholars given access to the scrolls and he published his findings in . He went on to trace the evolution of ancient script: “That we know that a particular scroll comes from .. and not .. is almost entirely due to the study of the scripts and their development that he worked out,” Harvard professor Peter Machinist told The New York Times.
GUANGCHENG: JOHN MINCHILLO/AP • BERLUSCONI: FILIPPO MONTEFORTE/AFP/GETTYIMAGES • MCGOVERN: CLIFF OWEN/AP • BURNS: HANDOUT •CROSS: HANDOUT
MEET UP Actor Christian Bale tried last December to visit Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng, then under house arrest, and was roughed up by thugs who prevented him from entering Chen’s village. But on Oct. the Oscar winner finally met the blind opponent of forced abortions—who made a dramatic escape from China and arrived in the United States last May. Bale presented him with an award at the annual gala of Human Rights First: “[Chen] had exposed a program of forced abortion and sterilization in Shandong. A program of forced abortion means that women are being dragged from their homes against their will. They are being forced to have abortions, sometimes late-term—imagine that—with some women reportedly dying in the process. Now this is true horror.”
GUNNED DOWN Authorities accuse Floyd Palmer, , a former church maintenance man, of shooting and killing Greg McDowell, , on Oct. as he led a morning prayer service for a group of at Creflo Dollar’s World Changers Church International in Atlanta. Palmer wounded a man at a Baltimore mosque shooting in , according to police reports, and was committed to a psychiatric hospital for a year.
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Dispatches > Quotables
‘It’s very difficult to look at churches being blown up and say this is tit-for-tat. One side is doing the killing, and one side is doing the dying.’ Emmanuel Ogebe of the Christian Association of Nigerian-Americans disputing media reports of Christian retaliation to radical Muslim attacks in Nigeria.
‘$2.7 million’
‘Sandy is pretty furious at Atlantic City. She must have lost a bet or something.’ Thomas Foley, chief of emergency services for Atlantic City, N.J., after flood waters overwhelmed the city 10 hours before Hurricane Sandy even made landfall on Oct. 29.
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The cost for booking half the rooms at the JW Marriott for the 2013 presidential inauguration. The four-night inaugural package at the Washington, D.C., hotel includes 300 rooms, eight suites, access to the parade route, $800,000 in food and beverages, and a nightly keepsake.
‘It’s insensitive to say my son is not very optimal—he is also very dead. I’ve not been “optimal” since he died.’ Pat Smith, mother of slain American diplomat Sean Smith who died in the terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. Smith was responding to President Obama’s remark to Jon Stewart on Comedy Central that “if four Americans get killed, it’s not optimal” during a discussion about the attack.
Atlantic City: Seth Wenig/ap • Bernardinis: FILIPPO MONTEFORTE/AFP/Getty Images • Ogebe: © 2012 Jubilee Campaign • JW Marriott: Gary Fabiano/Sipa Press/Newscom • Obama & Stewart: Jason Reed/REUTERS/newscom
Bernardo De Bernardinis, one of six Italian scientists and an ex-government official convicted of manslaughter for providing “inaccurate, incomplete and contradictory” information about tremors that led up to a massive earthquake on April 6, 2009. The scientists, according to prosecutors, were “too reassuring” prior to the 6.3 magnitude earthquake that killed 309 people in L’Aquila. If an appeal fails, the scientists will face six years in prison.
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‘I believe myself to be innocent before God and men.’
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Atlantic City: Seth Wenig/ap • Bernardinis: FILIPPO MONTEFORTE/AFP/Getty Images • Ogebe: © 2012 Jubilee Campaign • JW Marriott: Gary Fabiano/Sipa Press/Newscom • Obama & Stewart: Jason Reed/REUTERS/newscom
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Dispatches > Quick Takes
The intruder that broke into Ron Philipose’s home in Northeast Philadelphia weighed pounds, left a trail of broken glass and blood, and, when confronted by police, refused to leave. Philipose, his wife, and their -week-old son were not home at the time of the break-in, but NBC Philadelphia reports that police received a call reporting sounds of breaking glass in the house. When police arrived, they found the floor of the house covered in glass and blood, and in a back room the intruder: a large deer that had broken a fence and a window to get into the house. Police were unable to get the animal out of the house, and wildlife officials ultimately euthanized the deer.
If there’s one thing the Psychic Friends Network ought to be certain of—but isn’t—it’s the future of the company. In documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, PSN, a publicly-traded company famous for featuring Dionne Warwick in its infomercials, announced that it is hoping to earn million in revenue for the fiscal year. But there’s a caveat: “Undue reliance should not be placed on the forward-looking statements,” it says, “because PFN can give no assurance that they will prove to be correct.”
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At first glance, Keith Levasseur’s Baltimore Marathon time of :: doesn’t seem all that impressive. But consider Levasseur’s feet before judging his feat. Sure Levasseur only finished th in the Oct. race, but he did so wearing flip-flops rather than running shoes. The -year-old former Marine, who noted that his feet and quadriceps were extra sore after the race, said he ran the race in sandals in order to earn a spot in Guinness World Records for an entry entitled, “fastest marathon completed in flip-flops.”
BIKE: BAZ RATNER/REUTERS/LANDOV • REDSKINS LOGO: HANDOUT • ILLUSTRATION: KRIEG BARRIE • LEVASSEUR: COURTESY OF STRIDERSRACINGTEAM.BLOGSPOT.COM • CRYSTAL BALL: STOCKBYTE/GETTY IMAGES
Readers thumbing through pages of the alternative weekly Washington City Paper for coverage of the NFL’s Washington Redskins may be confused in the weeks to come. Nodding to Native American groups that object to the term as racially insensitive, the newspaper announced it would drop all references to “Redskins” in its pages and announced a reader contest to rename the team. The City Paper position resembles the long-time editorial stance of the Kansas City Star, which for years has instructed reporters to refrain from using the Redskins moniker. After City Paper announced it would drop the reference, Star public editor Derek Donovan defended his paper’s position. “I remain unconvinced by every argument I’ve ever heard that the name is not a racial epithet, plain and simple,” Donovan wrote. Donovan’s paper does reference its hometown NFL team as the “Chiefs,” but team officials have noted the club is named for former Mayor Harold “Chief” Bartle.
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BRIDGE: HANDOUT • BIG TEX: CHRISTIAN BRADFORD/REUTERS/NEWSCOM • ACCIDENT: SYLVESTER WASHINGTON JR./BEAVER COUNTY TIMES • EY’S BOAT: HANDOUT/REUTERS/LANDOV • EY (INSET): BRAD HUNTER/NEWSPIX
An Israeli inventor believes he is about to change transportation forever. Izhar Gafni says he’s perfected plans to create the world’s first mass-produced cardboard bicycle. Made without the use of metals and using cardboard except for recycled rubber for tires and car timing belts in place of chains, Gafni says his cardboard bicycle will be so cheap to make, he can practically give it away for free. Gafni’s business partner, Nimrod Elmish, insists that since their bicycle uses “green” building materials, government grants and rebates would effectively bring production cost of the bicycle to zero. Gafni said that if consumers believe the cardboard bike is rugged and safe, it could become popular in many third-world countries.
bike: BAZ RATNER/REUTERS/LANDOV • redskins logo: handout • illustration: krieg barrie • Levasseur: courtesy of stridersracingteam.blogspot.com • crystal ball: Stockbyte/getty images
bridge: handout • big tex: Christian Bradford/REUTERS/newscom • accident: Sylvester Washington Jr./Beaver County Times • ey’s boat: HANDOUT/REUTERS/LANDOV • ey (inset): Brad Hunter/Newspix
French dip It likely will never be built, but if one French design firm has its way, crossing the Seine River in Paris will become a lot more fun. Created as a response to a challenge to bring more mirth into architecture, designers with Atelier Zündel Cristea produced an idea for a trampoline bridge that would allow pedestrians to bound across the Seine. And though the concept is dangerous—what with the eventuality that bridge crossers would be doublebounced into the river—the design was good enough to take third place in an ArchTriumph competition.
Cowboy cooked Texas’ biggest and most iconic cowboy burst into flames on Oct. 19, marking the end of an era for Big Tex, the State Fair of Texas’ 52-foot giant greeter. He was 60. Officials with the State Fair said the huge statue, first erected on the Dallas fair grounds in 1952, suffered an electrical short in his boot that caused a fire that eventually engulfed the statue from his size 70 boots to his 75-gallon hat. The fire, which occurred on the day of the statue’s 60th anniversary at the fair, caused an outpouring of real and mock sympathy, with one local funeral home even hosting a memorial service for Big Tex. But State Fair officials insist that Big Tex is not dead, saying a bigger, better version will appear in time for the opening of the 2013 event.
Rolled and rocked An Oct. 23 crash in Patterson Township, Pa., involved a school bus that hit two utility poles and a truck that rolled onto its side, but nobody was injured. Part of the reason: Nobody was inside either vehicle. The parking brake reportedly stopped working on the parked bus, which began to roll downhill. The bus hit a parked truck, which also rolled downhill until it flipped onto its side. The bus then hit the utility poles and came to a stop near the porch of a Patterson Township house.
Help from above After spending 16 hours adrift at sea, Glenn Ey (shown at right with his mother) of Queensland, Australia, has an eagle-eyed first officer of a passenger jet to thank for his rescue. The Australian yachtsman, 44, initially got in trouble on Oct. 17 when he became stranded about 300 miles off the coast of Sydney. When the search for the missing yachtsman began hours later, Australian search and rescue officials called in help from international airline pilots flying into Sydney. The crew of an Air Canada 777 decided to drop to 5,000 feet to help conduct the search and just as the jumbo jet banked hard to the right to continue on to Sydney, the plane’s co-pilot spotted the lost yacht. Once the crew radioed in the location, search and rescue officials were able to rescue the lost seaman.
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Janie B. Cheaney
The backward path forward In moments of terror and great sorrow, remember what the Lord has done
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P . “When I remember God, I moan; when I meditate, my spirit faints.” From the first words, we know this is going to be one of those laments—a downer. The writer is trying to reach God through overwhelming events. Time has stopped, crushing all options under the weight of the present disaster. “You hold my eyelids open” on a stubborn view that never changes or softens. As I write, a crucial election lies ahead, national solvency hangs by a thread, and the character of our country is precariously balanced. That’s the big news. The small news is an acquaintance with grief. Personal friends and relatives have suffered profound loss, and while I struggle for words to comfort them, my own vulnerability comes to mind. Life is perilous by nature—the next minute could plunge any of us into a pit of despair. When we’re down there, nothing seems more real than darkness, or more illusory than light. Sometimes we have to go back to go forward, as anyone knows who’s been stuck in a snow bank. A man loses his wife; his closest companion for years, suddenly gone, and he can’t yet imagine the future. So he reaches for memory: their first date, their first kiss; what she wore, how she laughed. A wise comforter will let him talk, back up, remember.
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KRIEG BARRIE
Sooner or later it will be my turn to grieve. When that happens, “Let me remember my song in the night; let me meditate in my heart.” Let me remember when grass was green and the air was sweet, when the Lord blew into my life and turned it golden, when everything made sense. Back when I belonged. Let me ask my heart a series of questions, gently probing. Look, heart: You knew His love. Does this present darkness mean love has ceased? You’ve experienced the fulfillment of His promises—has He suddenly reneged? “Has God forgotten to be gracious?” But what kind of question is that? God is gracious. Anything He is, He will continue to be, for He can’t be false to His character. The Psalmist follows his own memory lane to the point where it joins a thoroughfare. We call this history—not a museum of dead artifacts but a family album of great-grandmothers in baby caps and sternfaced pioneers. Salvation history belongs to us as much as to the ancient Israelites; we’re all fugitive slaves escaping our Egyptian overlords. Straight ahead the Red Sea churns. The endless ebb and flow of water leaves no track, points no sign; we’re frozen in consternation. But as time passes we feel the wind picking up, the waves recoiling. The water surges and the weight of a timeless, sleepless burden surrenders before the might of God. The sea sketches a path. The moment unlocks its grip and we begin to see a future. If you’re in the pit, close your eyes. Seek Him in your memory. Follow Him back through the years. He created time so we could find ourselves and follow its threads to Him. It’s the only way—even though eternity is planted in our hearts, we ourselves are planted here in the thick of things, where trouble and trial grow our souls. In every believer’s memory there is a moment of terror (real or anticipated), when the worst thing we could imagine comes true: the child dies, the man leaves, the project fails, the nation staggers—and down we go into the pit where nothing exists but the dreadful present and the ceaseless, muttering waves. Pharaoh’s army, all bristling with spears, is upon us. “Fear not, stand firm, and see the salvation of the Lord” (Exodus :). If the way forward is unfathomable, then go back. Locate Him in your memory, and stand firm. “Your way was through the sea, your path through the great waters; yet your footprints were unseen.” The tracks of the Lord are clearest when we look behind us. In memory, He clears a path. A
Email: jcheaney@worldmag.com
10/26/12 9:52 PM
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Reviews
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Movies TV > Books > QA > Music
Bond drive MOVIE: Skyfall offers as a symbol of Britain, the West, and “the old ways” that are sometimes best
BY MEGAN BASHAM
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I ’ like Skyfall—the rd entry in the quintessentially British, quintessentially suave, quintessentially formulaic James Bond franchise—would have much light to shed on American presidential politics. Yet one of the central exchanges of the film could easily go down as the defining theme of the Oct. foreign policy debate. In the scene, which manages to both refresh the Bond image and reground it in Ian Fleming tradition, Bond meets his new quartermaster at an art gallery. Wonderfully played by Ben Wishaw from BBC’s The Hour, Q is everything we expect from a modern intelligence whiz— young, snarky, stylish by virtue of his
Email: mbasham@worldmag.com
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indifference to style, and terribly, terribly forward thinking. In short, he is everything the old guard spy sitting beside him is not. As they gaze at a painting of a decommissioned military craft, Q comments, “This one always makes me rather melancholy—the grand old warship being ignominiously hauled away for scrap.” We see in Bond’s eyes that he knows the observation could just as easily apply to him. The very idea of is to bayonets and horses what Q is to nuclear subs. He is a relic of days almost past, and the question hanging over the film is whether the country and culture Bond represents will pass away with him. This great standoff takes shape after an anonymous criminal manages to steal a drive containing the names of every undercover NATO officer embedded within a terrorist organization. When their real identities start appearing next to their pictures on the web, the
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Reviews > Movies & TV
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MOVIE
Cloud Atlas by Emily Belz
f ortitude”—races to protect bureaucrats as likely to Cloud Atlas, based on the 2004 novel by David sneer at him as thank him, Mitchell, tells six different stories in 172 minutes: that of M defends her ministry a sick American aboard a ship in 1849, a gay composer in with the words of Tennyson: the 1930s, a danger-seeking journalist in the 1970s, an Tho’ much is taken, much out-of-luck publisher in the present day (the best plot of the abides; and though six, featuring a hilarious Jim Broadbent), a human clone in We are not now that 2144, and a preyed-upon goat herder in a distant future. strength which in old days You wonder how the three directors can keep all those Moved earth and heaven; stories bobbing in and out and alongside each other but they that which we are, we are; do, masterfully, and without tying all the plots into neat One equal temper of bows. In the meantime the film earns its R rating with a lot of heroic hearts, graphic sex—one of the first scenes is a man in bed with Made weak by time and another man—and gore. We watch one character bash a head fate, but strong in will in with a wrench and cannibals doing what cannibals do. To strive, to seek, to find, The clone storyline is the most disturbing, and the most and not to yield. “pro-life.” In a futuristic Korea, the government creates It’s no spoiler to reveal genetically perfect clones to serve as waitresses and then that the film ends with slaughters them to harvest their organs for “pure-bloods,” Bond standing on top of the the humans born naturally. The heroine, a clone named MI6 building, M’s treasured Sonmi-451, becomes aware of her humanity and states at English bulldog figurine in one point: “No matter if you’re born in a tank or a room, his hand, the Union Jack we are all pure blood.” fluttering high in the sky The directors’ storytelling is overshadowed by their behind him. Once the preachiness on reincarnation. One character tells another steamy PG-13 love scenes that he believes in reincarnation, then he meets her in a and all the jolly callbacks to future life. The movie is about that subtle the whole three Bond films hours. Every few minutes, a past have character explains karma with a flickered by, line like, “Our destinies are all this is the connected.” For the weekend of Oct. 26-28 image we are The audience got the point according to Box Office Mojo left with. already, since the same actors play cautions: Quantity of sexual (S), violent What, it seems different roles throughout time (V), and foul-language (L) content on a 0-10 to ask, does an (with varying degrees of success— scale, with 10 high, from kids-in-mind.com icon like James Tom Hanks’ attempts at nonS V L Bond mean in Midwestern American accents are 1̀ Argo* R..........................................3 6 7 a world withdistractingly bad). Christian audi2̀ Cloud Atlas* R...........................8 8 7 out borders, ences flocked to the Wachowski 3̀ Hotel Transylvania PG..........2 4 2 in wars withsiblings’ earlier offering, 1999’s 4̀ Paranormal Activity 4 R.....2 6 6 out nations? The Matrix, for its gospel themes of 5̀ Silent Hill: What does self-sacrifice and resurrection. This Revelation 3D R.......................6 8 5 6̀ Taken 2 PG-13.............................3 7 4 Great Britain? time the director siblings are 7̀ Here Comes the Boom* PG...2 5 4 What does the crystal clear that they aren’t 8̀ Alex Cross PG-13.......................5 7 5 West? A peddling Christian themes. 9̀ Sinister R.....................................3 8 4 10 Fun Size PG-13............................4 4 4 `
Box Office Top 10
*Reviewed by world
10/30/12 5:02 PM
Madea’s Witness Protection: lionsgate • Wreck-It Ralph: Walt Disney Pictures
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Cloud Atlas: Warner Bros. Pictures • skyfall: Danjaq, LLC/United Artists Corporation/Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc.
assassinations start, and a parliamentary committee calls on M (Judi Dench) not only to answer for her own errors, but also to justify the entire existence of MI6 and, by extension, agents like 007. Among the skeptical is mid-level politician Gareth Mallory (Ralph Fiennes), who’s ready to relegate Bond (Daniel Craig, who earns consideration here as the best Bond of all time) to the ash heap of history. But, as one character quips toward the end of the film, “sometimes the old ways are best.” This is particularly true when dealing with enemies who manage to wreak massive destruction using weapons no more developed than box cutters, the internet, and a nation’s own sense of irrelevance. When technology fails there is no one but Bond, armed with only a handgun and a radio, to head off catastrophe. To do so, he must first overcome a dark moment of his soul, questioning his purpose as the super-criminal and traitor Silva (a supremely creepy Javier Bardem) taunts, “England. The Empire. MI6. You are living in ruins. You just don’t know it.” Lest any such subtext manage to escape less- analytic viewers, Oscarwinning director Sam Mendes (American Beauty) underlines it all with one bravura monologue from the great Dame Dench. As her best man Bond—the one she calls earlier in the film “an exemplar of British
DVD
Madea’s Witness Protection
CLOUD ATLAS: WARNER BROS. PICTURES • SKYFALL: DANJAQ, LLC/UNITED ARTISTS CORPORATION/COLUMBIA PICTURES INDUSTRIES, INC.
