"Thirteen Bad Arguments for Same-Sex Marriage." This article from Christianity Today points to some studies that you probably won't learn about in the general media. One study conducted in Norway indicates that when a culture adopts same-sex marriage, heterosexual marriage fades away. Another study considers adoption of children by homosexuals and finds that the children in such families are more subject to molestation from other family members and more likely to have doubts about their own sexual identity than children with a mom and dad.

The article also mentions Andrew Sullivan. Those of us who read political blogs will recognize his name. He is a homosexual and a proponent of gay marriage. (And a Roman Catholic.) The article says that he concedes that infidelity is a characteristic of gay marriage. Rather than use that characteristic as an argument against gay marriage, the authors state that Sullivan believes that the concept of marriage should be modified to allow for infidelity generally, both for homosexuals and heterosexuals. Which brings us back to the Norway study, where, according to the CT article, heterosexual marriage has all but disappeared in one district where homosexual marriage is recognized.

Andrew Sullivan has posted several articles on gay marriage on his blog, and I do not find the arguments that the authors of the CT article says he makes, that if men in gay marriages can't always be monogamous, then the definition of marriage will just need to be changed. Sullivan does make the point that men seem to be less faithful than women, and points to the stability of lesbian marriage as a case in point. I have the sense that his sociology is mainly anecdotal, though, or that the studies may be "flawed" from the CT point of view. With heterosexual marriage having been a bulwark of Western Civilization for ages, it is, at the very least, outrageously risky to push this experiment on the majority in a matter of a couple of decades without giving it a hard, hard look.

(Of course, it is not a matter of cost versus benefit to "people of the Book". But the culture will not listen to scriptural based arguments against homosexualilty.)

As to the issue of homosexual adoption, one might ask why a study would be needed to show that molestation and identity issues become a problem. That would already seem predictable. But the article indicates that the promoters of "gay" adoption have come up with "studies" in support of the homosexual adoption, studies that show that they are good for children, but studies that, according to the authors of the article, are significantly flawed in their methodology. But I am not really sure that the idea of child molestation is all that robust on the social left or that the folks over there would mourn the erosion of the hard edges of sexual identity. So a study that shows increased molestation and identify problems may not be much of a problem to the proponents of gay marriage, except to the extent that the it disturbs the rest of us.

The State of Florida has a statute that forbids homosexual adoption. That law is under some pressure these days. The Florida Bar is divided into "sections" according to one's specialty, and there is a "Family Law" Section. There is a movement in that section to get the Bar behind repeal efforts. Membership in the American Bar Association, which has become significantly politicized over the past 25 years, is voluntary. But membership in the Florida Bar is mandatory for Florida lawyers. It will put Florida lawyers who oppose the gay agenda in a difficult position if the Florida Bar decides to lobby for repeal. The contingency still seems unlikely, but things can move quickly and negatively if we don't pay attention.

Don't label me.

Denzel Washington puts Meryl Streep and Katie Couric in their place in this transcript of a Today show interview. So very cool.

Hey Stoopid

Alice Cooper has some choice words for his fellow rockstars here.

Duke U. Hosts "International Solidarity Movement". Duke is hosting a national conference of Palestinian Solidarity, which is part of the "International Solidarity Movement". This has generated quite a bit of controversy and Duke has seen fit to address that controversy on its website. My friend Bill, with whom my friendship began when we were both freshmen at Duke, alterted me to this controversy. His sources are that the group is an anti-Semitic hate group that supports the over-throw of Israel, not the more limited goals that the group's website describes. See, for example, this article.

On the other hand, I search the Palestinian Solidarity's website and see nothing that indicates any concern about the corruption and anti-democratic forces that have the Arab people who live around Israel in their grip, not to mention the methods of sending young people to their deaths as suicide bombers and killing countless more innocents.

Dove Avenue Recipes. A new blog will post recipes from the Dove Avenue kitchen and progeny of the Dove Avenue kitchen. The first post is Carol's spaghetti sauce.

Must we forgive everyone?