MADEA’S WITNESS PROTECTION: LIONSGATE • WRECK-IT RALPH: WALT DISNEY PICTURES
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T , Tyler Perry released the sixth installment in his popular Madea series, Madea’s Witness Protection, now on DVD. Perry directed, produced, and starred in the film, which grossed over million at the box office. This success is not rooted in a complex storyline, three-dimensional characters or witty dialogue, as the movie is devoid of them, but it could be rooted in the respect Perry has for faith and family. The movie tells the story of George Needleman (Eugene Levy), a weak-kneed CFO who learns his company was fleecing charities in a mob-run Ponzi scheme. The bad news is: Needleman’s the fall guy and the mob wants blood. The prosecutor on the case (Perry) moves Needleman and his family to the safest place he can think of—his Aunt Madea’s house in Georgia. Though Madea (also Perry) is not thrilled about trying to hide “a bunch of white folks” in her all-black neighborhood, she agrees, consoling herself with the , monthly stipend she’ll receive. The Needleman family isn’t too thrilled either, particularly George’s teenage daughter, Cindy, who verbally abuses her half-brother and demeans her stepmother whenever she can. Cindy’s raunchy attitude flabbergasts Madea, who concocts a snide scheme to help Cindy appreciate her family. Meanwhile, George is pulling his hair out trying to unravel what’s left of the company’s financials. When he takes his mother to a nearby church to hear “negro spirituals,” a word in the pastor’s message helps him untangle the web of deceit. Despite the stereotypes, crass humor, and mild language giving the film its PG- rating, Madea’s Witness Protection hits a chord with American viewers. Perry’s respect for faith and family is encouraging, but to have a lasting cultural impact he must move past slapstick humor, deepening the depth of his stories and the quality of his characters.
See all our movie reviews at worldmag.com/movies
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MOVIE
Wreck-It Ralph
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A under the shadow of Fix-It Felix Jr., hammer-handed video game villain Wreck-It Ralph (John C. Reilly) sets out to prove he’s not the bad guy everyone thinks he is. He zips through power cords and game hops through the arcade, winning a medal of honor in a Halo-type game, which he quickly loses inside the racing game, Sugar Rush. While searching for the medal, he befriends the barb-tongued yet sprightly Vanellope von Schweetz (Sarah Silverman), and together they concoct a plan to secure both his medal and her place in the upcoming race line-up. But the stakes soon get a lot higher. While King Candy (Alan Tudyk), a candy-flavored Mad Hatter, is determined to stop Vanellope’s foray into racing, his evil schemes are one-upped by the apocalyptic threat of cy-bugs, robots from another game. Along with Fix-It Felix Jr. (Jack McBrayer) and Felix’s new crush, Sergeant Calhoun, Wreck-It Ralph and Vanellope must defeat the evil king, stop the cy-bugs, and do so before their glitch-filled game is unplugged. But can Wreck-It Ralph overcome his coding as a villain in time to save his friends? Fans of Toy Story will find a lot here to pique their interest. The arcade setting brings colorful characters together in a way that hearkens back to Andy’s room. In lieu of toys, though, Wreck-It Ralph draws on classic video games, combining settings and villains from retro games like Pac-Man as well as modern games like Call of Duty. But Wreck-It Ralph has major glitches, too. Rated PG, the movie’s heroes are prone to snotty remarks, white lies, and crass toilet humor. Some violence may also trouble young viewers, including a scene in which a zombie has his heart ripped out. Disappointingly, with so many clichés like “be yourself” peppering the script, what’s not offensive is more like stale cotton candy than any sugar rush. While this won’t mean game over at the box office, discerning parents may still pull the plug.
N O V E M B E R 1 7, 2 0 1 2 • W O R L D
10/30/12 5:05 PM
Reviews > Books
Antiquity analysis
preacher and writer, Augustine. Brown summarizes Author traces competing attitudes toward wealth Augustine’s view amid the fall of Rome BY MARVIN OLASKY that “pride, not wealth, was the true Last Enemy of Through the Eye of a Needle WORLD’ year the Christian. The broadly tells of attitudes runs from June , to May real division of the toward wealth, but the most : That will give us time to get world was not fascinating part is his everything in order for our th between the rich contextualizing of the battle annual books special issue, scheduled and the poor. It between Pelagius and for July. This year we’ll be noting conwas between the Augustine in the cultural tenders for Book of the Year as we go proud and those battles of that era. The British along, rather than just revealing them who were enabled monk Pelagius thought life at the end—so here’s contender No. , by God’s grace to could be perfect: As Brown Peter Brown’s Through the Eye of a be humble before summarizes that view, “There Needle: Wealth, the Fall God and before was no heart of darkness in of Rome, and the their fellows. … For human nature,” and Christians Making of OLD BATTLE: Augustine (top) and Pelagius. once the rigid who spoke of having to rely Christianity in stance of pride was on “the grace of God” were the West, removed, wealth and power could be just groping for “an excuse for not ful- used without inhibition to promote the filling the law of God.” (Princeton U. concord of a Christian society.” Pelagius denied original sin and Press, ). Augustine, Brown notes, “was proclaimed that Christians especially Brown, , relentlessly even-handed in his treathad the power within themselves to be has spent half a ment of the sins of both the century studying perfect: “Spiritual riches no rich and the poor.” Here’s one can give you other that era. He became a what Augustine preached to than yourself.” This view star among academic historians with the poor about whether the underlay economic docthe publication in of The World of rich who were evil could get trines: If the rich would Late Antiquity, which broke with the into heaven: “Certainly such only give away their historians’ consensus that the period people will not get in. But money, they could have from .. to was a time of you too, just see whether perfect lives. It’s not hard decline from the “golden age” of you will enter. What if, as to imagine his excited folclassical civilization. Brown saw well as being poor you are positives in the rise of Christianity and lowers starting campaigns greedy; what if you are both to “Occupy Rome” or did not inhale the philo-paganism of weighed down with want many historians from Edward Gibbon “Occupy Hippo,” the home and on fire with avarice?” of another illustrious in the s to the present.
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Journalist/professor David Aikman has come out this year with two instructive books about Middle Eastern and American conflicts. The first half of his novel, Kidnapped in Gaza (Strategic Media), describes well the life of a reporter in Israel and Gaza, and the second half is action-filled as political demands become deadly serious. Aikman’s nonfiction book, One Nation Without God? (Baker) succinctly offers both bad news and good: The influence of Christianity is waning in America, but pockets of hope show how a turnaround is possible. In Who’s Counting? How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk (Encounter), John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky document instances and results of fraud in past elections. Example: Al Franken won a Senate seat—and became the th vote Democrats needed to pass Obamacare—by votes, yet more than , ineligible felons voted illegally in that Minnesota election contest, and nine of interviewed said they had voted for Franken.
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AUGUSTINE: NEWSCOM • PELAGIUS: HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES • BROWN: HANDOUT
Three instructive reads
Email: molasky@worldmag.com
10/29/12 10:46 PM
NOTABLE BOOKS
Books for children and their parents > reviewed by
Thoughts to Make Your Heart Sing Sally Lloyd-Jones and Jago The author and illustrator of The Jesus Storybook Bible combine on a book of devotions for young people. Sally Lloyd-Jones writes with warmth and clarity, keeping the gospel—the story of Christ rescuing sinners—at the center of each meditation. In “Finished!” she writes about the words Jesus said on the cross: “It wasn’t a cry of defeat. It was a shout of victory. The great work of rescuing us was finished! There is now nothing you can do to make God love you more—and nothing you can do to make him love you less. It is finished!” Those are words to make your heart sing.
The Glory of Grace: The Story of the Canons of Dort William Boekestein William Boekestein proves that it is possible to make the story of a th century synod compelling to children. This slender volume with attractive woodcut-style illustrations focuses on a doctrinal battle between Calvinists and Arminians that was important theologically and also played a role in European politics. Boekestein introduces important figures like Pelagius, Erasmus, Luther, and Arminius, and clearly explains their roles. He shows—and is fair toward—what Arminius taught and what the Canons concluded. And he shows why the battle mattered: “Today the Arminian view has become widely accepted in many churches,” while others “are rediscovering the Reformed faith. ... This synod remains one of the highlights in the struggle of God’s people to maintain the glory of grace.”
Minette’s Feast: The Delicious Story of Julia Child and Her Cat Susanna Reich
AUGUSTINE: NEWSCOM • PELAGIUS: HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES • BROWN: HANDOUT
The protagonist of this delightful picture book is Julia Child’s cat: Minette Mimosa McWilliams Child. “Like any self-respecting French cat,” Susanna Reich tells us, “Minette wouldn’t dream of eating food out of a can.” She much preferred hunting for bird and mice. Julia tried to tempt her with various concoctions, but Minette would only nibble—until Julia took classes at Le Cordon Bleu. Reich fills the book with playful alliterations: “She baked and blanched, blended and boiled, drained and dried, dusted and fried.” Reich has fun with rhymes: “And day and night she could smell the delicious smells of mayonnaise, hollandaise, cassoulets, cheese soufflés, and duck patés.” The illustrations capture Paris charm and poussiquette antics.
SPOTLIGHT God’s Promises by Sally Michael (P&R, ) provides parents a biblically grounded and engaging way to introduce their children to God’s promises and His character. With direct read-aloud text, Michael uses apt illustrations and Scripture to explain sometimes complex things: the difference between unconditional and conditional promises, for instance. Each chapter ends with exercises designed to teach children to trust the God who makes promises. If you love noisy picture books, ones that demand sound effects, you’ll like Squeak, Rumble, Whomp! Whomp! Whomp! by Wynton Marsalis (Candlewick, ). Jazz musician Marsalis’ celebration of sound has saxophones speaking, ambulances woo-uuu-ooo-uuuing, trombones brrrawmping, tubas whomping. Even spreading butter on toast makes a sound: “Chrrrick chrrrick chrrrick.” It’s perfectly illustrated (see below) by Paul Rogers in a style reminiscent of vintage movie credits from the s and s. —S.O.
This Is Not My Hat Jon Klassen
On the first page of this brilliant picture book is a small fish wearing a tiny derby hat. The words that accompany the picture: “This hat is not mine. I just stole it.” From that brazen beginning Klassen tells a moral tale with few words and simple pictures. The little fish makes a series of statements about how he plans to get away with the crime. Klassen subtly changes each illustration to show that the confident statements are untrue. The fish’s foolish logic—“I know it is wrong to steal a hat,” the little fish says. “I know it does not belong to me. But I am going to keep it. It was too small for him anyway”—has bad consequences.
Email: solasky@worldmag.com; see all our reviews at worldmag.com/books
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N O V E M B E R 1 7, 2 0 1 2 • W O R L D
10/26/12 10:01 PM
The new underground railroad
North Korean refugees desperate for help have learned to find a Christian or a church, says reporter MELANIE KIRKPATRICK BY MARVIN OLASKY
light around Pyongyang, the capital, but the rest is black. And North Koreans are in the dark about what’s going on in the rest of the world? North Korea is a truly sealed society. Every communist regime, every totalitarian regime, wants to control information, because knowledge is power. North Korea has taken that to a new extreme. You can’t make a phone call outside the country, you can’t send a letter—but because of the people who have escaped, stories have gotten in to North Korea about the rest of the world, and people are beginning to wake up. Your subtitle, with the words “underground railroad,” resonates powerfully in American history. What’s the Asian underground
railroad? The underground railroad in Asia begins in northeast China near the border with North Korea. Some Christian rescuers in the late s and early s coined the term after deciding they wanted to model their rescue attempts on the underground railroad for escaping slaves in antebellum America. It’s similar to the original underground railroad in its network of safe houses and secret transit routes that help people get across China. They can’t escape south. Because of the heavily fortified demilitarized zone that separates the two Koreas. So North Koreans go north to China, often hook up with a local Christian community, and eventually go all the way across China, usually to a southeast Asian country such as Thailand
DU BIN/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX
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N J WORLD plans again to publish a list of or so outstanding books from the previous months. One of them is likely to be former Wall Street Journal editor Melanie Kirkpatrick’s Escape from North Korea: The Untold Story of Asia’s Underground Railroad (Encounter). With entrepreneurial reporting Kirkpatrick documents the ways desperate North Koreans are fleeing their country, although many die in the process or end up in concentration camps. In how many ways is North Korea a dark land? Let’s start with electricity. A famous satellite image shows the Korean peninsula at night. South Korea, half the peninsula, is filled with bright lights. North Korea has a bit of
or Laos or Vietnam, sometimes north to Mongolia. They head to the South Korean embassy and ask for help. They have to cross a river to get to China, but that’s not the main deterrent, right? The real deterrent is the North Korean border guards, who do not hesitate to shoot people in the back as they’re crossing the border. What propels people to risk their lives trying to escape? Some seek food: In the late s about a tenth of the population died in a North Korean famine. A lot of people who get to China and see the relative freedoms offered to them there make the decision to go to South Korea. Others who leave are real defectors: They’re carrying with them state secrets, or maybe are professionally trained and they want to get out. Do you have a sense of how many North Koreans escape in the course of a year? In , nine people reached South Korea. In , the number was . Now it’s about , a year. Any sense of what percentage of people who try to escape make it? Impossible to tell. And China’s policy is to track down North Koreans, arrest them, and send them back to North Korea, where they’re treated very harshly. But, incredibly, people will escape several times before they finally reach the underground railroad and make it to safety. ESCAPE ROUTE: The Tumen River (above), which separates China and North Korea; Kirkpatrick (right).
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10/25/12 12:00 PM
ELBERT CHU
Reviews > Q&A
What’s the fi rst thing escapees to China look for? Many people say the first thing they’re told is, “Look for a building with a cross on it.” The people who offer help are jeopardizing a lot. It’s against the law in China to help a North Korean—even giving somebody
Henry College do? Look at LINK—Liberty in North Korea— run out of Torrance, Calif. It’s a secular group, but most of those in it are Christian and motivated to help because of their Christian beliefs. They raise awareness and they also have a program that aims to bring a hundred people out of China every year to safety. What should American policy be toward North Korea? We need to bring the issue of human rights into our
a meal is against the law—and the people willing to help them are Christians. Is it getting tougher under Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s new dictator? He has issued a crackdown order along the border. The word from my sources in South Korea and along the border is that fewer people are getting out. What can college students like those here at Patrick
dealings with North Korea. Right now human rights issues, if they’re raised, are totally subordinate to all the other issues. But think about the Soviet Union: We always made demands on human rights issues. We don’t do the same with North Korea and I think we should. I also think our goal should be the bringing down of the Kim family regime and the peaceful unification of the Koreas under a free and democratic system. A
You tell stories about Americans who have become personally involved in helping, like Mary and Jim. They are a Korean-American couple from the Midwest. Their kids have graduated from college, they both have had successful careers, and a few years ago they decided that they wanted to devote the rest of their lives to ELBERT CHU
DU BIN/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX
TAKING RISKS helping people. They are devout Christians and their first thought was to go to Africa. They speak Korean? Yes, and eventually they made the decision to go to China. Their church and the organization they work for, Crossing Borders, supported them, and today they run a string of orphanages in northeast China, and a shelter for young women who are in danger of being sold as brides. Koreans typically see children with one Chinese and one North Korean parent as impure? They’re half-and-half children rejected by both countries. Some background: When China arrests a North Korean woman and sends her back to North Korea, if she’s pregnant, the North Korean policy is to abort the baby, because she is carrying Chinese seed, which is considered impure. What about the Chinese? They are also racist, and their attitude to North Koreans is very derogatory, so these kids are rejected. Often if the mother leaves—and mothers do leave on the underground railroad and leave their children behind—the fathers often reject them, because they’re impure. Some fathers care about their children, though, and feel that they would be better off in one of these orphanages run by Christians. What risks do the foster parents who run those orphanages take? They’re Chinese citizens and if they’re caught taking care of these kids and proselytizing—the children are all raised in Christian homes, and proselytizing is against the law in China—they could face severe repercussions.
Email: molasky@worldmag.com
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10/25/12 12:02 PM
Reviews > Music
Verdi
Black and white
The uplifting Fifty Shades “soundtrack” is the opposite of the trashy Fifty Shades novels
Canteloube
Fauré
BY ARSENIO ORTEZA
Bach
Rachmaninoff
Chopin
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Granted, several of the selections do emerge, directly or indirectly, from carnal contexts. Two pieces by Chopin, for instance, are included (“Prélude Op. , No. in E minor” and “Nocturne No. in B flat minor Op. ”), and his carryings on with George Sand (née Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin) still set tongues to wagging. There’s also Verdi’s “Prelude” from La traviata, an opera about traviata a courtesan with a heart of gold. And who knows what libidinous soccer moms might make of Debussy’s “La fille aux cheveux de lin” once they realize that the title means “The Girl with the Flaxen Hair.” But, these pieces aside, none of the music on Fifty Shades of Grey: The Classical Album could even remotely be accused of appealing to anyone’s prurient interests. The majority, in fact, when not simply innocent (Canteloube’s Chants d’Auvergne, Pachelbel’s “Canon in D,” Delibes’ “Flower Duet” from Act I of Lakmé, the “Adagio sostenuto” movement of Rachmaninoff’s “Piano Concerto No. in C minor”), could actually engender belief in and desire for the God who inspired them. Thomas Tallis’ “Spem in alium” (as sung by the Tallis Scholars) is arguably
the most rapturous Tudor-era prayer ever set to music, and, even in Latin, its a cappella yearning for deliverance from on high comes across. Fauré’s “In Paradisum” (as sung by the King’s College Choir, Cambridge, and accompanied by the English Chamber Orchestra) comes from the Requiem in D minor, a setting of the Catholic Church’s Mass of the Dead. And the very title of the album’s final selection, Bach’s Cantata BWV , “Jesu, joy of man’s desiring” (as performed by the pianist Alexis Weissenberg), points to the cross. It is, in other words, highly unlikely that the harried housewives most likely to buy Fifty Shades of Grey: The Classical Album—and who no doubt helped it reach No. on Billboard’s classical music chart—will, upon actually listening to it, feel their lower natures enflamed. If anything, they’ll want more of where this music came from, perhaps even bothering to research its theological, or at least, historical roots. Whereupon they’ll discover that Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis” was based on a Tallis hymn whose lyrics began “Why fum’th in fight the Gentiles spite, in fury raging stout? / Why tak’th in hand the people fond, vain things to bring about?”—a paraphrase of the opening verses of David’s Psalm . A
KRIEG BARRIE
“H laughs,” sang David in Psalm , assuring Israel that, occasional appearances to the contrary, God was in no serious danger from His earthly enemies. “The Lord holds them in derision.” The Lord is certainly having the last laugh where Fifty Shades of Grey is concerned. In September, EMI Classics released Fifty Shades of Grey: The Classical Album, a compilation of previously released classical recordings that, according to a liner blurb, “inspired” the novelist E.L. James as she wrote her best-selling, sexploitation Fifty Shades trilogy. Some of the pieces, reportedly, are even mentioned in the works. So the album is a soundtrack, as it were, to James’ novels. But no sooner does the listener hit “play” than she finds herself (James’ audience is predominantly female after all) immersed in a Whitman’s sampler of some of the richest, most ennobling melodies to have emerged from the pens of Western composers in the last four centuries—melodies, it should be added, that the type of woman likely to find James’ trash alluring would not ordinarily be expected to seek out.
Email: aorteza@worldmag.com
10/30/12 9:34 AM
IAN ROOK
Delibes
NOTABLE CDs
Five new or recent pop-rock releases > reviewed by
When I’m President Ian Hunter & the Rant Band In , Hunter became the first major rocker (Leonard Cohen doesn’t count) to release an album at . Appropriately enough, it was mellow. Now, at , his last-will-and-testament album behind him and apparently premature, he returns to the footloose-and-fancy-free ways of his youth, jumbling randiness and joie de vivre with only an occasional tip of the hat to the grim reaper. The title cut is even catchy enough to have conservatives chalking up its fiscal foolishness to Hunter’s being an Englishman.
Kiss Carly Rae Jepsen If you can forget that Jepsen is and therefore really should be putting away childish things such as the music on this album, you might just find the squeaky-clean innocence of this obviously teentargeted product reason enough to celebrate its existence. Aside from one TV-sanctioned expletive on Jepsen’s duet with Justin Bieber, top--selling st-century pop music doesn’t come more family friendly. As clean as it is though, it’s even squeakier— mainly because of Jepsen’s voice, which overstays its welcome fast.
Lowe Country: The Songs of Nick Lowe Various artists Given how definitive Lowe’s own performances of his songs seem, it’s interesting how many of them sound as if they were written just for the mostly country performers who’ve twanged them up specifically for this album. Not every song is taken to new heights, but one of the ones that is—kudos, Robert Ellis—is “All Men Are Liars,” a slice of insightfully misanthropic whimsy that, except for its dated Rick Astley joke, formerly seemed perfect just as it was when Lowe recorded it years ago.
KRIEG BARRIE
IAN ROOK
Momentum Neal Morse Morse’s latest solo album is everything the Flying Colors album on which he recently sang and played wasn’t: namely, unabashedly Christian and full-on progressive rock on an epic scale. (At :, “World Without End” is almost without end itself.) But what stands out most is “Freak,” a distinctly non-prog song that eavesdrops on the troubled but interesting inner dialogue of the kind of person whose very strangeness can make others question whether their being so at home in this world is a good thing.
See all our reviews at worldmag.com/music
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SPOTLIGHT The hip-hop artist Andrew Nielsen, aka MC Lars, is an American treasure, and people who don’t already know as much need only to check out his Greatest Hits (Horris) to learn the error of their ways. Besides being as hilarious as he is erudite (he couldn’t have come up with his Poe, Shakespeare, or Melville raps without sucking the marrow from “The Raven,” Hamlet, or Moby Dick respectively), Nielsen is an astute contemporary social critic with a laser gaze, seeing through garbage rap, faux punk fashion, and “hipster girls.” About that last category— Nielsen recorded “Hipster Girl” in , three years before Occupy Wall Street became hipster girls’ favorite reason to cut class. Yet he nailed the type perfectly: “She’s my trust fund baby bohemian,” he raps. “Her vegan humus keeps her thin.” Then the girl herself raps, “By the way, that pro-Bush shirt you’re wearing is making me really uncomfortable.” Ace satire. Jonathan Swift would be proud. —A.O.
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10/30/12 9:32 AM
Mindy Belz
Toxic U
It’s hard enough to get into college, but staying on campus with your beliefs intact is the bigger challenge
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Tufts University
InterVarsity believes the strategy at Tufts will prompt similar challenges at other campuses, national field director Greg Jao told WORLD on Campus (worldoncampus.com, our campus news affiliate and a great place to follow these stories): “This is part of the larger renegotiation of how we understand religion in our culture.” The attacks on college Christian groups, said Jao, continue to push faith out of the public square and into the private space of homes and places of worship. The problem with forcing religion into private chambers is at least twofold. First, it deprives others of the life-giving witness and teaching that is Christianity at its abundant best. Religious expression pushed to the edges and closets of life makes its adherents second-class citizens who over time will face job and other discrimination: Just ask Christians living in the Middle East. Second, it’s unconstitutional. Our First Amendment freedom of religion comes entwined with the freedom of speech and the freedom to form associations with those who are like-minded (see NAACP v. Alabama, and others). What problems lie ahead for our society when those freedoms don’t extend to Christians on college campuses, where over percent of current high-school students will spend some of their most mind-shaping, socially intensive, pattern-setting years? The process of getting into college in America entangles—as Andrew Ferguson put it so well in his book Crazy U—“our deepest yearnings, our vanities, our social ambitions and class insecurities, and most profoundly our love and hopes for our children, with the largest questions of democracy, of equality, fairness, opportunity, the social good, even the nature of happiness.” It’s easy to lose one’s way in that landscape, and many of us parents reconcile ourselves to paying tuition at a college that challenges our deepest held beliefs because there are on-campus ministries that promise Christian community, and perhaps intellectual refuge, for our children. My advice: Don’t count on it. A
JOHN BOHN/THE BOSTON GLOBE/GETTY IMAGES
I a high-school senior, chances are these days you’re spending a lot of time beside your physical or virtual mailbox—stuffing it with college applications composed in the dead of night after calculus is done, or waiting anxiously for that thin oversized envelope signaling “yes” to early admission. If you are that senior’s parents, you are spending some sleepless nights wondering on his or her behalf what the future holds and where that future will take place—and more anxiously eyeing your checkbook than your mailbox. I’ve been there, I will be there again, and I have some bad news: College campuses across the country are becoming by the day a toxic environment for Christian families. Enter with your eyes open and at your own risk. The financial risk—a year at an in-state university with room and board now costs on average ,—is not a student’s or his family’s greatest peril. Far greater is the danger, having made that sort of commitment, he will find expression for his deepest beliefs and affiliations shut down. The latest example: Tufts University in Massachusetts, where in October students voted to “de-recognize” Tufts Christian Fellowship (TCF), the largest evangelical group on the ,-student campus and an affiliate of one of the oldest campus ministries in the country, InterVarsity. This is but the latest in a string of campus moves to silence Christian voice and witness, but here’s what’s especially sinister about what happened at Tufts: The case stemmed from no specific charges against current or former members of the organization, and no specific violations of campus policy by TCF. The student body’s Community Union Judiciary opposed the group’s requirement that its leaders adhere to the “basic Biblical truths of Christianity,” student government members told the Boston Globe on Oct. . The charges came from Tufts Coalition Against Religious Exclusion, which published an editorial in the student newspaper accusing the Tufts Christian Fellowship of “hate speech” because of its beliefs about homosexuality—and calling for the school to stop funding the group with student activity fees for such “bigotry.”
Email: mbelz@worldmag.com
10/30/12 4:32 PM
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KINGWOUNDED The Iraq and Afghanistan wars have produced more amputees than in recent U.S. combat history, but one young warrior and his wife discover life is fragile, and love is bigger by Edward Lee Pitts in Washington, D.C.
/// photos by luke sharrett
ndrew Smith has a vision. In January his brother is getting m arried. Smith imagines being able to walk up the church steps and down the sanctuary’s center aisle. After all, he is the best man. This activity would be an after-thought for most 25-year-old men. But Smith is learning to walk all over again. Last March while on patrol in Afghanistan, Smith stepped on a pressure plate, triggering an estimated 10-pound homemade bomb. The explosion hurled Smith into the air, took out his left leg below the knee and his right leg above the knee, and sent his life and that of his newlywed bride onto a path far from their original plans. Now Smith just wants to walk a hundred feet down a church aisle in such a way that no one attending the wedding will realize that underneath his dress pants are two prosthetic legs. He doesn’t want to use a cane. “I don’t want to take any attention away from my brother,” he said. This past summer Smith seemed a long way from reaching his goal. Recuperating at a military hospital outside of Washington, D.C., Smith couldn’t stand on his prosthetics for more than a few moments. “The longer I’m in them the more it hurts,” he winced. N o v e m b e r 1 7 , 2 0 1 2 • W OR L D
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Prosthetists worked to mold the artificial limbs into a better fit for what was left of Smith’s leg bones. While he waited on a comfortable adjustment, Smith depended on a wheelchair. He sometimes moved its wheels with his arms. At other times his wife, Tori, pushed him along. Around him Smith sees plenty of evidence that his injuries do not condemn him to a life of confinement. Today a double amputee can do more than just stand. One recent morning a pair of 20-something soldiers wearing black shorts and gray T-shirts with the word Army printed in black jogged beside a busy street near the entrance to the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. As they ran past the line of cars and headed toward
must be missing one or more limbs. In addition to Walter Reed, the military has hospitals specializing in amputee care in San Antonio and San Diego. All three have opened within the last seven years. With the rest of the amputees in this community, Smith attends physical therapy two hours each weekday. The rubber-floored rehabilitation room contains items you would expect to see in an average gym: a rack of hand weights, multi-colored exercise balls, elastic resistance bands, and exercise machines. But there are also items you don’t see in a gym: cycles powered by hands instead of feet, an indoor track with an overhead support harness, and, in one corner, several dozen prosthetic legs stacked up like
the military gate, the four prosthetic legs they wore matched each other stride for stride. Since the start of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, over 17,000 Americans have been catastrophically wounded. As the United States honors war heroes on Veterans Day and readies for the end of war in Afghanistan, the saga for America’s wounded military personnel—particularly its amputees—will stretch not only over withdrawal timetables and political cycles but over their lifetimes. The military has treated 1,559 amputee soldiers (of those, 272 lost an arm or hand). Such large numbers are due to advancements elsewhere. With modern body armor, better-protected vehicles, improved medic training and rapid evacuations, U.S. soldiers survive battlefield wounds nearly 90 percent of the time. Smith would have died if his injuries had occurred in Vietnam. By 2010, a military study reported the highest amputeeper-wounded soldier and amputee-per-killed soldier rates in the nation’s history. In other words, more soldiers who would’ve been killed in the past are now wounded amputees. That’s why portions of the 243-acre Walter Reed campus in Bethesda, Md., look like a village with two residency requirements: You must be well under the age of 30 and you
backstage props. Dominating the room’s center are rows of beds with white sheets and pillows. It’s as if a Gold’s Gym has merged with a hospital ward. Most of the patients are double amputees. A few have lost three limbs. A couple of soldiers are missing just one leg. “We call a single below the knee a paper cut around here,” Smith says. A soldier lost multiple limbs about once in every four combat amputations in 2009. Last year the ratio increased to almost one in two. Amputations hit an average high of 22.1 per month in 2011, according to a recent report by the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center. For decades leading up to 2001, most amputees treated by the military medical community involved older, inactive patients who suffered limb loss due to disease. But during the last 10 years the flood of young amputees requires treatments and devices to help them regain the active lifestyle they so suddenly lost. Seeing these soldiers as wounded athletes rather than patients, the military has modeled the recovery program after a sports medical clinic. On one of the days I visited the clinic, two double amputees dribbled and passed a soccer ball. A third amputee threw a football over the hospital beds with a therapist. One patient sidestepped ankle high hurdles while another lifted his new legs over a row of rubber sports cones, tapping the tip of each small cone with his prosthetic foot before setting
REHAB: With Tori by his side, Andrew exercises during morning physical therapy at Walter Reed.
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it down on the other side. Occasionally someone fell onto the red and blue rubber track. Always they got back up without asking for help. The newest generation of artificial joints better approximates the human knee and ankle. A knee embedded with a battery-powered microprocessor carries angle sensors that adjust for walking up a flight of stairs, running down a hill, or jumping over a curb. This smart knee technology comes with a remote that allows its wearer to switch between modes for such activities as golfing and bicycling. Its battery charge lasts for up to five days. During therapy as the soldiers learn to play with their new knees, young wives or girlfriends linger nearby. One
I’m almost thankful about this injury. ... Now I get to spend every day with my wife, which is awesome.
—Andrew Smith
stands right behind her husband and wipes sweat from his brow with a white towel as he slowly makes his way around the track holding a weighted exercise ball over his head. Two parents looking like someone has gut-punched them stand beside one of the beds as their son goes through stretching exercises to strengthen his core. The dad occasionally snaps a few pictures. The beds are the first phase of training for the new patients. Smith graduated from the beds by July. But on this day he can only manage to slowly walk down a rubber mat with the help of waist high handlebars that run alongside the mat. After a couple of feet he calls for his wheelchair. He slumps down into it.