"No, I have no intention of forgiving everyone. Only those who have fallen. While the idol towers over us on his commanding eminence, his brow creased imperiously, smug and insensate, mutilating our lives--just let me have the heaviest stone! Or let a dozen of us seize a battering ram and knock him off his perch.

But once he is overthrown, once the first furrow of self-awareness runs over his face as he crashes to the ground--lay down your stones!

He is returning to humanity unaided.

Do not deny him this God-given way.

--The Gulag Archipelago Volume 3

A Movie Review: "Before Sunset". I am still reeling from "Before Sunset", a well-crafted, exceedingly attractive post-modern romance that takes place in Paris (of course) in almost real time. The movie consists mainly of a very intense conversation between two erstwhile lovers who rediscover each other after nearly a decade and take a walk together. The ending is perfect, and I laughed out loud: not because it was comical but because it was a great and wonderful relief from all of the tension that the movie's eighty minutes had so unexpectedly built up within me.

This has to be the date movie of the year, if not the decade.

Someday, I will sort out the moral implications of it (they really aren't that hard), but that's for another post. Right now, I am still enjoying "the moment". (Forgive me, Lord.)

I've got to go with Mary on this one

The first 3 sentances in the preface to Trevor Hart's Regarding Karl Barth makes me wonder whether he had an editor because they are so convoluted which is surprising because I wouldn't expect such work from IVP, but it concerns me if Mary suffered for having worked in their editorial department.

"Some books are a long time in the writing. The origins of this particular volume lie some twenty years back in a lecture hall in Durham where a Professor of Divinity encouraged his first year students early in their studies to identify a prominent theologian whose writings they might use thenceforth as a sounding board on a wide range of theological questions. The names cast out like pearls included many notable British, European and American scholars who were familiar as yet only from reading lists hurriedly perused but largely unused."

To the credit of Hart's prose, "perused" and "unused" rhyme in the latter part of the last sentance.

Another View of the Iraq War. Is there a light at the end of this tunnel?

Grundig FR200 AM/FM/SW Radio. I bought this little radio at RadioShack this week. Totally cool. It has a rechargable battery that you power up by turning a crank 90 times, and it will play an hour and also power a little reading light. You can run it on three AA batteries if you want to, but why? Don't even put those batteries in it, so you can store the radio without having to worry about batteries in it that might leak.

It has AM, FM, and two short wave bands. The written instructions are very good. Its nearly all plastic and has the look and feel of a nice toy. But just using the little telescoping antenna, I was able to get European short-wave broadcasting stations right off the bat. It even has a fine tune feature. It weighs just 10 ounces. Its been reduced in price from $50 to $40. Read more about it here. We have put it with our camping/hurricane preparation stash.

Magazines and such things.

I have learned in my early days of teaching regular English that about all that most of my students will ever read outside of class is a magazine. I would like to collect a big stack of magazines--about cars, trucks, nascar, hunting, sports, cosmetology, photography, basically anything halfway decent and not the economist--to have and use in my classes at times, so they can perhaps learn how to read such things critically and carefully. But alas, I don't know where to begin to amass such a collection without having to buy so many myself. So, I ask you in the Stokes kith and kin community to help me figure out where and how to get such things.

In other sad news, The Atlantic has today restricted access to its website to subscribers only. If anyone would like to donate a subsrictiption to that magazine, that would be most welcome :)

Canada's Short on Doctors. What if we had a health system and no doctors came. We run them off with malpractice judgments, Canada runs them off by fixing prices.

Canadian Health System Woes. Here is an article from a Canadian news source concerning the Canadian healthcare system. It describes survey results indicating dissatisfaction among Canadians.

"Atomic Clock" on Sale. I usually work at the office on Saturday mornings. Its quiet, no one else is usually there, the telephone doesn't ring. I can sit and actually think. At the end of the morning, I reward myself with a trip to the RadioShack store on Flagler Street, across from Burdines. So I walked in yesterday.

When I go to a RadioShack, I usually go to the back half of the store, beyond the TV sets and stereos, to where the good stuff resides. I look for the little yellow price tags that they hang on things that the store is clearing out. One of those was hanging from an "Atomic Clock". It was marked down to $14.95 from somewhere above $25. I bought it. This is an amazing clock, and you should rush to RadioShack and get one.

An "Atomic Clock" looks like a regular wall clock. It does not explode, so there is nothing to fear. Instead, it keeps time by means of a built-in, tiny radio receiver linked to a micro-processor. The radio receiver picks up long-wave radio signals broadcast from WWVB a government radio station in Ft. Collins, CO. The Ft. Collins radio station is linked to the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, Time and Frequency Division in Boulder. At the institute, a "team of atomic physicists continually measures every second of every day to an accuracy of ten billions of a second per day. These physicists have created an international standard, measuring a second as 9,192,631,770 vibrations of a cesium 133 atom in a vacuum". The "atomic clock" is the device that does this measurement, not the thing now hanging from a wall in my house.

WWVB that broadcasts the time from the "atomic clock" several times a day on a long-wave frequency that can reach every part of the continental US. The receiver in my clock picks up the signal, and the microprocessor to which it is connected works the second, minute and hour hands to reset the clock. This happens usually at night, which is the most successful time of day for propagation. It happens automatically. All one has to do is put in a single AA battery (not supplied, of course) and hang the thing up.

Not only are cheap wall clocks made with this technology, there are wrist watches, nicer clocks, and other time keeping devices. A few months ago, we bought a new clock-radio-cd player for the kitchen. When we turned it on, it automatically set the clock because it had the same sort of radio receiver/microprocessor that my new all clock has.

Exporting Jobs, Importing Garlic. At a pot-luck luncheon at church today, after the worship service, I sat with a businessman, Hernan, who is married to our church secretary. He is a Chilean, now a US citizen, and very well educated. His wife is an Armenian, born and raised in the Bronx, whose parents' families fled from the Turkish persecution. (I think that only in Miami would you have lunch with such people at a Presbyterian Church. But I could be wrong.)

Hernan told me that his company is getting ready to import processed garlic from Argentina to the United States. What is interesting about the story is that the processing factory just moved, lock, stock and barrel, from Miami to a place near Buenos Aires where the garlic is grown. It literally moved. His company bought the factory from the local owner, disassembled it, transported it to the Port of Miami, and last week put it on the boat to South America. It is on its way there now. When the factory arrives, his company will put it back together again, next to the fields where the garlic is grown. The product of the factory will be shipped back to the US.

Hernan said that a California firm designed and manufactured the machinery in the factory. The local owner of the factory could not make a go of it, apparently, and put the factory up for sale. Hernan's company figured out that it could be successful only if it were located outside the US. The result of all of this, if the venture works, are new jobs in Argentina and cheaper garlic in the US. Cheaper garlic in the US may produce some jobs of its own in the food distribution and preparation business. It might win some more business for the California company that designed and made the machinery. I don't think we can say that Hernan's company actually exported jobs to Argentina, because the business in Miami was failing. It sounds like a win-win to me.

I am sure a "win-win" is not always so. But the story makes you want to stop and think about the negative rhetoric we sometimes hear about American businesses "exporting jobs abroad".

Hearts of Stone. George Veith in the August 7 issue of World Magazine comments on the phenomenon of people who concede that life begins before birth but nevertheless support abortion. He describes a bizarre circumstance where a NY woman carrying triplets decides on a "selective reduction" procedure under which a physician aborts two of her three unborn children. The woman writes in the NY Times that she would have to give up her NY City apartment and shop at Cosco if she had all three children. If young, urban women are capable of killing their own young under these circumstances, think of the other dark things we must be capable of?

John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park. About 65 miles south of our home in Miami Springs, on the island of Key Largo, is John Pennekamp State Coral Reef Park. When our son, Walter, and his wife, Morgan, visited us this past week, we drove to the park to go snorkeling.

The island of Key Largo is one of the Florida Keys, and is the first shiny bead on a necklace of islands that sweeps off the peninsula, ending with Key West just 90 miles from Cuba. The park is on the Atlantic side of the island, immediately adjacent to Key Largo Coral Reef National Marine Sanctuary. The sanctuary covers approximately 178 nautical square miles of coral reefs, seagrass beds, and mangrove swamps. The government established it to preserve a portion of the only living coral reef in the continental United States.