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hen Smith landed at the Kandahar airfield in Afghanistan in February 2012, the first thing he noticed was bullet holes covering the old terminal’s walls. “This is real,” Smith said to himself. It had been a long journey. The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks happened during his freshman year in high school in Chattanooga, Tenn. Smith spent the next four years yearning to join the military just as his grandfather had right after the start of World War II. He enlisted in 2010 not long after graduating from Tennessee’s Lee University. Smith found himself on the
war’s center stage as a member of a brigade combat team in the 82nd Airborne Division. In Afghanistan Smith got used to life inside tents the size of multiple basketball courts, sleeping on mattresses that looked like they had been there since the U.S. Army first arrived. When an air raid siren went off while Smith and his unit took an orientation class on improvised explosive devices, some of the troops who’d been there awhile laughed it off, promising the fresh faces that any missiles launched couldn’t reach deep inside the base. But the sudden alert followed by the rush into the nearest concrete bunker was sobering to Smith. “The Taliban is still here,” he thought. Commanders assigned Smith’s company to a combat outpost in southwest Afghanistan near the Pakistan border. The soldiers passed rumors that Alexander the Great had once built a fortress there during his conquest of the area. But there were no fortresses there in 2012. Smith’s squad of less than 20 soldiers took over a patrol base outpost south of the main outpost in the area. For protection they had a few tall sand-filled barriers, a couple of makeshift guard towers, concertina wire and a truck blocking the lone entrance. Baby wipes replaced showers. Canned soup and Gatorade bottles replaced hot meals. The picket duty placed Smith’s squad near a hornet’s nest of Taliban fighters who trekked back and forth over the nearby desert from Pakistan bearing lethal supplies. Commanders tasked Smith’s squad with interdicting this smuggling. His part in the mission lasted only one patrol. On the morning of March 8, Smith ventured outside the patrol base with about a dozen U.S soldiers and seven members of the local Afghan police. They moved along a dirt road near farmland with a few scattered buildings. Smith watched nervously as the Afghan police used twigs to poke at anything in the road that looked suspicious. As the squad entered a field, the pop of bullets erupted from their left. Smith and the others hit the ground and held their fire. The soldiers couldn’t see where the fire was coming from, but that didn’t stop the Afghan police officers from firing blindly. One of the Afghan police officers ran over to Smith and a few other Americans and motioned them to follow. The Americans hesitated. “You guys are good,” Smith’s squad leader shouted. “He knows where the Taliban are. You guys follow him, and we will be right behind you.” Smith hopped over a wall and landed inside a narrow ditch. Shots flew overhead. Smith was third in line, following the Afghan policeman and another American. Somehow the first two missed the pressure plate. Smith did not. When he crashed back down to the ground head first after the blast, Smith’s first thought was to push himself onto his back. Then he screamed. “Help. Help. Help.” Smith’s team leader held his hands as the unit’s medic slapped tourniquets and gauze onto Smith’s wounds. It was the medic’s first battlefield casualty. He was 20 years old.
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fter a recent morning therapy session at Walter Reed, Smith wheeled himself back to the outpatient apartment on base that he shares with his wife. A group of men in wheelchairs waited with their wives and mothers outside the hospital’s pharmacy. On the back of the wheelchairs are bumper stickers that say, “I served in Afghanistan.” Other amputees wear T-shirts that read, “I had a blast in Afghanistan” written alongside a c artoon drawing of an explosion. “You have to have a sense of humor,” Smith explained. Smith greeted a soldier from his own platoon who was wounded a month and a half after Smith. After a brief exchange, Smith noted that the fellow soldier was in the intensive care unit for a week. “I was in there for a month and a half,” he added.
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Smith’s body got torn apart on a Thursday. By the following Tuesday he had arrived at Walter Reed. Since the blast, doctors had kept Smith’s lower body covered in sheets and wrapped in bandages. But on Smith’s second day in the hospital’s intensive care unit, a doctor came in to examine him. Nurses removed the sheets and bandages. Smith looked down and did a double take. He tried to lift his lower body and couldn’t. He looked up at his wife with a puzzled face and said, “I don’t have any legs.” “Not all of them,” she replied. Tori Smith had prepared a big speech for this moment. But before she could begin, her husband had gone back to sleep. When she got the call about her husband’s injury, Tori was in her second semester of law school at Michigan State. The military could not tell her whether Smith would be transported from Germany to a hospital in Maryland or Texas. But she didn’t want her husband to spend his first night back in the United States without her. She got into a car with her mother-in-law and brotherin-law and headed toward Washington. Along the way they listened to worship music and prayed that they were going in the right direction. If the military called and told her Smith had been sent to Texas, then they planned to drive to the nearest airport and put Tori on a plane to San Antonio. When Smith landed at Andrews Air Force Base, military personnel loaded him into an ambulance the size of a
HOME AWAY FROM HOME: Andrew and Tori in their apartment.
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“Jesus save me. Jesus save me. Jesus save me,” Smith shouted over and over. His screams were matched by the team’s radio operator yelling landing coordinates to a helicopter launched to take Smith off the battlefield. Shoved into the helicopter, Smith continued to cry out for Jesus. As the helicopter took off, Smith’s screams stopped. He had blacked out. The next time Smith woke up was inside a military hospital in Germany. It was March 10, two days after his injury and almost exactly one year since his March 11, 2011, graduation from basic training. He had only been deployed for 18 days. A Purple Heart, awarded to Smith while he was unconscious, sat inside a bag near his hospital bed.
semitruck with six other wounded soldiers and headed for Walter Reed. Tori was already waiting. Standing on the sidewalk near the hospital’s emergency unloading dock, Tori was warned by doctors it was as close as she could get. But when Smith arrived Tori went to him and held his hand for a brief second, kissed him, and told him she loved him. He gave the thumbs up sign before being whisked inside the hospital. Tori has seen Smith every day since then. She slept in a chair during his stay in the intensive care unit even though doctors and nurses told her she was not supposed to be there. When Smith almost died at 3 a.m. one morning due to complications, Tori alerted the nurses. Soon four or five doctors surrounded Smith, his vital signs crashing. They wheeled him back into surgery. Smith has had more to deal with than the loss of his legs. Shrapnel from the explosion ripped through his groin and slashed apart his abdomen. Infection almost killed him. He lost his abdominal muscles on his right side. Doctors performed 15 surgeries on his intestines.
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Paralympic champion
Nine hundred runners dressed in track suits and spandex ran last month in a McLean, Va., 5K created to help provide wheelchair-accessible transitional housing to veterans recovering from their wounds. But I was particularly drawn to one of the 400 spectators who gathered to watch, encourage, and cheer the runners. Larry Hughes, a muscular man with a white-tinged black beard and thick, r ectangular glasses, was wearing a gold U.S. Marine Corps pin and sitting in a wheelchair because of shrapnel wounds suffered in the Vietnam War. Hughes trains wounded veterans in track and field events, including shot put, discus, and a “running bike” built for those with disabled legs. Hughes’ injury helps him understand what the injured war veterans are going through. After his injury 44 years ago, he says he “had to find myself.” He realized that others perceived him as “other than us,” and that made him “question my integrity of being a citizen.” Overcoming his doubts, he went on to compete in the international Paralympic Games. In 1996, he won a gold medal for America in discus. Hughes says, “To see someone with a disability running alongside, in front, and behind you in a race may make someone feel sorry for them and ask, ‘How can they do it?’” His answer: “They can do it like anyone else who has a desire to do it.” And he was right. More than 20 wounded vets were among those who crossed the finish line, some with a graceful stride, some with clenched teeth. —David Fisher
More than once Smith would be discharged from the ICU only to be sent right back after vomiting up large amounts of blood or having a fever as high as 105 degrees or a heart rate hitting 200. “Doctors would keep saying ‘this is interesting’ whenever they examined Andrew,” Tori explained. “In a hospital, you never want to be an interesting case.”
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eleased from the hospital in june, almost three months after Smith was hit by an IED, or Improvised Explosive Device, the Smiths’ new home is an apartment in Tranquility Hall, a 315,000-square-foot facility for amputees on campus that houses 153 two-bedroom suites. Smith says that every apartment is occupied. Smith’s apartment on the fifth floor looks like a newly renovated three-star hotel room. Two framed picture collages hang on the wall. One before Smith’s injury includes wedding photos and a uniformed Smith surrounded by family at his basic training graduation, and one taken after the IED shows the Smiths at a Washington Nationals baseball game and at such D.C. monuments as the World War II Memorial. In the den that separates the two bedrooms, Smith’s Purple Heart rests in a case on a ledge behind the couch. On the same shelf is a pair of pictures, one of Smith and the other of his grandfather who served in the Merchant Marine during World War II. They stand almost exactly alike, their feet spread slightly apart. Both are wearing their uniforms. There’s a handicap-accessible kitchen where Smith, who only in recent weeks has been able to eat regular food, likes to prepare meals for his wife. His specialties include chicken and vegetables, steak and onions, or spaghetti. In the freezer of their apartment is a whole chicken that Smith is saving to roast for when his stomach heals. They spend their time when Smith is not seeing therapists or doctors watching baseball on television. Smith salivates at every pizza commercial. “I’m almost thankful about this injury,” Smith says. “If I wasn’t injured I’d still be in Afghanistan right now, which would be fine, I’d be doing my job. But now I get to spend every day with my wife, which is awesome. It is kind of hard to think, ‘Man I wish I wasn’t injured so I could still be in Afghanistan sleeping on the ground and being shot at.’ It is just really cool being able to be with her every day.” Ask physical therapist Kyla Dunlavey the secret behind Smith’s recovery, she gives a quick answer: “Tori.” Then she adds, “And their strong faith.” Tori and Andrew were best friends in college. On the day Smith left for Army basic training in early November 2010, he turned to Tori before getting on the bus and said: “I love you.” Tori didn’t know what he meant. She had to endure the mystery for several weeks because Smith couldn’t talk to anyone during boot camp. When instructors gave him a two-minute phone call on Thanksgiving Day, Smith reached Tori. “I figured out then what he meant by ‘I love you,’” Tori said.
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shocked physicians saw evidence that the fistulas had closed on their own. “They were like, ‘Wow—just keep doing what you are doing,’” Tori said. “It’s such a testimony to the Lord.” When Smith could return to a normal diet, he didn’t eat the roasted chicken saved in his freezer. The surgeons were so impressed with his miraculous progress that five of them insisted on taking him out to Ruth’s Chris Steak House. They said it was the first time they had done that for a patient. Smith ordered a 12-ounce New York Strip, but he couldn’t finish it all. He brought it home and ate the rest of it the next day. “We were talking to healers, and we were able to tell them that we knew the master healer,” Tori said. “What happened was a tragedy. It was terrible. But God has turned it into a blessing. To know that he is here because God spared him, it is hard to complain about anything.”
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n the hallway of Tranquility Hall, information tables sometimes are set up offering internships for wounded warriors at government agencies like the FBI and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But the Smiths are intent on returning to Tennessee. A local charity is raising funds to build a house for them. Once there they aren’t sure what they will do. Law school is on hold for Tori. Smith is studying for the GRE. They bought a Running a Restaurant For Dummies book. Smith said it wouldn’t be a fancy one. It would serve “a lot of nasty, greasy food. We’d name it ‘Heroes’.” One morning in late October, Smith put on his new prosthetics that end with a pair of white and blue Nikes. He straightened up and began his stretching exercises. “I feel like I’m 90,” he said. He grabbed a square shaped foam pad and began to drag it behind him around the track. “And he’s off,” said Dunlavey, his therapist. Smith can make two laps around the track, dragging the extra weight. It’s his second day walking without a cane. Throughout the fall, Smith and Tori shared a saying: No cane by Christmas. Then the goal became: No cane by Halloween. It’s more than a week before Halloween. Smith tosses a 4-pound weighted ball back and forth with Dunlavey. They soon advance to a 7-pound ball. Smith catches it with one hand without losing his balance. Tori sits nearby talking with some of the other wives. When her husband grabs a basketball, Tori jumps up and starts filming with her cell phone camera.
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With Smith barred from using computers during basic training, they started dating the old-fashioned way: through letters. Tori, then working as a manager at a Target store in Cleveland, Tenn., wrote every day, including homemade crossword puzzles. They decided to hold “prayer dates” where every night at 9:00 they would both stop what they were doing and separately pray. “We wanted to do something that reminded him to put God first no matter how much he got yelled at,” Tori said. When Smith returned home for two weeks over Christmas, it marked the first time they had seen each other as a couple. They got engaged on Easter in 2011 and began planning a summer 2012 wedding. But in the summer of 2011, Smith learned his unit would be deployed to Afghanistan in early 2012. When he told Tori she had one response: “You are not going anywhere without marrying this girl.” Tori shopped for a wedding dress in less than 30 minutes, trying on two of the three dresses just to please her friends. She forgot to buy a veil until the morning before their Dec. 23, 2011, wedding. She was in her first year of law school and he was training to go to a combat zone. All they could do was Skype with one another. “Now I see why God had different plans,” Tori said of their rushed wedding. “What would we have done if we weren’t married when all this happened?” Today the couple talks often about the Book of Job—how God chose him to endure sufferings because He knew that Job would be a light for Him. Part of God’s plan for the Smiths is already becoming clearer. They see their current community of wounded soldiers as a new ministry opportunity. Others on base see all the setbacks that Smith has been through and ask, “How do you get through that with such a good attitude?” “When you are talking to nonbelievers that is like, chaching,” Tori said. While Smith was unconscious in the hospital, Tori put headphones over his ears to play praise music. His head would sway back and forth. Tori wouldn’t let doctors wheel Smith away for any of his surgeries before praying. A network of 2,000 family and friends who log onto teamandrewsmith.com spent months asking God to heal the holes in Smith’s intestines that prevented him from eating. A half dozen doctors told Smith that there was zero possibility that the holes would close without surgery. The doctors decided to wait until November or December to operate so Smith’s scar tissue from all the previous procedures could heal. But during an examination in late summer, the
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What happened was a tragedy. It was terrible. But God has turned it into a blessing. To know that he is here because God spared him, it is hard to complain about anything. —Tori Smith
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Showing off his moves, Smith dribbles the basketball while walking around the track. He sends the ball between his prosthetic legs and around his back without breaking his dribble. He finishes by spinning the ball on his fingers. “You are doing great, babe,” Tori says. “Thanks.” Smith is focusing on learning how to move without having to think about it. “I had no idea [of] all the mechanics involved in walking,” he says. After receiving some instruction on the use of his hips, Smith walks toward a full-length mirror so he can study his movements.
Check out our iPad slide show for more photos
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Amputee patients at Walter Reed are usually walking by nine months and running by 13 months. When they leave Walter Reed after somewhere between nine and 18 months, the soldiers walk into a future with few limitations. More than 300 amputees from Walter Reed have returned to active duty, including 53 who have gone back to serve in Iraq or Afghanistan. This summer an officer wounded in Iraq in 2007 became the first double amputee to assume the command of a major military installation. Dunlavey says former patients return all the time boasting about their exploits: One ran a 10-mile race just 11 months after losing his legs. Others have climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro and Mt. McKinley. “Maybe I could be the first amputee to do the Appalachian Trail. Has anyone done that?” Smith asks Dunlavey. “Two thousand miles of mountains. That would be perfect for me.” But first Smith wants to hike from the therapy room to his apartment without his cane. It’s a 10-minute route that will take him over sidewalk curbs, around cars in a busy parking garage, and up a steep hill. He carries his cane but doesn’t use it. Instead he twirls it with one arm as if it’s a baton. Tori follows behind pushing his empty wheelchair. “Another beautiful day,” Smith says as he marches up the hill. “You are doing great walking,” Tori responds. It’s two more months before his brother’s wedding. A
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REVERED: Millard in her home office. The photos and documents on the wall chronicle her husband Bob’s time in the military.
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Kitty Millard has become an expert at tracking down Vietnam veterans and reuniting them with long-lost buddies by Bonnie Pritchett
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n Oct. 10, 1968, Dennis Pfaff led a patrol of U.S. soldiers through the rice paddies of Vietnam’s Chu Lai area. The men of Bravo Company 4th/ 21st, 11th Light Infantry Brigade avoided the footpaths and dirt tracks that passed for roads for fear of tripping a land mine. One misstep could take a leg or a life. The men waded as far as they could through the water before they had to climb up on the bank near the site of an earlier explosion that foundered a tank but injured no one. But when the patrol reached the site of the first explosion, another mine went off. Pfaff was wounded but the two men behind him, Bill and Jerry, took the brunt of the blast. Pfaff managed to drag himself back to Bill’s side before realizing his friend was dead. A piece of shrapnel to the heart quickly drained his life. But Jerry was conscious, in pain, and scared. “I’ll never forget the scream, the terror he was going through,” Pfaff recalled. The unit evacuated Jerry to a hospital where he survived surgery but not the night. The men’s deaths haunted Pfaff for 38 years, through marriages and divorces, bouts of drinking and anxiety. Immediately after the explosion, Pfaff thought Bill had tripped the mine wire. But in the confusion of the
aftermath, he convinced himself his foot set off the blast that left so much destruction behind. Until he met Kitty Millard, Pfaff believed he would go to his grave carrying the guilt for that explosion. Pfaff learned from a friend, also a Vietnam vet, that Millard was looking for him. The 76-year-old widow, grandmother, and Bible study teacher spends her days scouring archived military logs, local libraries, census reports, and the internet to find Vietnam veterans, a voluntary task she considers an honor. Her search for Pfaff started as a hunt for another soldier from the same company. Once she found the first soldier, Millard continued her search for more. Pfaff ended up as one of 500 men from the Bravo Company 4th/21st that Millard helped find. Those efforts culminated in the group’s first reunion in April 2006. Today, veterans revere Millard for her ability to locate long-lost friends starting with only minimal clues. But back then, she was just getting started. In 1999, Millard helped her husband Bob update his West Point Academy class roster. Four years later, a woman recalled that work and asked Millard to find the chaplain who officiated her husband’s funeral in 1969. The woman also wanted to find the man who served as her husband’s forward officer during the war. Millard, who has never met a stranger, used her vast network of friends and acquaintances to find the men. Word about her uncanny ability
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to find people spread. Others soon started asking Millard to find longlost friends, family, and veterans. During the last seven years, Millard has accounted for—dead or alive—at least 2,000 Vietnam vets. Those who reconnect by phone or email often choose to meet face-to-face. The ensuing reunions have become a source of unexpected healing, rekindled friendships, and renewed memories. “I think she saved my life,” Pfaff said. “She certainly made a tremendous change.” Pfaff hadn’t talked to anyone from his days in Vietnam for 30 years. But he decided to go to the reunion, curious to see how his fellow soldiers had fared in life. While retelling his story, Pfaff realized memories are best recalled through the filter of other witnesses. One of the other men that took part in the patrol that day also recalled the incident, only differing from Pfaff’s account in one very important detail. “Stop beating yourself up,” the man told him. “You didn’t trip the booby trap. Bill did.” A second, unrelated conversation, confirmed the man’s account. Although Pfaff still felt a sense of responsibility to the men he led, the revelation that he was not directly responsible for their deaths helped dispel some of the guilt and anger he had carried for all those years. Millard attended the Bravo Company reunion and called it “glorious.” Pfaff told her the night he found out what really happened during that patrol, he slept like a baby for the first time since returning from the war. Since then, Millard has attended many reunions, facing her fear of flying to travel across the country to meet the men she has only known through email and phone conversations. She’s often hailed as the guest
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of honor. The experience is humbling for a woman who admits knowing little about the Vietnam War prior to her association with the veterans. During the s, other issues of national importance occupied her mind. Millard’s home in Nassau Bay, Texas, is part of a bigger community that serves NASA’s Johnson Space Center and its spaceflight contractors. Her husband, who died last year, worked in the fledgling space industry, which provided a distraction from the conflict overseas. “It was so far away and we were so busy putting men on the moon,” she said. “It was the heyday of the era.” When Millard first started searching for Vietnam veterans, they were not much more than names on a page. But as she learned more about the conflict and met the men who served there, Millard grew to care deeply for the men and their families. She often asks them about their faith, prays with them, and encourages them to encourage one another. She’s seen some men quit drinking and others marry girlfriends they’ve been living with for years. Some have even accepted Christ.
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a free-fire zone, an area where soldiers were authorized to shoot first and ask questions later. In the dense tropical brush Scapellato heard someone approaching. “I just opened up with my M and emptied the magazine,” he said. He thought he was shooting at Viet Cong. Moments later, Scapellato took a bullet to the knee in a barrage of return fire—friendly fire. The second platoon, unbeknownst to Scapellato, had doubled back on his side of the river. Despite emptying his magazine, Scapellato didn’t hit any of his fellow soldiers, but the bullet he took came from Joe. Scapellato’s lieutenant, known only as Porky, put the injured infantryman on his back and carried him to a medical evacuation helicopter. The last thing he remembered after being strapped to the transport was waving down to his platoon as the chopper rose and carried him to what would be four months of medical treatment in Vietnam, Japan, and the
United States. He never saw his buddies again. He never said goodbye. And he never told Porky “thank you.” Years later, Scapellato still thought about that debt of gratitude he owed. But how would he find a man named Porky almost years removed from the jungles of Vietnam? If anyone could find him, Millard could, other vets assured him. But Scapellato had his doubts. “There’s no way FOUND: Pfaff (left) at Ft. she’ll be able to find Carson and this guy,” he recalled Scapellato in thinking after Vietnam. contacting Millard. In addition to all of the standard research tools Millard had at her disposal, she also had her own database of information gleaned from years of research, including a growing network of new acquaintances. She also just happened to have a copy of a casualty list from . Millard found another injured soldier from Scapellato’s unit, Bravo Company th/rd, th Light Infantry Brigade, and called him to ask about Porky. “I really think I have God’s help,” Millard said. “I’ll find some weird little tidbit and it turns out that it leads to the person I’m searching for.” A few days after Scapellato emailed her, Millard wrote him to say that she had found Porky, aka Gary Renner, of California. Scapellato was stunned. Millard’s search for Porky ended up locating about men from the unit. The group’s October reunion in St. Louis not only reconnected Scapellato with good friends but also brought a surprising revelation. Since the day he was shot, Scapellato believed he had made a critical error that almost cost him his life and that of his friend. But at the reunion, he discovered the
HANDOUTS
ILLARD IS USUALLY the one looking for the veterans. But in a reversal of roles, Vincent “Jersey” Scapellato, of Vineland, N.J., sought out Millard in . She laughed remembering his email. He wanted her to find the soldier who had helped him to a waiting helicopter after he’d been shot. But he only had a date and a nickname—Porky. Unlike st-century soldiers, who deploy and return as a unit, many Vietnam vets went overseas as a group of draftees to serve until their individual time was up or they were wounded, whichever came first. They often knew each other only by nicknames or first names. War zone extractions like Scapellato’s severed ties hastily and, most often, permanently.
On Feb. , , Scapellato took point as his platoon patrolled the jungles of Chu Lai. His friend, Joe, led another platoon on the opposite bank of a river. The region was
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JUNE 14-15 2013 | BJCC | BIRMINGHAM, AL WWW.GRIDIRONMEN.ORG | 1.800.475.0819
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other platoon had doubled back without notifying anyone. He had no way to know he was firing on his fellow soldiers. Earlier this year, members of Charlie Company 5th/46th, 198th Light Infantry Brigade met for a reunion in Nashville, Tenn. They invited Millard to express their gratitude for her work. Ed Arndt, a retired Nashville accountant, helps organize what has become an annual event. He enlisted Millard’s help in tracking down hard-to-find veterans like Mike Ayers. Arndt had been looking for the former soldier since 1973. Through an internet search, Millard found almost a dozen men with that name. Phones calls to each finally scored the right one. “He was the greatest find,” Arndt said. “There were 10-15 of us who were really close at Ft. Hood. The great thing is when Kitty finds guys for us, you get to talk to them and know they’re OK. You just don’t talk about [Vietnam] to anyone else.” Doug Dowson attended the Nashville reunion, his second. He was one of Millard’s “finds” and remembered the call he received from her three years ago. It caught him off guard. “Wow,” he remembered thinking. “Somebody has an interest in us.” Millard uses the same script for the thousands of phone calls she has made. The call to Dowson went something like this: Dowson: Hello. Millard: Is this Doug Dowson of Charlie Company 5th/46th, 198th Light Infantry Brigade who served in Vietnam from September 1968 to September 1969? Dowson: Yes. Millard: Welcome home and thank you for your service to your country. After that the responses vary from stunned silence to “Are you with Veterans Affairs?” “No,” she replies. “I’m just a normal housewife.” A normal housewife whose unusual service has brought peace and comfort to thousands of men still suffering from a 40-year-old war. “My purpose is to help them heal from the traumatic experiences they had,” Millard said. “I can listen to them so they can go on with their lives.” A
IT’S TIME FOR MEN TO
stand. TIM TEBOW
JOSH
CHARLES
FRED
PHIL
MCDOWELL
LUTER
BILLINGSLEY
WALDREP
—Bonnie Pritchett is a writer living in League City, Texas
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Food and loathing Eating disorders wreck lives and families, but grace can heal the physical, mental, and spiritual wounds by S O P H I A L E E N. Americans
who lead ordered lives will sit down at Thanksgiving dinner tables. But others lead disordered lives. I was when my father mentioned a new disease called anorexia that made some people, mostly women, starve themselves. “What a crazy, wicked disease,” I thought. “What idiots.” About four years later, I was that idiot with the crazy, wicked disease. I lost everything because of my eating disorder, and by the grace of God, gained much more because of it.
Within the last decade, awareness of eating disorders has exploded, and pictures of women with spines jutting out like spikes and arms hanging like rails have become common. If Angelina Jolie shows up with veiny arms, tabloids speculate about her weight. The disease fills gossip columns, but the deeper stories remain misunderstood. I’ve gone into five of those stories. One is the story of -year-old Jessica Perez from upstate New York, now with cropped and jet-black hair, gray-blue eyes, and piercings stamped into her ears, lips, nose, and belly button. She also has five handinked tattoos, thin X-shaped scars stretched across her chest, and a waist that bears Harry Potter’s Horcrux symbol—remnants of her self-cutting days. Severely depressed and self-hating, Jessi cut and starved herself because that was the only way she knew to stop her emotional pain: “The physical pain
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daily staples: low-calorie items such as is something you control. You can start broccoli, lettuce, and hummus. When it, and you can make it stop. It’s someshe runs out of them, she drags herself thing you can’t do with depression.” to the store no matter how tired she is— Jessi was about when her father because she just has to. Why? She abandoned the family without doesn’t know. explanation, leaving her mother Recently, Missy weighed herself. She distraught and Jessi gradually curtailing had reached pounds, the highest her food intake to stifle her anger and she’s been in a very long time. She sadness. By , she had full-fledged stepped off the scale and resolved to anorexia and an addiction to cutting stick to her motivation to recover, but herself. At school, she hung out with a not before—and after—experiencing a bunch of “severely depressed” misfits. spasm of terror. At home, she tiptoed around her new As Missy tries to explain her reaction stepdad and stepsiblings. to the weight gain, her eyes well up. Eleven years later, Jessi has gone She gulps air, flailing her bony arms as through four hospitalizations and one though trying to fend off the panic eating disorder treatment center. In all those years she never had a period. It takes months for her to recover from an illness. Her body involuntarily regurgitates rich, heavy foods, so she spends hot summers sucking on fruity push-up popsicles, chewing on Twizzlers, and sipping fat-free milk. Jessi is -foot- and barely weighs pounds. She says she feels comfortable at that “good, functioning weight” because she can get by without panicking about her weight. She can’t cartwheel or run up the stairs, but she can dig up sod in the garden and mop the floor. Jessica Perez At times, Jessi wonders what she’s living for: “I’m very lost.” She thinks about God but doesn’t attack she feels each time she thinks exactly know who He is: “I feel so about her weight: “It feels like dying. … helpless ... I’ve always tried to be a good I feel like I’m walking around with person. I feel like I would not have tumors.” suffered the way I have without some When she checked an online chart, kind of purpose behind it. If God she was still well under her healthy doesn’t have a purpose for this, then Body Mass Index (BMI) and already this universe sucks.” panicking. She realized that as much as she professes trust and faith in God, doubt keeps her from recovery: “I’m : Melissa living in sin and darkness, and it’s (Missy) Miller, , has putting a wall between God and me no struggled with an eating matter how much I want to tear it disorder for about down ... I have this latent sense that He years, and still struggles can heal—but not me.” with it day to day. Although financially dependent on her parents, Missy still blows at least : Adam Nettina a week on groceries for herself, is , a recent college gradspending an “obscene amount of time” uate, and about pounds at Whole Foods staring at nutritional under his healthy weight. labels and hoarding food she doesn’t The last time he was at a eat. Her fridge must always contain her healthy weight, he was a
ripped freshman at Catholic University of America, pressing weights, and running additional laps around campus after his ROTC training. Depressed and dissatisfied with school, Adam became addicted to the euphoria his daily exercise regimen and strict dietary rules provided him. He transferred to Utah State University and intensified his disordered behaviors until he was hospitalized his junior year. During our entire conversation on Skype, Adam was standing, shuffling his feet, and fidgeting around. He had spent the whole day sitting at his desk in Annapolis, Md., and felt antsy about his lack of activity: “I feel like if I sit, it’s
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taking years off my life.” He had raw vegetables with BBQ sauce for dinner because he’s feeling guilty about the pack of Nutter Butters he had for lunch. He shops in the boys’ section sometimes because men’s clothes hang off him. Adam isn’t the stereotypical eating-disordered patient, and not just because he’s male. He makes sure to get about , calories a day, but that’s the problem: He’s so hung up by this magic number that anything that deviates from it sends him into an anxious rage. He keeps a scale in his kitchen to keep precise measurements of his non-fat yogurt and chicken breasts. His mind pulses non-stop with calculations: An apple isn’t an apple. It’s “good” calories, and a license to eat that cup of “bad” ice cream. “You start to lose a sense of even enjoying the taste of food.
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‘‘I feel so helpless … I’ve always tried to be a good person. I feel like I would not have suffered the way I have without some kind of purpose behind it. If God doesn’t have a purpose for this, then this universe sucks.’’
‘‘I’m living in sin and darkness, and it’s putting a wall between God and me no matter how much I want to tear it down … I have this latent sense that He can heal—but not me.’’ Missy Miller
It’s a calorie, something you get to check off a list.” In June at his grandmother’s th birthday dinner, Adam demolished an entrée-sized salad—and slices of pizza left by relatives. But the “morning-after syndrome” keeps striking him: “It’s not so much a body image issue … the eating disorder itself, the obsession about food and the obsession about control, it’s hedonistic and idolatrous.” With his head low and his feet still moving side-to-side, Adam summarizes his recovery: “This is a marathon, not a sprint.” Right now, he looks exhausted.
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: Olivia Linde, , is beautiful. Her dark, expressive eyebrows arch like Audrey Hepburn’s, and her dark curls tumble in soft cascades. But to her -yearold eyes, she was just an awkward teenager hiding behind big frizzy hair, freckles, and glasses: “I always felt I wasn’t beautiful enough, and I wanted to fit in.” Olivia grew up with Christian parents but was still “soul-searching for God.” Seeking acceptance from others through her physical appearance, she found anorexia instead. Spiritual starvation led to physical starvation. Olivia didn’t make a conscious decision to diet. She was an active teenager playing soccer and volleyball who started upping her daily activity and calculating calories. That “innocent diet” gradually transformed into a serious social and mental disability. When her youth group laid out food, Olivia scampered into the bathroom to hide. She covered herself in layers of clothing to hide her emaciation.
When Olivia was and deep into her eating disorder, she professed faith in Christ and resolved to follow Him. There began the long process of recovery: the terror that gripped while her nutritionist and parents rejoiced at the higher numbers on the scale, the battles with her parents at the dinner table, and the guilt-wrestling as she watched how much her parents were hurting. Even now, Olivia still struggles not to act on the “anorexic thoughts” and the “horrible mental pictures” of her body: “There’s no quick fix. … It’s just choosing Jesus every single day.” This summer she worked at a Christian camp for teens and rarely needed to preach: She merely allowed herself to be vulnerable with her story. Olivia’s experience helps her detect symptoms of eating-disordered behaviors: “Every single girl I know, if they haven’t struggled with it themselves, they know someone who does.”
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: Four years ago, Natalie Tan was a -year-old National University of Singapore student who also didn’t know a calorie from a bean, but her boyfriend at the time started working for a diet product company. Relatives said during Chinese New Year, “You put on so much weight! Why so fat?” Natalie decided to lose about four pounds, so she took the slimming supplements and educated herself on what calories were, disregarding the part about how many she needed. Natalie lost a lot more than four pounds. Within four months, her period stopped. In about a year, her skin had yellowed like a decaying
phone book, and her worried parents took her to a counselor. As her weight continued dropping, her counselor referred her to Singapore General Hospital, where Natalie was diagnosed with anorexia and admitted to the hospital’s eating disorder treatment center. For Natalie, life at the treatment center with five other eating-disordered individuals fed her competitive streak. Instead of focusing on getting well, she and the others engaged in a silent competition: The person who gained weight the fastest was the loser. Some even learned how to hide food or throw up. Ironically, baking helped Natalie: She turned a corner when training as a pastry chef at Le Cordon Bleu in London. In nine months Natalie grew from a high-strung child who threatened to starve herself during fights with her “heartbroken” parents, into a healthy, independent woman who now assembles cakes and mousse shooters for a living. She had always enjoyed baking, but now she can bake a cake and eat it, too. God works in mysterious ways. After trying to avoid God for a long time, Natalie returned to church because the “aunties and uncles” at church raved about the cakes and cookies she baked for them. During her exams at Le Cordon Bleu, Natalie saw how God led her each step of the way as she stumbled through mistakes while heating sugar syrup and whipping buttercream for an opera cake. In fact, God had been with her all along. Natalie, who grew up a Christian and whose mother leads the ladies’ ministry in church, said she “knew God was around but I never felt His presence”—not until she started struggling with an eating disorder.
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‘‘I was actively destroying my body, stubbornly refusing even to open the Bible because of the tight, confusing mixture of guilt and resentment I felt toward Him. I wanted to hurt myself so much because I loathed everything about myself.’’
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looked healthier physically, mentally and spiritually I was worse than before. Costco bagels sparked one conflagration. I moved out the next day, spent nights sleeping in my car and crashing at my friend’s house, then roomed with a high school friend for three months. During those months, I turned into a hedonistic bulimic. I stayed up until a.m., gorging on piles of fatty and sugary foods until my belly could take in no more, puking my guts out, and repeating the process again until I was half fainting. This unsustainable lifestyle—I passed out twice—pushed me back to anorexia. Many times I could have died. I was actively destroying my body, stubbornly refusing even to open the Bible because of the tight, confusing mixture of guilt and resentment I felt toward Him. I wanted to hurt myself so much because I loathed everything about myself. God used that loathing to spotlight my sin and weakness. Friends, intelligence, and talents—all obliterated by a single mental disability. Nothing to boast about, nothing to contribute: I was a -pound college dropout who couldn’t even feed herself or walk uphill without falling. But I had an Almighty Father who
so loved and treasured me that He sent His one and only son, Jesus Christ, to replenish my soul, my mind, and my body. I saw God’s love through my family, my church, my friends. I saw God’s love in someone as pathetic and wretched as me. It took me a long time to understand what that kind of grace meant—deeply, intimately, personally—to me. I no longer wept about my inability to recover. When I used that newfound identity as a daily perspective on every circumstance and situation in my life, true recovery took place. Many professionals say you can never recover completely from an eating disorder. Yes, the scars will always remain, but in my experience, God never wastes our tears. Even as my heart still tightens with the painful memories, the overwhelming sensations I feel are thanksgiving and awe. Only God can make pottery (albeit still somewhat misshaped) out of a beaten lump of useless clay. Only God can turn an experience as hideous and humiliating as an eating disorder into a testimony that sings of His mercy and love. My parents and I share that testimony. We are all flawed individuals who are part of a beautiful purpose. It is bittersweet, but the bitter makes the sweet so much sweeter. A —Sophia Lee is a USC senior and WORLD intern
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, ’ story: mine. I’ll never forget the weepy hug I shared with my parents as I left my first hospitalization against doctor’s orders. The doctors and psychiatrist told me I would die. My parents and I believed an eating disorder was primarily a spiritual disease that cannot be healed by force-feeding and therapy sessions. God will heal, we believed. The day after that discharge, my hope deflated as I realized I couldn’t bring myself to finish a bowl of oatmeal. Each meal from then on became a battle. For six months our family dinners, high in tension, left everyone with indigestion. Then my worried parents and I drove hours to Northwestern University for my freshman year. I waved goodbye, promising to come back for winter break with an additional pounds. I was home within a month, pounds lighter, hospitalized for the second time and basically kicked out of Northwestern. The next year was painful. Desperate to go back to college, I gained more than pounds, but Northwestern denied me re-admission. Thus began my bitterness against God and my parents, fueled by the hatred and disgust I felt for myself. Even though I
Sophia Lee (left) at lbs. and a friend in ; Lee in (below).