A concessionaire runs a number of activities at the park, and among them is snorkeling. (Canoing, kayaking, scuba diving, sailing and camping are other activities.) On the concessionaire's website, one can read about the snorkeling and even print out a coupon. We rented all the equipment we needed, and stepped aboard a flat-decked pontoon boat with several other families, and took a fifteen or twenty minute ride out to a particular reef called White Bank Dry Rocks.

Although Hurricane Charley was on his way up from Cuba, none of the winds had reached us by Wednesday morning as we anchored next to the reef and prepared to jump overboard. Walter and I had become SCUBA qualified while he was in the Boys Scouts in high school, but it was still a little intimidating to Carol and me as we looked down at the water, held our face masks to our face, and stepped out. But the water was pleasant and our buoyancy vests kept us afloat with no effort. We only needed to relax a little, stretch out face down, and look into another world.

It was simply beautiful, and so many fish! All kinds and colors. Despite living in Miami for most of my life, I am a novice at this, and I can't begin to name everything we saw. But there were grouper, snappper, angel-fish, barracuda (!), fish with bright colors, little ones, big ones, fat ones, skinny ones. All kinds of coral grew, and there were sea fans, sea urchins, and other living things: I often could not tell whether I was looking at flora or fauna. But it was all good. How can one look at all of this (a more appropriate verb would be "behold" all of this), and not ask how such beauty and complexity happened to be there. How could it be just a matter of chance? How could anyone think that?

The 90 minutes in the water went by fast, but for Carol and me, it was just enough.

When we returned to the mainland, we went into the Visitor's Center, where there are several aquaria that are very well maintained and documented. There we saw many of the varieties of coral, fish and other living creatures that we saw on the reef itself, and we were able to read about what we had seen. I asked one of the people behind the desk whether there was a biologist who maintained the aquaria, and I happened to ask that question to the biologist himself. He told me that he had retrieved all of the specimens in the tanks from the reefs in the park and that none of the specimens had been purchases. He said he was actually growing some very rare coral in several of the tanks. He hoped to get a license to restock some of the reefs with the coral he is able to grow.

One especially interesting tank had a green eel in it, about two feet long. On the eel was a colorful shrimp who walked up and down the eel's back, pausing now and then to pick at the eel with its long, thin legs. According to the written narrative adjacent to the tank, the shrimp was a "cleaner shrimp" and lives with the eel in a symbiotic relationship. The biologist told me that he had to dive deep to catch such a shrimp, and that he had caught several. He said that the one in the tank with the eel "put on the best show".

All of it was a great show.

Meningitis on Campus. The incidence of bacterial meningitis, a potentially disabling, even fatal disease, is significantly higher for college students living in dorms than in the general population. Here's an article about "vaccination parties" that parents are holding for their college bound children. Query whether Christians on campus ought to make addressing this health issue one of service to others. It would be refreshing to have Christians deal with a health issue that unifies people.

Toys Aren't Us? When my children were small and their cousins from New Port Richey would visit, my father would mark the occasion by taking them all to Toys R Us. The visit was like some sort of TV game show for kids, except that they had already won the prize. My dad would tell them they could buy anything they wanted. And they did. It exasperated the parents, but Dad's theory was that they would remember him when he was gone. That struck me as sad and mistaken, because they would remember him anyway. But to this day they remember those Saturday morning Toys R Us visits with "PahPah". So it seems sad to read that Toys R Us may be getting rid of their toy business, another victim of Wal-Mart. I don't know what Dad would think of Wal-Mart. But he would like the old guy who greets people when they walk in. He would want that job.

"Hellboy", the Movie. I saw this on video the other night. Its one of those movies that don't qualify for a date-night event when you help occupy the middle aged couple category, so I hadn't seen it. I enjoyed it; I especially enjoyed the Hellboy character. He emerged into comic-book world well after I left it, so I don't know how he compares with the real thing (real thing?). But his movie version's refusal to take himself and most everything else in his world very seriously made him fun to watch.

The movie has a resurrection that got my attention. There was a resurrection in the first Matrix, as everyone will remember. So now there are two in recent movies that I can recall. (Anyone think of any others? Other than "the" Resurrection in the Passion, of course.)

As to the resurrections in Hellboy and the Matrix, "What", as they say, "is that all about?" Is it more post-modern stuff, where we refuse to acknowledge any certainty, even death? Is that "post-modern" or is it something more instinctive? "Hellboy", of course, is premised on another world being out there. The other world in Hellboy, however, is very dark, a sort of competitor, enemy world to ours, not the "real world" of Christianity of which ours is simply a shadow. But having such a dual world is an interesting advance on the closed, single world of naturalism.

I liked the resurrections in both Hellboy and the Matrix. In both cases, we have the surviving lover bringing the deceased lover back. Its all about love. In Hellboy, we have a defiant, male lover; in the Matrix we have a Madonna (Magdalene?) like, female lover in leather.

Another question: how do you deal with these kinds of movies and not be a Christian? What in the world are non-Christians doing with these images? What do they think about it? Is God putting these resurrections out there to prepare the viewers for the good news of "the" Resurrection? As He may have done with the cult of Mithras in the Greek world during Paul's ministry? Those resurrections could, at least, give us a predicate for talking to others about "the" Resurrection.

Should a Modern Woman seek an Evangelical Man as a Husband? A recent study refutes the idea that evangelical men tend to be authoritarian and oppressive to their wives and children. Quite the contrary. Brad Wilson reports in Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands that these men, at least the ones who are churchgoing, are more affectionate, that they spend more time with their children, and that they comprise the group with the smallest incidence of domestic violence in comparison with the rest of society. For the Christianity Today interview with Brad Wilson, a University of Virginia sociologist, go here.

The PCUSA: Sigh! A friend of mine, Bill Sussman, who knows me to be a Presbyterian, brought to my attention the resolution passed at the recent General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, USA, condemning Israel. My friend is the president of his Reformed congregation, and his Anti-Defamation League contacts had sent out a massive email about the action. As he has been needling me about my Christianity since we were in college and inviting me to come over to Moses' side, and as I have been trying to convert him for at least as long, I sent him a long email explaining how the General Assembly relates to the people in the pews (it doesn't). I also told him about the schism inside the denomination between the moderates and evangelicals on the one hand and, on the other, the people who support abortion, "gay rights", government control of everything important, people who believe that the story of Jesus was invented by "the early church", and who have fashioned a god in their own image, a god whom they reinvent as often as they do themselves. (Other than that, these are really great people.) My friend, Bill, conceded that there are such people on the Reformed side of Judaism.

There is a good article about what the PCUSA General Assembly did, critical of it but intelligently so, on the Christianity Today website here. It was written by a rabbi.

Jews like Bill and Christians like me have much more in common than the people on the other side of the divide in the PCUSA. The unfortunate thing is that the bureacracy of our denomination has so much control over the organization's organs on communication. On the other hand, the people in the pews have control over the purse strings, and at many churches in our denomination, including my church, we send not a penny to the national organization of the denomination that supports the bureaucracy.

A Pagan America. Harold O.J. Brown writes a very disturbing piece on where we are in America, using Roe v. Wade and Lawrence v. Texas as signposts.

Transexual Marriage in Florida. A Florida court of appeals very recently published an opinion involving the marriage of a transexual "man" to a woman. The "man" had been born a female, but had various kinds of drastic surgery, took male hormones, and was able to pass successfully as a man in "his" community. "He"participated in a marriage ceremony with a woman who had a child from a previous relationship. The "man" then adopted that child. Later, the woman was impregnated artificially. The "donor" of the sperm was the brother of the "man". She gave birth to a second child.

The "marriage" did not last and divorce proceedings commenced. Child custody questions arose. The mother wanted exclusive custody of the two children. She took the position that she and her spouse were not really married in the first place, because they both were females. She asked that the marriage be annulled and that the adoption be invalidated. That would have cut off any rights in the "man" to visit or have custody of the children. (Guess who gets damaged the most in all of this.)