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Hope for th
B F C C near Chattanooga, Tenn., tallies the number of people his Christian development organization has helped in Rwanda, he speaks of “hundreds of thousands.” (The work includes a Bible-based curriculum that helps poverty-stricken families save money and assist other community members.) But when Fikkert, executive director at Chalmers and an economics professor at Covenant College, considers the number of poor people the group has helped in Chattanooga since he founded the organization in , he says the figure drops dramatically: “I can count it on one hand.”
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the poor
Poverty in the United States is at a two decade high, but local groups that connect work and faith to charity provide lasting relief by jamie dean
Why the gap? While Rwanda has a violent past and far worse poverty than the United States, Fikkert says it also has something else: “The churches in Rwanda are churches of the poor. ... They are full of the poor.” In Chattanooga, he says, churches are often “full of people who don’t have relationships with the poor.” It’s not just a problem in Chattanooga. It’s a conundrum for many Christians across the country who want to help the
p h o t o b y S a r a h E l m s /S t r y. u s
poor in their own communities, but aren’t sure where to begin. Fikkert, co-author of When Helping Hurts, admits he struggles with such problems as well. That’s not because there’s a lack of poverty in America. A Sept. 12 report by the U.S. Census Bureau found the poverty rate in the United States hovers around 15 percent—the highest level in almost two decades. The rate barely changed from 2010 to 2011. It means some 46 million people in the United States live below the official poverty line—about $23,000 for a family of four. (The poverty rate calculations don’t include certain government benefits like earned income tax credits or food stamps, which would lower the number of those living below the poverty level.) When it comes to children, the numbers are especially startling. The report found the poverty rate for children raised by single mothers was 40.9 percent. (The rate of poverty for children of married couples was 8.8 percent.) The problem will likely grow worse: Kay Hymowitz of the Manhattan Institute noted that out of 1 million children likely to be born into poverty next year, nearly three-fourths will be born to single mothers. For years, politicians have debated the best way to help poor Americans, and the winner of November’s presidential election will face the same question. But as politicians struggle with the government’s role in poverty relief, Christians also continue grappling with their own responsibilities to help the poor. Former Sen. Rick Santorum, a devout Catholic, says that’s particularly important as TOP CHEFS: conservatives call on the government to Brian and Eric curtail runaway federal spending. During a at Victory pro-life event filled with Christians at the Trade School.
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or men and women looking for jobs after serving time in prison, starting small can seem like a huge task. Sandy Schultz, CEO of The WorkFaith Connection, talked about helping people with troubled pasts start over during the Hope Award’s dinner in October. “For so many of the men and women we are serving, putting the truth on a [job] application can be painful,” she said. “But God uses The WorkFaith Connection to remind them that they are a new creation in Christ, that the old is gone. They are living proof, bright lights in the world. They bring Scripture to life.” Other groups seek to bring Scripture to life for needy populations in other cities. In 2006, the first Hope Award recipient was the Christian Women’s Job Corps in Nashville, Tenn. The group began in 1997 as a program of the Woman’s Missionary Union, an affiliate of the Southern Baptist Convention. The group offers computer and GED classes, job skills counseling, one-on-one mentoring, Bible study, and childcare to women struggling with difficult circumstances, including addiction and poverty. Six years later, executive director Becky Sumrall is still leading the group, and spoke in a phone interview about the organization’s growth. Significant changes include adding an ESL class for international students and a jobs program for men. (When the group advertised for a GED class, 75 percent of the respondents were men.) With the poverty rate reaching 16.5 percent in Tennessee, a weakened economy has brought more people seeking help. Sumrall has joined Nashville’s poverty reduction committee to serve the city in looking for ways to help needy residents. The growth at the ministry has brought more challenges,
including maintaining enough volunteers to meet the needs, says Sumrall: “The hardest thing has been that we can’t serve as many as walk through the door.” Sumrall says the group has stayed at a size it can sustain, and keeps the spiritual component at the forefront: “Our model is still working.” Each of the other Hope Award recipients continues its model as well: The Arkansas Sherriffs’ Youth Ranches (2007) provides a home for hundreds of abused, neglected, and homeless children. A Way Out (2008), a Memphis, Tenn.–based ministry, rescues women from the city’s prostitution, stripping, and drug culture. An intense program includes Bible studies, counseling, and Bible-based classes on subjects like sexual addiction, depression, and maintaining boundaries. Forgiven Ministry (2009) is a Taylorsville, N.C., ministry that still provides day camps for prisoners and their children. The program includes biblical teaching on fatherhood for the inmates, and gives children a day with parents they rarely see. The group has added more camp dates and additional staff. Freedom for Youth (2010), a Des Moines, Iowa, ministry, teaches inner city kids how to break cycles of poverty. The services include a mentoring and tutoring program for elementary-school students, an after-school program for teenagers, and a residential house for adults. Mark Nelson still directs the ministry, and says he’s seen similar growth that others report—and similar challenges—as the poverty rate has increased. “We’re seeing it at our rural sites,” Nelson said in October. “The kids are coming in very hungry. They haven’t eaten.” More children means the need for more volunteers—something the ministry WORKFAITH: Making the struggles to maintain. But the group has connection. added three sites in rural areas, and a girl’s home for homeless young women. “Ministry isn’t getting any easier,” says Nelson. “But when things get tight, that’s when our faith seems to grow the most. … It’s showing us there is even a greater need to give the hope that only Christ can give to those who are suffering.” By 2011, a cooking school won the Hope Award: Victory Trade School in Springfield, Mo., provides a Christian discipleship program—and culinary training—for men who need help finding and keeping jobs. Young men apply from 15 different states, and many have gone on to successful careers. This year’s Hope Award winner has a similar goal of training men and women to learn how to get and keep jobs by offering a Christ-centered approach that encourages a biblical work ethic. The WorkFaith Connection has chosen not to pursue government funding so that it can maintain its Christian emphasis. That has cost the group grants from other sources
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Republican National Convention in August, Santorum told the group: “If the government is going to do less, we’ve got to do more.” What that looks like varies widely among cities, Christians, and churches. For the last seven years, WORLD has featured examples of Christians seeking to help needy populations by applying biblical principles to addressing material and spiritual needs. Each year, we profile a handful of worthy organizations nominated by readers, and ask our readers to vote for a winner online. On Oct. 18, we announced the winner of WORLD’s 2012 Hope Award for Effective Compassion: The WorkFaith Connection, a Houston-based group that helps some of the city’s least employable men and women find jobs. It’s one example of many groups working to do more to meet deep needs. In this report, we’ll review some of the past winners, examine some of the historical context for Christian poverty fighting, and look at ways that Christians can start small to do more.
as well, but CEO Schultz said: “We cannot make Scripture optional. Without connecting work and faith, we are not The WorkFaith Connection.”
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he concept of connecting work and faith in poverty fighting isn’t a new idea. In the Old Testament, God commanded the Israelites to take care of the poor, including providing opportunities for them to work. In the New Testament, that teaching continued, as the early church took close care of its neediest members, and the Apostle Paul encouraged hard work from all Christians—a teaching that flowed from God’s creating Adam and Eve as workers in the Garden of Eden. Christian care for church members—and outsiders— continued as the still-young church cared for the poor, the orphaned, the widowed, and many of the sick during plagues that ravaged the ancient world. By 362 A.D., the emperor Julian complained to the high CHRISTIAN it had declined, and became known as one of priest of Galatia about the virtues and extensive system of WOMEN’S the most significant social reformers of his good works by Christians: “The impious Galileans support not JOB CORPS: era. Chalmers directed deacons to help the only their poor, but ours as well, everyone can see that our GED tutoring. unemployed find work, and help uneducated people lack aid from us.” children find schools to attend through a By the time of the Protestant Reformation, theologians meticulous home visitation system. began re-emphasizing the importance of caring for the poor. Chalmers also wrote extensively on poverty relief. Tim Indeed, John Calvin asked his congregation: “Do we want to Keller, a pastor and author of Ministries of Mercy, notes show there is a reformation among us?” If so, he said, “There Chalmers once said the church could do what the government must be pastors who bear purely the doctrine of salvation, could not: address the moral and spiritual roots of poverty. and then deacons who have the care of the poor.” As a pastor in Geneva, Calvin developed a robust diaconal program in the church. David Hall, a pastor and the author of ddressing the moral and spiritual roots of Calvin in the Public Square, calls the theologian’s diaconal poverty remains the challenge for Christians work “one of Calvin’s contributions to Western civilization.” today. Calvin helped form the diaconate as a response to refugees Back at the Chalmers Center, Fikkert says that flowing into Geneva, but extended that care to widows, the government does have a role to play in orphans, the hungry, and the poor. He even directed the poverty fighting, including promoting a healthy economic deacons to make sure the public hospital was maintained so environment that will create jobs and give people an that the poor and needy could find good medical care. opportunity to work. All of these efforts were grounded in an Christians can help by teaching poorer expectation that those seeking help would people how to be spiritually healthy, he says, also seek work. Calvin taught that begging “So that they will know they are made in WORLD is now taking without honest work (for those who were the image of God and called as His image nominations for povertyable) was incompatible with a biblical work bearers to work and be productive.” fighting ministries to be ethic—a break from Roman Catholic And though specific programs and considered for our 2013 almsgiving that had distributed charity ministries are often critical, Fikkert says Hope Award for Effective more indiscriminately. encouraging the poor to be part of regular Compassion. Please email And diaconal assistance in Geneva came church life is perhaps the most critical step: June McGraw (jmcgraw@ with biblical counseling from the deacons, “Sometimes we lose sight of the fact that the worldmag.com) with basic and an expectation that recipients attend ordinary means of grace—worship, preachinformation about your the local church. ing, fellowship, prayer, the sacraments—are nominee: Name, city, website By 1578, theologian and pastor John a part of how God transforms lives. The poor address, and a paragraph on Knox was continuing an emphasis on need these too.” why you think it’s great. helping the poor in his work as a leader in That means considering how to do more in Criteria: Groups should be the Protestant Church in Scotland. Knox the days ahead will require Christians to think explicitly Christian, privately supervised a substantial system for deacons deeply about how to be involved in local funded, and centered on to visit the poor in local parishes and help ministries, but also how to involve the poor offering challenging, personal, tend to their spiritual and material needs. in the ministry of their churches. Fikkert and spiritual help. The Thomas Chalmers, a Scottish pastor in says that’s a task that takes tremendous national winner receives a the early 1800s, revived this emphasis after effort and “unbelievable intentionality.” A check for $25,000, and regional winners receive $4,000 each.
James Allen Walker
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Notebook
Lifestyle > Technology > Science > Houses of God > Sports > Money > Religion
Multiple identities Asian-Americans foster faith on campus through both multi-ethnic and Asian-specific fellowships by Angela Lu & Sophia Lee
sophia lee
>>
Three days before fall semester at the University of California– Los Angeles began, a student group fair gave campus organizations recruiting opportunities. Between booths representing Feminists on Campus and UCLA Republicans, representatives of the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship—which is half Asian-American—passed out fliers
about upcoming events. Meanwhile, Korea Campus Crusade for Christ (KCCC) members huddled in a group praying for God’s guidance in their evangelical mission. State universities in California are not known as places where religion flourishes, but two out of five undergraduates at UCLA and the University of California, Berkeley are of Asian
ancestry, and many profess Christ. Some within the movement, though, worry that pigeonholing into ethnic enclaves could inhibit Asian Christians’ ability CONNECTING: Students from to impact the UCLA’s Christian larger campus. Students At the UCLA organization at student fair, senior the group fair.
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Notebook > Lifestyle
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nervous about finding a Christian f ellowship in Berkeley. He based his expectations on Berkeley’s reputation as a rebellious, liberal school where he thought, “Christ wasn’t proclaimed, or not proclaimed clearly.” Once on campus, he felt overwhelmed by the amount of Christian groups he found— 61 of the 86 religious groups on campus are Christian. After checking out a few, he settled into Living Water fellowship, a group of about 200 students, 95 percent of whom are Asian-Americans. Wong made friends to keep him accountable and who can relate to the struggles he faces. For example: “In Chinese culture there is a huge work mentality, where success is determined by how much you do, how respected you are. Because of that, we struggle to understand the idea of God loving us unconditionally.” Many high-achieving Asian-American students also feel added pressure from their parents to succeed and find it hard to give their plans up to God. Wong admits that despite the opportunities provided by shared experience, CLOSE-KNIT: KCCC members at UCLA carry clipboards to sign up potential members.
it can also cut students off from the campus at large: “One thing tough about Berkeley is that most things are pretty divided by race. In the fellowship world, it’s mostly separated by race and culture, unfortunately.” Rebecca Kim, author of God’s New Whiz Kids?, believes underlying the Asian clustering is a power struggle. Through interviews for her book, which looks at how Asian-American college students are changing the face of American evangelicalism, she found that Asian-Americans find it hard to attain leadership positions in diverse, integrated Christian groups. The easier option is just to join an Asian-specific fellowship. Kim said ethnically segregated fellowships are deep-rooted in American culture: “It’s hard to overcome that.” At InterVarsity, though, Matthew Kim said they are trying to change that and become “a fellowship that is not just taking care of ourselves, a safe haven for Christians, but [is seeing] the campus as a place God is sending us out to be missionaries.” Grace Wong, a senior at the University of Southern California, agrees with Kim’s vision. She thought
sophia lee
Justin Shyu stood in front of a booth representing Epic fellowship, the Asian-American branch of Campus Crusade (now Cru). Wearing a pair of plastic sunglasses stamped with “UCLA Student Association,” he occasionally turned around to admonish his shy booth partner, “Be more assertive!” Shyu, a second-generation Taiwanese-American, found Epic after a friend brought him to a Cru meeting. Shyu said that although God “rocked” him at a Cru fall conference, he “did not feel exactly right” among the crowd of 300 mostly nonAsian Cru members: “I felt like I couldn’t make close relationships.” At Epic, Shyu says, the connection was instantaneous: “I felt so safe there, safe to share about my life.” This kind of instant close-knit community draws many students into Asian-American fellowships, such as Epic, or Asian-majority fellowships. Matthew Kim, a staff worker of InterVarsity at Berkeley, suggests that Asians stick together partly because of the “immigrant church” mentality: “The Asian-American church in the United States is seen as a refuge, a place of safety … where people speak their language and cater events toward their culture.” He said such mentality persists when students come to campus, causing Asians to group together to worship— for better or for worse. While InterVarsity at Berkeley is a multi- ethnic fellowship, Asians make up 80 percent of its members. Many Asian students join the fellowships their friends are in or that older students recommend, which leads to the high concentrations of Asians even in nonethnic specific fellowships. Berkeley sophomore Josh Wong believes that with this network of Asians, Christian groups are well known on campus. “Many of the fellowships are very missional. They very rarely hide in a bubble. It’s a big place with a lot of connections.” But, Wong conceded, their voice “could always be more.” Wong, who grew up in a Chinese church in Southern California, was
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sophia lee
about joining Epic as a freshman but chose the more multicultural InterVarsity for two simple reasons: “I wanted a small fellowship, and not an Asian fellowship.” She grew up in an Asian church, but said joining a more diverse fellowship opened up her perception of God and her whole world of understanding: “In Asian communities, it’s great that you’re comfortable and you understand your own culture, but you block off a huge part of the world.” She now plays the keyboard for USC InterVarsity’s main meetings, which was two-thirds Asian three years ago but has now diversified because of efforts to include other ethnicities: “We recognized that God’s kingdom isn’t just Asian people.” When Grace Wong joined InterVarsity in 2009, it was made up of 20 students, most of them Asians. Now, three years later, USC InterVarsity’s Thursday night meetings pack a chemistry lecture hall with about 180 white, black, Asian, and Latino students. The praise band, with an African-American singer, sometimes sings the praise songs in Spanish. “We want to reinforce that God is the same,“ Wong said. “That no matter what ethnicity you are … you can come together and worship the same God.” Still, Kathy Khang, InterVarsity multi-ethnic director for the Midwest region, believes both ethnic-specific and multi-ethnic fellowships are important as each student comes to campus with differing views of their ethnicity. “Our primary identity is through Christ, but God gave us race and gender as part of our identity … that’s a reflection of God’s own identity. He didn’t create us as one genderless, raceless being.” A
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Notebook > Technology
Foreign spies?