The trial court rejected the wife's argument and ruled that the "man" was sufficiently male to make a valid marriage. The judge made a number of somewhat compelling findings that I will not describe here. But the court of appeals reversed the decision based on Florida's marriage protection law (the same sort of law that the social conservatives are trying to pass as a Constitutional amendment). They also cited Florida prohibition of homosexual adoption.

I am sure that the "man" will take the matter to our left-leaning Florida Supreme Court. The court of appeals said that this question is one for the legislature, not for the courts. Our Florida Supreme Court, in the "end of life" area, has said that it is the last word, not the legislature. This is the same Florida Supreme Court that rewrote Florida's election laws in such an intellectually dishonest way that the US Supreme Court felt it had to clean up the mess, itself creating its own mess on the national level. So it will be interesting to see what the Florida Supreme Court will do with this case.

On the Perversity of Sin. Article on Planned Parenthood's "I Had an Abortion" T-shirts here.

Political Convention Reality Check. Zell Miller, the Democratic senator from Georgia, tells why he skipped the convention in Boston but will be at the one in New York. Then there is the British pundit, who seems to have the Kerry speech about right.

What does Bin Ladin want?  I am reading the 9/11 Commission Report.  The other night I heard on television a pundit ask whether Bin Ladin's objective is to get us out of Saudi Arabia, where the "holiest of Muslim shrines are located".  Bin Ladin's objective is a bit more ambitious, according to the 9/11 Commission.  It reports that in February 1998, Bin Ladin and his associate Ayman al Zawahiri issued a fatwah in which "they called for the murder of any American, anywhere on earth, as the 'individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.' "

Three months later, the Report states, in an interview in Afghanistan by ABC-TV, Bin Ladin said, "We believe that the worst thieves in the world today and the worst terrorists are the Americans.  Nothing could stop you except perhaps retaliation in kind.  We do not have to differentiate between military or civilian.  As far as we are concerned, they are all targets."

Cripples at the Gate called Beautiful.  Today in Van's Sunday School class, we considered Acts 3 where Peter heals the crippled beggar.  I thought of the beggar as representing me, perhaps representing all of us, especially those of us who are older, but especially representing me. 

By now, some of us older folks have made peace with our shortcomings and disabilities.  We sit just where we are, we have given up trying to move closer to Christ's character.  I remember a very difficult woman who was a member of our church and, to our relief, left us a few years ago.  She insisted that her very difficult and self-involved attitude was "the way I am", and it was up to the rest of us to accept her as she was.  That's what unconditional love is all about, she insisted.  She had made peace with her neuroses, and we were to make peace with them too.  She is not so different from me.

What have I decided that I cannot do?  I have decided I cannot do a lot of things.  I see a way that Christ would have me grow, and I say that I cannot go there.  I have tried over the years to move in that direction in this respect or that, but I am 58 years old now, and what's the use.  I will sit here at the gate called Beautiful, ask for a hand-out from my friends and from strangers, and watch them pass by into the Temple.

Then Peter said "Look at us!".  So the man gave him his attention, expecting to get something from them.  Then Peter said, "Silver or gold I do not have, but what I have I give you.  In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk."

(But I gave up trying to walk decades ago, the beggar said to himself.  I haven't even thought about walking in years.)

Taking him by the right hand, Peter helped him up, and instantly the man's feet and ankles became strong.  He jumped to his feet and began to walk.    Then he went with them, Peter and John, into the temple courts, walking and jumping, and praising God.  They went to the place called "Solomon's Colonnade", named for the most successful of all the Kings of Israel:  more wealth, more wives, more wisdom than anyone ever.  One wife is plenty, but more wealth and more wisdom, I'll take that.   Frankly, at this point I'll more than settle for the wisdom.

Take my hand, Precious Lord.  Make my feet and ankles strong.  I want into the Temple.  Help me look at others the way you do.  Help me look at myself in relation to them, to see myself as you would have me to be.  I want to jump up and begin to walk.

The Demise of Literature.  George Will's column on this subject is well worth reading.

I wonder what Solzhenitsyn thinks of Cool Hand Luke?

probably something like, "Forty Eggs? Such gluttons, even in their work camps!"

He does have this to say, "Somewhere young men of our age were studying at the Sorbonne or at Oxford, playing tennis during their ample hours of relaxation, arguing about the problems of the world in student cafes. They were already being published and were exhibiting their paintings. They were twisting and turning to find ways of distorting the insufficiently original world around them in some new way. They railed against the classics for exhausting all the subjects and themes. They railed at their own governments and their own reactionaries who did not want to comprehend and adopt the advanced experience of the Soviet Union. They recorded interviews through the microphones of radio reporters, listening all the time to their own voices and coquettishly elucidating what they wished to say in their last or their first book. They judged everything in the world with self-assurance, but particularly the prosperity and higher justice of our country. Only at some point in their old age, in the course of compiling encyclopedias, would they notice with astonishment that they could not find any worthy Russian names for our letters--for all the letters of our alphabet."

The Gulag Archipelago Two

Changing Majors

I just finished reading, The Worldly Philosophers, by Robert L. Heilbroner. Walter suggested it to me and lent me his copy a few months ago.

If I had read this while a freshman at Davidson, I would have been strongly tempted to major in economics. Maybe the Econ Department at Davidson was trying to limit their number of majors, but the Econ 101 class I took was so mind-numbingly uninteresting that I couldn't get out of there fast enough. Now that I've read Mr. Heilbroner's fascinating account of how and why we're where we are economically, I might actually find that 101 class interesting and even want to take more. Mr. Heilbroner also helped me understand more fully the ongoing conservative/liberal discussion on what makes an economy go, particularly interesting to me in light of all of the current commentary on why/why not Pres. Bush's economic policies are beneficial.

I thank Walter for recommending the book, and pass on that recommendation to you.

Eat Every Bean and Pea on Your Plate.  "Losing weight, eating more fruits and vegetables and exercising your brain and body" is a formula for preventing not only heart disease but also Alzehimer's disease.  At least I think that's what this article said . . . I can't remenber.

Patrick O'Brian and the Aubrey-Maturin Series.   Patrick O'Brian's Jack Aubrey suceeded C.S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower, and succeeded him pretty well.  I read the HH books as a teenager, then discovered O'Brian's novels in my late 40's, and then I read the HH series all over again.  As you probably know, the recent motion picture Master and Commander is based on the O'Brian novels.  (The first novel in the series is titled Master and Commander, but the movie takes pieces from several books in the series and weaves them together for the screenplay.)   If the subject interests you, you might like to read two related articles in the December 2003 issue of the Smithsonian Magazine, the first about "Thomas Cochrane, the Napoleonic era's nautical maverick [who provided] the spark behind the fictional Jack Aubrey" and the second about O'Brian himself.  These articles are available in a PDF file on the Smithsonian Magazine website here.

Barbara Britain - Barbara Seaman.   Barbara is a Christian, an elder in our church, a legal secretary with a Broward firm, a single mom with grown up children.  She has a fine eye for photography and began selling her photographs several years ago.  Here is where you can see them on the web.  Her name is "Barbara Seaman", but there is an author of some fame by that name, so she has a nomme d'art, "Barbara Britain".  She is from England.

From the "Get thee a Wife" Department.   A recent study indicates that sex is a better key to happiness than money.  What would we do without "studies"?

But is God really a vegetarian?  My previous blog refers to Gen. 1:30 and 31 as pointing us to a vegetarian diet.  I mentioned this at my Friday morning men's breakfast, and my friend Pat Talbott started rattling off scripture in which God appears to approve non-vegetarian items on one's plate.  For example, we have the quail that the Lord sent to the children of Israel in the wilderness, and we have the loaves and the fishes  that Jesus distributed to the five-thousand.  (Notice the balance: in the wilderness manna in the morning and quail in the evening; on the hillside far out of town, loaves and fishes .)  So if originally God planned a vegetarian diet, he was soon away from it after the fall.  
 