Domestic spies
Husbands and wives in troubled marriages turn to spy gear BY DANIEL JAMES DEVINE
>>
surveillance technology increases in sophistication and shrinks in size and price, their options are expanding: For just to , software installed on a mobile phone or home computer can log keystrokes and intercept emails and texts, or a hidden GPS tracker can map out where a vehicle travels each week. Spy gear shops offer even more imaginative options. The website of Aaron Gregory Vehicle Tracking & Spy Equipment sells video cameras hidden inside pens, houseplants, and brown teddy bears. “Catch your cheating spouse with our spy equipment,” the company invites. Judges’ opinions differ, but at least five U.S. circuit courts have ruled that spousal surveillance violates the Federal Wiretap Act.
The city of New Orleans launched an online map enabling homeowners, real estate investors, and nonprofit organizations to track urban decay easily, and perhaps counter it. The map, developed by the nonprofit Code for America and hosted at blightstatus.nola.gov, is linked to city data and marks property addresses where inspectors found broken windows, crumbling siding or roofing, or overgrown lawns. The website indicates whether the city has notified the property owner or issued a judgment, and the map format makes it easy to see particular neighborhoods with clusters of blighted homes. According to one sociological theory, blemishes like broken windows invite larger crimes: Blight maps could shine an early light on problem properties. —D.J.D.
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COMPUTER: TIM ROBBERTS/THE IMAGE BANK/GETTY IMAGES • HUAWEI: STR/AFP/GETTYIMAGES • MAP: HANDOUT
A in a bedside alarm clock. Spyware installed on a mobile phone. A magnetic GPS tracking device attached to the underbody of a Mitsubishi Eclipse. Curiously, these surveillance tools weren’t planted by detectives, but by suspicious spouses. Both the Houston Chronicle and The Wall Street Journal reported the increase in jealous husbands and wives using software and devices to spy on mates they suspect are involved in affairs. The eavesdropping activities often come to light in court, either during divorce proceedings or afterward. (In one case, a woman sewed a device into her son’s blue jeans to secretly record her ex-husband.) Jealous spouses have recorded phone calls for decades, but as
The House Intelligence Committee warned U.S. officials and companies against doing business with Huawei Technologies and ZTE, two major Chinese telecom companies, after concluding they could “undermine core U.S nationalsecurity interests.” Huawei and ZTE have tried to expand sales of routers and network equipment in the United States, but security experts worry the Chinese government could coerce the two companies into planting bugged hardware that could steal data or disrupt communication. Last year the Commerce Department blocked Huawei from bidding to build a national wireless network for emergency responders. Earlier this year the Reuters news agency revealed ZTE had sold surveillance equipment to Iran, along with embargoed U.S.-made hardware and software. The House committee said it found evidence Huawei had engaged in bribery and transmitted U.S. computer data to China. Both companies deny they are controlled by Chinese officials, and Huawei called the committee’s report “little more than an exercise in China-bashing.” —D.J.D.
Email: ddevine@worldmag.com
10/29/12 4:08 PM
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COMPUTER: TIM ROBBERTS/THE IMAGE BANK/GETTY IMAGES • HUAWEI: STR/AFP/GETTYIMAGES • MAP: HANDOUT
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10/29/12 10:19 AM
Notebook > Science
Bones to pick
Scientists are at odds on the question of soft tissue preservation
>>
years old. The team also found evidence of material within the fossils that behaved, chemically, like DNA. Schweitzer is famous for discovering soft tissue inside a fossilized T. rex femur in 2004. Although subsequent studies have backed up her findings, critics who can’t swallow the idea of 67-million-year-old dinosaur protein argue the T. rex proteins actually came from a “biofilm” deposited by microbes that invaded the fossils in more recent years. In defense, Schweitzer contends that a previously unknown chemical mechanism allows cellular matter to be preserved over geologic time. An apparent solution to the dispute—that dinosaurs may be considerably younger than current theory dictates—is unlikely to get much consideration, given the commitment to Darwinian evolution in mainstream science. Thus, the riddle remains scientifically unsolved. According to Scientific American reporter Kate Wong, Schweitzer poked fun at her opponents during a talk at an Oct. 17 paleontology conference in North Carolina. “Here’s the data in support of a biofilm origin,” she said, showing everyone a blank slide. “We haven’t found any yet.”
Shots in the dark Flu vaccines are less effective than health officials have thought, say researchers from the University of Minnesota. In a three-year study that reviewed 12,000 science journal articles and other documents, disease experts from the university’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy concluded there’s little consistent evidence that annual flu shots reduce the risk of illness among children ages 2 to 17 or among adults 65 and older. That doesn’t mean people should forgo shots, though: The team found flu shots to be moderately (about 59 percent) effective among healthy adults ages 18 to 64, and the nasal spray vaccine was about 83 percent effective among young children (7 and under). “We urge people to get their flu shot,” said lead researcher Michael T. Osterholm. “The present vaccines are the best interventions available for seasonal influenza.” But the team said the widespread perception that flu shots are very effective has discouraged efforts to develop next-generation vaccines that could protect against more than one flu strain. —D.J.D.
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paleontologist: PIERRE-PHILIPPE MARCOU/AFP/Getty Images • Flu vaccines: Lewis Whyld/PA Wire/ap
An ongoing debate over whether cellular material can be preserved within fossils for long jurassic lark: periods of time got a fresh round of A paleontologist ammunition in October. Two new studies analyzes the bones of DNA and proteins offered support for of a sauropod. opposite perspectives. In the first, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Australian scientists drilled into 158 semifossilized leg bones from extinct, flightless moa birds and extracted DNA samples. Relying on carbon dating, the researchers measured the bones to be between 600 and 8,000 years old. They calculated how much DNA had degraded in the older and younger fossils, and by comparing those amounts, estimated that DNA has a half-life of 521 years—meaning about half of DNA breaks apart every 521 years. The upshot is that little readable DNA should be able to survive in a fossil beyond 1.5 million years, and none beyond 6.8 million. In the second study, published in Bone, a team led by North Carolina State University researcher Mary H. Schweitzer used mass spectrometry to show evidence for the existence of dinosaur proteins inside Tyrannosaurus rex and duck-billed hadrosaur fossils, both purported to be more than 60 million
worldmag.com: Your online source for today’s news, Christian views
10/29/12 4:14 PM
Luke Duggleby/Redux
By daniel james devine
Notebook > Houses of God
Luke Duggleby/Redux
paleontologist: PIERRE-PHILIPPE MARCOU/AFP/Getty Images • Flu vaccines: Lewis Whyld/PA Wire/ap
Pre-dawn worshippers gather for prayer outside St. Gabriel’s Church in Hawzen, Ethiopia, nestled in the rocky, mountainous province of Tigray, which borders Eritrea. Dotting the region are ancient churches carved into sandstone cliffs that safeguard ancient religious manuscripts.
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Notebook > Sports
‘She laughed at me’ Aaron Rodgers proved his teacher wrong, but many others will prove her right BY MARK BERGIN
>>
BACK-UP PLAN IN MOTION: Rodgers.
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and age groups post criticism on locker room bulletin boards to motivate their teams. But this particular anecdote from Rodgers represents something different. This was a challenge from an educator to face the improbability of NFL success and take seriously the development of alternatives. That Rodgers happened to be among the select few who can earn a living in athletics hardly discounts the wisdom of his professor, however derisively delivered. Sports bloggers and radio personalities, such as ESPN’s Mike Golic, have lauded the Green Bay play-caller for proving his professor wrong. But what of all the athletes for whom the professor would prove right? Especially in impoverished communities, where youth often grow up without successful adult role models save the ones playing ball for large paydays on television, the challenge to take education seriously is apt. In urban Chicago this past summer, I coached a basketball team made up of players who universally believed their futures would include NBA fortune. I wrestled with how to guide these young men, many of them juniors and seniors with no college basketball scholarships in sight. To laugh at their dreams would be heartless, but to avoid hard conversations about realistic expectations more heartless still. To Rodgers’ credit, he enrolled at the University of Wisconsin Green Bay after a series of concussions made him consider life after football. But for most athletes, life after football begins before any paydays. Perhaps Rodgers should give a more sincere thank you to his professor, not for adding to the chip on his shoulder but for delivering a dose of reality.
Lolo on ice Two-time Olympic hurdler Lolo Jones, who suffered disappointments in Beijing then London by failing to medal, will take another crack at Olympic glory. Jones has joined the U.S. bobsled team and will fight for a chance to compete at the games in Sochi. Fellow U.S. track star Tianna Madison, who won gold in London as part of the women’s x relay team, also has crossed over to the winter sport. The pair follows a number of male athletes who have made similar conversions from track to bobsled. For Jones, the move could offer a chance at redemption after not living up to the hype she helped manufacture. —M.B.
RODGERS: ELSA/GETTY IMAGES • JONES: MICHAEL LYNCH/AP
D in Green Bay, Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers recounted a moment in college that still serves to motivate his drive for success in the NFL. He told of a teacher in a food appreciation class at Cal Berkeley who scolded him for asking permission to rewrite a failing paper: “She says, ‘What do you want to do with yourself?’ I said, ‘I want to play in the NFL.’ She laughed. She laughed at me. It was a condescending laugh and she said, ‘You’ll never make it. You’ll get hurt. You’ll need your education, and you’re not gonna make it through school here.’” The professor’s prediction proved half right in that Rodgers never finished his degree. He left school after his junior year to enter the NFL draft, where he was selected in the first round. He has since led the Packers to a Super Bowl victory and is widely considered among the elite quarterbacks in the league. Rodgers retold his tale of woe in a near spiteful tone, his voice dripping with sarcasm as he thanked the professor for “adding to that chip on my shoulder.” Rodgers has long made it known that he plays his best football in the face of perceived slights that give him something to prove. He is far from alone in that among worldclass athletes. Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps, for example, makes a habit of searching media reports for some criticism he can use as fuel. And coaches across all sports
Email: mbergin@worldmag.com
10/30/12 3:51 PM
Last train out to get off the grid?
Amazing “Solar Generator” Is Like Having A Secret Power Plant Hidden In Your Home! BY MIKE WALTERS STAFF WRITER, OFF THE GRID NEWS
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ew solar powered backup provides instant electrical power in any outage or disaster. If you have ever wanted to have an emergency backup system that supplies continuous electrical power, this will be the most important message you will ever read. Here is why. There is now a completely portable (and ultra-high efficient) solar power generator which produces up to 1800 watts of household electricity on demand when you need it most. News of this “solar backup generator” (it’s the first “off-thegrid” breakthrough in 50 years) is spreading like wild fire all across the country! Why? The answer is easy. You see, this solar generator is extremely powerful and yet very simple to use. It produces continuous electricity and runs with absolutely no noise whatsoever. It emits no fumes. But the best part about the solar generator is that once you own one, you can...
Gas Stations Can’t Pump Gas Without Electricity! It’s true. When the power goes out, you’re left with whatever gas you have on hand because the gas station pumps all run on electricity. A few gallons stored in a gas can means a little electricity for a little while, then it’s quickly “back to black.” Here’s the thing: I could go on and on about life without electricity and what a nightmare gas generators can be. But here’s the bottom line: Solutions From Science is now offering an amazing power generating system that can provide plenty of electrical power in the event of an outage or emergency. And the best part is that you can have the power safely in your house.
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Let me try to explain the features and benefits of a solar generator as simply as possible. If I could bring one over to your house and let you start plugging in appliances, you would immediately understand what all the fuss is about. Generate Free Electricity From The Sun! But I can’t do that. Anyway, here are some of the Charged by the sun with a powerful solar panel, reasons I think you’ll want a solar generator: the unit then stores the power for your use when #1. Maximum Power In Minimum Time. you need it. We all face natural disasters, with The solar generator can be set up in just a few hurricanes, tornadoes, snow and ice storms cutting minutes. Then, all you have to do is start plugging off electrical power to millions of Americans each things in. It can run both AC & DC appliances year. anywhere… anytime. Then there are man-made disasters and outages. #2. Back Up Power When You Need It Most. Blackouts and rolling brownouts are becoming common in many parts of the United States as our It’s called a “solar backup” because it’s designed grid gets stretched beyond its capacity. to come to your rescue when power trouble starts The truth is, we are extremely vulnerable to and your lights go out. Run a small refrigerator all kinds of meltdowns that can create temporary (high efficient ones are best) to keep your food from or even permanent electrical outages. That’s why if going bad. you are one of the few Americans that thinks ahead, #3. Portable Power. you need to… If the going ever gets too tough where you are Have A Solar Powered Backup In Place! and you decide to “get out of dodge,” you simply When you compare a solar generator to a gas throw it in the car and take off to a safer destination. generator, the difference is pretty remarkable. Here’s #4. Generates Permanent Power. why. First, gas generators make an incredible amount of racket… if you can even get them started in the The unit provides 1800 watts of electricity at first place. With a gas generator, you pull and pull peak power. That’s enough to run many appliances some more, all because your generator has been in your house. The generator is recharged constantly sitting in the cold and the carburetor is playing by the sun allowing you to use the system while hard to get. This, of course, is not a lot of fun in the charging it at the same time. Many users choose to dark. Another reason to avoid gas generators is that keep appliances plugged in permanently to reduce you just can’t safely run one in your house. But the electrical costs and help pay for the unit. number one reason you don’t want to be caught in a time of crisis with a gas generator is…
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#5. Multiple Uses. You can use your solar backup to run essential appliances when emergencies arise. You can recharge phones, run shortwave radios, televisions, lights, fire place or furnace fans, as well as computers and printers. Plus, if you need to work in the woods at the cabin or in a boat, you can use the solar backup to run power tools, trimmers, blowers and coffee makers. #6. Plug And Play Means Instant Power. The emergency backup system comes ready to go. Just start plugging in your favorite household essentials. By the way... the units go for about $1697.00 plus shipping and handling. But I’m going to show you a way around that. I have negotiated a very special offer for readers of this publication. Here’s the deal. You can use coupon code WR102 to get one for $200.00 off as a reader of this publication. To do that, the absolute fastest way to get one is by going to the website at:
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10/29/12 10:48 AM
Notebook > Money
A real cliff-hanger
Automatic budget cuts and tax hikes would take the wind out of an economy that’s starting to look better BY WARREN COLE SMITH
>>
Halloween jitters Wall Street calls the third, fourth, and fifth weeks after the end of each business quarter “earnings season.” It’s when thousands of publicly traded companies announce financial performance for the previous three months. For the third quarter just ended, something unusual happened: Analysts cared less about earnings than about revenue. Revenue can give a more accurate picture of how a company is performing, because earnings can vary widely due to accounting charges and temporary cost-cutting. The revenue picture for the third quarter was not good. Hasbro, with brands like My Little Pony and Transformers,
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said sales for boys and preschool were less than projected. Caterpillar, the world’s largest construction and mining equipment company, cut its profit and revenue predictions for the year, blaming weakness in the global economy. The result was an October that gave back September gains. Between Oct. , just before earnings season began, and Oct. , with earnings season winding down, the Dow fell more than points and left traders with a dose of Halloween jitters most think will last until the end of the year. —W.C.S.
ILLUSTRATION: KRIEG BARRIE • TRANSFORMERS: SHANNON STAPLETON/REUTERS/LANDOV
“T ,” said Phil Orlando, chief equity market strategist at Federated Investors. The consequences of going over the fiscal cliff “would be grave,” said top executives in a letter to President Obama and to Congress on Oct. . It might also be the best thing that ever happened to a lame-duck session of Congress. As Samuel Johnson once said: “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” Congress has more than a fortnight to avoid the fiscal cliff—the name Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke gave the twin effects of across-the-board budget reductions and the expiration of Bush-era tax cuts. But not much more: days to be exact, though expected recesses are already causing Hill staffers to complain that the lame duck is likely to leave them with nothing but leftover Christmas turkey. But there is surprising unanimity that Congress will get something done. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., told the Bipartisan Policy Center on Oct. , “This shouldn’t be this hard.” Rep. Sue Myrick, R-N.C., said, “There is no reason Congress cannot prevent the fiscal cliff.” It won’t be easy. President Obama promised to veto any bill that extends tax cuts for top earners. Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, thinks he’s bluffing. “After the election, all eyes turn to , where or more Democratic senators are vulnerable,” Norquist said. “They don’t want to raise taxes, and Obama won’t stand alone. Obama signed the tax cut extension two years ago, and even added to them. He’ll do that again.” Virtually everyone—Republican or Democrat—is opposed to “sequestration,” the technical term for the automatic spending cuts. Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., told me that across-the-board cuts would be “folly” and not a permanent fix: “Until Congress has the guts to cut specific programs we will never get our debt under control.” Coburn acknowledged that “new revenue” would be necessary. He denied the charge by Norquist that “new revenue” is code for a tax increase. “It means tax reform,” he said. “Lower rates and a broadening of the base. If we don’t do that, we’ll get a massive tax increase called inflation.” But neither Coburn nor Norquist believe we’ll get a systemic fix in the lame duck session. None of this comes at a good time. “The economy looks like it wants to grow more normally again,” said Rusty Leonard of Stewardship Partners, who says going over the fiscal cliff would not be a catastrophe, but would be a serious drag on growth. “It would be a real shame to see that long-awaited impetus for more normal growth cut off at the knees by the cliff.”
Email: wsmith@worldmag.com
10/30/12 1:46 PM
Health care for people Biblical of faith
ILLUSTRATION: KRIEG BARRIE • TRANSFORMERS: SHANNON STAPLETON/REUTERS/LANDOV
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10/29/12 10:37 AM
Notebook > Religion
Troubled ministry
Lawsuit claims leaders at Sovereign Grace Ministries covered up sexual abuse BY THOMAS S. KIDD
>>
W O R L D • N O V E M B E R 1 7, 2 0 1 2
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Mahaney founded SGM in out of Covenant Life Church in Gaithersburg, Md. In , Mahaney stepped down as Covenant Life pastor. Following his reappointment as the president of SGM, Mahaney relocated the ministry’s headquarters to Louisville, Ky., and planted a church there. The new church held its opening service on Sept. . The lawsuit charges SGM leaders with allowing suspected child abusers to continue interacting with children, sheltering the accused perpetrators from prosecution, and forcing alleged victims as young as to forgive their molesters. The complaint accuses several SGM elders and officials of actively covering up the crimes, while it names Mahaney because the offenses allegedly occurred under his leadership. SGM released a statement saying that “child abuse in any context is reprehensible and criminal. Sovereign Grace Ministries takes seriously the biblical commands to pursue the protection and well being of all people, especially the most vulnerable in its midst, little children.”
Mixing it up The American Family Association (AFA) in October urged parents to keep their kids home from school on “Mix It Up at Lunch Day,” a program sponsored by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The SPLC says that the school cafeteria is often the most socially segregated space in public schools, and the most obvious location to encourage new friendships. The AFA argues that Mix It Up is a thinly veiled effort to “establish the acceptance of homosexuality into public schools.” For its part, the SPLC has recently added the AFA to its growing list of American “hate groups.” Civil rights organizers founded the SPLC in in Montgomery, Ala. Now the group targets not just racial discrimination, but what it sees as many varieties of prejudice, including that against gays and lesbians. Its top priorities, the SPLC website says, include “children at risk, [combating] hate and extremism, … and LGBT [Lesbian, GETTING TO KNOW YOU: Eighth graders taking part in “Mix It Up at Lunch Day” at Westwood High in New Jersey.
Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender] rights.” It particularly focuses on protecting LGBT students from bullying in schools. Bryan Fischer, director of issues analysis for the AFA, says that “no one is in favor of anyone getting bullied for any reason, but these anti-bullying policies become a mechanism for punishing
Christian students who believe that homosexual behavior is not something that should be normalized.” The SPLC contends that breaking down barriers of sexual orientation is not the primary purpose of Mix It Up, but that those barriers are among the most entrenched in schools. The AFA has launched an email campaign against Mix It Up day (which fell on Oct. this year), encouraging concerned parents to contact administrators of participating schools. Since the beginning of the AFA campaign, more than schools have withdrawn from the program. —T.S.K.
MAHANEY: JAMES THOMPSON • MIX IT UP: CARMINE GALASSO/KRT/NEWSCOM
T to mount for Sovereign Grace Ministries (SGM), an evangelical association with about churches and , members worldwide. The SGM board of directors reinstated the ministry’s founder, C.J. Mahaney, as president of SGM in early after he took a leave of absence for several months. Accusations of spiritual pride and hypocrisy precipitated Mahaney’s leave. Now SGM is facing a lawsuit by three female plaintiffs, alleging that SGM leaders covered up sexual abuse that occurred in the s and s, and that they discouraged church members from cooperating with law enforcement officials. Even before the lawsuit, several SGM churches, including ones in Charlottesville, Va., Sarasota, Fla., and Daytona Beach, Fla., had left the association. Jesse Jarvis, pastor of the Daytona Beach congregation, cited a “leadership culture characterized by excessive authority and insufficient accountability” as a reason for leaving SGM.
Email: tkidd@worldmag.com
10/29/12 4:17 PM
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GIFTS MAHANEY: JAMES THOMPSON • MIX IT UP: CARMINE GALASSO/KRT/NEWSCOM
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. . . because we love the brethren.
10/29/12 10:45 AM
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10/29/12 10:33 AM
Mailbag ‘Debunking junk’
Oct. You began by describing how high school teachers explain DNA, but in my biology class in Watson and Crick’s seminal discovery was not part of the curriculum. All I remember is not understanding why my teacher insisted that water is a food. Since then my frustration with biological terms has continued, so thanks for helping me understand the concept of DNA switches a little better. —J M, Carrollton, Texas Thank you for the fascinating article on ENCODE research. We will never know everything about any aspect of our universe, but let’s keep searching and so continue to fulfill the creation mandate. —M W, Bloomington, Minn.
As we learn more about the switches in our DNA (and that of plants), and begin to manipulate them to cure various diseases and conditions, do we know whether that will have other longrange effects we can’t control? While we’re interested in what makes us tick and how He designed creation, we need to be careful not to really mess up. —G N, Willow Street, Pa.
Well done. Obviously God would utilize percent of the genome sequence. Our DNA codes and switches must control a staggering number of biological processes, from egg fertilization and implantation all the way to the triggers that govern our aging and planned body failure in death. —C N, Bozeman, Mont.
‘Blocking the shots’ Oct. As a Christian, homeschooling physician, I thank you for this story on homeschoolers’ attitudes toward
Send photos and letters to: mailbag@worldmag.com
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immunization. There is an unreasonable mistrust in the Christian community about a practice that has radically reduced our risk of smallpox, polio, and many other diseases. However, public health recommendations regarding Hepatitis B and HPV virus are seriously at variance with widely held Christian attitudes about sexuality. I would plead for a nuanced approach to this subject, but what I often see is more heat and rudeness than light. —J P, Monroe, Wis.
Are homeschoolers really taking unnecessary risks by delaying vaccinations? As a physician, I wonder, are they instead protecting their children from long-term, unfavorable consequences of vaccines while alerting our communities to significant concerns about vaccine safety, efficacy, and universal necessity? —P R, Lake Stevens, Wash.
This article was obviously biased in favor of vaccines. Shouldn’t parents decide what they are willing to inject into their children? Shouldn’t parents decide whether to take the risk of not vaccinating? —E B S, Cadiz, Ky.
As an OB/GYN, I will continue to advise my patients to follow the advice of the CDC regarding vaccines, including the HPV vaccine. Even if a young woman remains sexually pure, she may marry a spouse who did not. It is not a license for promiscuity, for the HPV vaccine does not prevent pregnancy, HIV, herpes, or any other sexually transmitted disease. —K B, Middletown, Pa.
As a Christian and a scientist I am proud to have vaccines tested on me for safety and efficacy. I assure anyone who asks me that the CDC guidelines are based on a solid foundation of facts. —J K, Houston, Texas
‘Pastors and the party’ Oct. Thank you for the sidebar about African-American pastors at the Democratic Convention. “I’m not working for Mitt Romney!” is a pretty succinct summary of what that community is saying. This doesn’t surprise me, given the Mormons’ history with race. —P O’C, Gilford, N.H.
‘Power hungry’ Oct. The producers of the new show Revolution hold religion in contempt. In one funeral scene from the second episode, the leader of the evil militia recites the rd Psalm, while the protagonists apparently have no faith of any kind. Message: It’s the “bad guys” who believe. We see the same message elsewhere in our culture. We have much work to do. —J R. K, Jacksonville, N.C.
N O V E M B E R 1 7, 2 0 1 2 • W O R L D
10/25/12 11:21 AM
Mailbag
Study
Under Pastors Reformed Presbyterian Theological Seminary Pittsburgh, PA www.rpts.edu info@rpts.edu (412)731-6000
FLORIDA, IN CAMAGÜEY PROVINCE, CUBA submitted by Marilyn Reed
‘All in a day’s work’ Oct. Federal lawmakers collect . an hour, “to say nothing of the generous benefits,” and all these politicians expect me to believe that they know how difficult it is for the middle class to make ends meet? —N B, Concord, N.C.
‘Boy crazy’ Oct. Those who advocate for abortion rights but denounce sex-selective abortions are logically inconsistent. If a fetus is a human being, then abortion of either male or female unborn children should be forbidden. If not, then abortion should be allowable for any reason, including sex selection. Their consciences tell them that there is something deeply wicked about sex-selective abortions, but their unbiblical worldview can’t tell them why that is. —D W, Mebane, N.C.
Study under pastors.
Notable CDs Oct. Andrew Peterson is at the front of a quiet revival of acoustic artistry and lyrical depth heard only rarely since Rich Mullins. Light for the Lost Boy is an album of rare creative beauty and insight into Christian hope. —C C, Monument, Colo.
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‘Queen of Rock ’n’ Roll’ Oct. I thoroughly enjoyed your article on Arizona Dranes and plan to get the book to learn more about this pioneer of gospel music. But I was a little disappointed in the slam on Pentecostalism. I can understand having a difference of opinion, but to call our interpretation of Acts “deficient” is over the top. —B C, Agawam, Mass.
‘Fatal decisions’ Sept. For the last few decades, government has been assigning group rights based on ethnic heritage, age, sex, etc. It’s no surprise, therefore, that the government may now exercise passive or active euthanasia on some of the same bases. —D H, Sparta, Mich.
‘Literary bondage’ Sept. Janie B. Cheaney’s insights into the popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey were penetrating. Perhaps there has never been a time when the Godgiven roles of men and women have been so blurred and confused. —J MM, Kingsport, Tenn.
A true husband loves, cherishes, and nurtures his wife as Christ loves the
10/29/12 10:34 AM
Church. But such love is uncommon in our culture and so women drift to men who hurt them physically, emotionally, and sexually. Women need not seek fulfillment in such books. We must find our identity in Christ alone. —C C, Tampa, Fla.
‘God out of the box’ Sept. Exhorting readers steeped in postmodern culture to be “open” to whatever they deem God’s Word to mean is as needful as sending an alcoholic to a bar. Both childlike faith and right divisions of the Word are necessary if we are to behold God’s image rather than our own.
Jill
Kelly
—E. A, Louisville, Ky.
Clarification The children accompanying pro-life activists at the Democratic National Convention did not speak through a megaphone. Only one activist declared: “Unless you repent, you will be cast into hell” (“Social convention,” Oct. , p. ).
Corrections The first presidential debate between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama was at the University of Denver (Looking Ahead, Oct. , p. ). The heroine of Snow White and the Huntsman is Kristen Stewart (“Snow White and the Huntsman,” Oct. , p. ). Bob Dylan’s lyrics in “Tempest,” on his new album of the same name, include the line, “I’m sworn to uphold the laws of God” (Notable CDs, Oct. , p. ). The centurion in Matthew asked Jesus to heal his servant (“Powerful inferences,” Sept. , p. ).
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Andrée Seu Peterson
The pedestal We treat a person shabbily when we place him where only God belongs
>>
KRIEG BARRIE
I and tend to put him on a pedestal because he is more mature than I in Christ. Just a fact. But there is a problem with pedestals and I am finding it out again. I say “again” because I have in the past put people on pedestals and it has not gone well. If you are guessing that the disaster was their inevitable falling from the perch by their own foibles, you guess wrong: Their fault was simply that they were not God. Interestingly, I do not treat people whom I consider my spiritual equal so shabbily. The pedestal is reserved for the unfortunate whom I most highly esteem. Unfortunate, I say, because far from exalting him, it robs him. It is a setup for failure. It is a double standard in which the unspoken deal is that he is not allowed to make mistakes while I myself have liberty to do so—since I am (as is tacitly agreed) the less mature one. So I give myself permission to say things to my husband, which if he said them to me would cause offense. See Screwtape’s demon primer for an example of this perverse dynamic: “Your patient must demand that all his own utterances are to be taken at their face value and judged simply on the actual words, while at the same time judging all his mother’s utterances with the fullest and most oversensitive interpretation of the tone and the context and the suspected intention” (The Screwtape Letters). My husband David is different. He does not lay traps with words. It was not always this way. A -year heroin addiction made his entire life a deception, because truth is the casualty of addiction. A encounter with God in a county jail in solitary confinement showed him what he had become, and the view transformed his life. I have a five-year paper trail of daily correspondence, which I have combed and never found a single inconsistency in. But my game of “You be the mature one and I’ll be the immature one” is a hellish typecasting because it locks in the parties so that no growth in the relationship is possible—or even countenanced. And when I posture myself as the less mature one and you as the more mature, I conceive these not as temporary roles but as our respective, rigid stations in life. In this B-grade drama I create, I expect that in every situation and conversation I will play the part
Email: aseupeterson@worldmag.com
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of the weak (since I am the tragically, albeit lovably, flawed half of our duo), and you will always be the strong (since that is your job). If you, husband, heaven forbid, should exhibit the slightest faltering, great would be my indignation. Another pitfall of “the pedestal” is that if I am in awe of you, then when you do sin I will not recognize it as sin because I have made you—and not God’s word—my moral plumb line. I will therefore stumble right along with you. What is needed is to remove the pedestal from my eye, so that I will see clearly to help my spouse to see himself, which is what he needs from me, rather than my worship. After considerable thought, I have arrived at two practical ways to “put off” the pedestal and “put on” godly ways of relating to the husband I esteem: First, I take seriously my identity as one also indwelled by the Spirit and having spiritual gifts, and on whom it is incumbent to love my husband for his own good. But how can I love if I cannot see him? And how can I see him if it is always “all about me” as the chronically spiritual patient? “Un-blind me, Lord, to see my partner’s spiritual needs.” Secondly, I give my husband permission to be a workmanship in progress, not a finished product. All double standards flee away, swallowed up in our mutual desire to bless. Here there is freedom and limitless creativity, flowing in new riverbeds and not the fetid pools of insatiable personal neediness. No more pedestals for us, just David and me walking hand in hand, facing forward. A
N O V E M B E R 1 7, 2 0 1 2 • W O R L D
10/25/12 11:25 AM
Marvin Olasky
Halloween’s real ghouls It’s a mistake to say history’s evils couldn’t happen here
Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum
>>
W O R L D • N O V E M B E R 1 7, 2 0 1 2
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TANG CHHIN SOTHY/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
T C S. J D in uptown Manhattan, the fourth largest church in the world, and unfinished years after its construction began in , is a hodgepodge of Gothic, Romanesque, and Byzantine styles. It’s also a hodgepodge of theologies, like many Episcopalian churches, but it has groovy celebrations such as the blessings of bicycles in April, bees in June, and animals generally (from a tortoise to a yak) early in October. The cathedral’s most recent extravaganza was the Procession of the Ghouls that came this year on Oct. : Organ music accompanied a silent horror film, and “an impressive parade of ghoulish characters” created fun for all. What a blessed country America is, where some think ghouls are fun, and where we can still speak, write, and vote freely. In other parts of the world such as North Korea—see p. , and WORLD’s Oct. article on one escapee—ghouls are no laughing matter. John Lennon famously wrote, “Imagine there’s no heaven, it’s easy if you try. No hell below us, above us only sky”—and dictators Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il, and Kim Jong Un have ordered three generations of North Koreans to stifle their imaginations and live through hell above ground. (Those poor people cannot own anything that allows them to get non-propagandistic information, and the news blackout is nearly complete. Last December North Korean radio announced—only years late—that Lennon was dead, and real or staged mourning broke out in Pyongyang: You can see the bizarre film on YouTube.) I haven’t been to North Korea but I have seen some ghoulish places abroad, and once partied with ghouls known as Communists. Younger Americans who have no firsthand experience with ghouls may think those
with such experience are paranoid, but they should read Church Behind the Wire () by Communistturned-Christian Barnabas Mam, who survived killing fields that filled with blood during the s after the United States let the Khmer Rouge take over Cambodia. I have visited what were once the killing fields, and the torture chamber that helped to populate them: Security Prison , now the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh. The roosters there wake up what is once again a quiet neighborhood, but documents in the archives contain pleas from prisoners like this one: “I would be happy to grow rice with my wife and children on a collective farm. … Please save me, just let me live.” That did not happen, and his skull may have been one of those housed several miles away in a ghoulish -story platform holding hundreds of skulls. It’s hard to look at those skulls and think of the bright eyes and smiles they once housed. The same failure of imagination is likely in Vilnius, where Lithuanians have turned the former Soviet KGB prison into a museum. You can walk through the torture room and into the execution chamber where those who worshiped government rather than God efficiently murdered more than , prisoners over two decades beginning in : A scholarly analysis of skulls buried in one mass grave showed that had one bullet hole, a wasteful two holes, and only a profligate three to six. Early this fall I visited that ex-prison and found it suffered from museum-itis: No matter the horror, it’s hard to feel its enormity in a well-lit space with neatly ordered exhibits, just as it’s hard to fathom raging whitewater rapids in a Six Flags ride. The hyperHalloween experience I did have came at Patarei prison, the former KGB detention center in Tallinn, Estonia. When the prison closed, guards took off, leaving behind medical and torture equipment, wall posters and graffiti, utensils and bedding—and it’s all dark, dark, dark in cells complete with creaky doors and whistling winds through window slits on the shore of the Gulf of Finland. God has so blessed America that we can happily relegate such terror to Asia and Europe and say it can’t happen here—but it could if churches content themselves with blessing bicycles, bees, and yaks instead of teaching about sin and what happens to societies that encourage it rather than restrain it. We need to learn about real ghouls. A
Email: molasky@worldmag.com
10/29/12 4:19 PM
WE arE sErious about ministry Phil Rice M.A., Billy Graham School of Missions and Evangelism; Youth Ministry International Trainer
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