But perhaps changing the menu could be among God's redemptive acts, those acts that allow us to live as sinful beings if only for awhile, his common grace, and his accommodation to our fallen state and us living in a fallen world.
 
If God moves towards us by such ordinary things as changing the permissive diet, are we to move toward him and away from foods that are not good for us?  Can we do this without making it a Pharasaic practice and being annoying (by that I mean unfriendly) to others?  Can we do this without being focused on ourselves, but by making such a practice a way that we love others?  

We should not envy rich movements that are organized and led by an alternative bureaucracy living on the problems it is supposed to solve. We want a movement that is a movement because it is advanced by all its members in their daily lives.

--Wendell Barry

Reading the Bible in a Year.  At the recent Christian Life Conference we attended, one of the two major speakers was John Huffman,  the pastor at St. Andrews PC in Newport Beach, CA.  John said that you could read the Bible through in a year if you read two chapters from the Old Testament each day and one from the New.  So I started that yesterday.  I read Gen 1 and 2, but didn't get to Matthew 1, because I had to stop and think about what I read in Genesis, and ran out of time.  What a refreshing thing to read those two chapters!  So many things appeared new to me.  I realized that it had been a long, long time since I had read them.
 
Here's one thing that struck me for the first time (probably something that has been always obvious to you and certainly to many others): In Gen. 1:29 and 30 God appears to describe the first diet for men and animals.  Its a vegetarian diet.
 
I thought "What about the lions?  Did they not eat other animals?"  But maybe the lion we see today is the evolutionary result of sin having later come into the world.  (Such speculation!).  Maybe we are as different in our characters from Adam as the present day lion is from what God originally created.
 
And where does that leave us?  If the original intention was for us to be vegetarians,  do we eat meat as an appropriate accomadation to the fallen world or should we move away from that?

Thank you Letter to my Aunt and Uncle.
 
July 15, 2004
 
Dear Ann and Don,

We had a wonderful time in Eastman with you. Thank you for your great hospitality and for letting us have an entire day and two nights with you. There could not have been a better way to start a vacation. It was such a rush to get away from Miami, we were wound up to say the least, and to sit on that porch with you and have that time together was a balm.
 
We reached Montreat in plenty of time after leaving Eastman on Saturday. Walter, Morgan, and Mary drove up with Carol’s sister, Mary Ann, in time for dinner there. We all enjoyed each other and the conference activities. My seminar on "End of Life Issues" was well received. We heard some fine preaching. We saw old friends from prior conferences, including a young lady whom we had met years before, Becky Capps. She graduated from Princeton Seminary in 2003 and had recently joined the staff at Westminster PC in Spartanburg as an associate minister. Is that the church you attended?

On Tuesday at Noon the conference ended. We said good bye to Mary Ann, and Mary, Walter, Morgan, Carol, and I drove to the Blue Ridge Parkway and headed north toward Blowing Rock. We stayed for three nights at a National Park Service campground just off the Parkway: no electricity, no showers, but a "comfort station", which you had to find at night with your flashlight. Despite all of those deprivations (maybe a little because of them), we enjoyed it. The weather was cool and dry. One day we canoed down the New River. Another day we went to Linville Gap, to the viaduct on Grandfather Mountain, to the Mast General Store near Boone, and we did some hiking.

On Friday we drove to Spindale and visited Carol’s Aunt Evelyn. Macon and Kellsey met us there and we spent the night. On Saturday, we drove Walter, Morgan and Mary back to Greensboro, but stopped for lunch in Winston-Salem. In W-S Mary showed us the school where she will be teaching and the house that she and two other young women will be renting for the year. Then we dropped Walter and Morgan off at the Greensboro-High Point-Winston Salem airport for their flight back to Dallas. From there we went to Mary Ann’s house and dropped off Mary. About 3PM we headed for home. We got as far as Savannah Saturday night, and then drove the rest of the way to Miami on Sunday.

Now its Friday, two weeks from the Friday that we spent with you. The velocity of time seems to accelerate as I get older. But I am still enjoying those moments with you, and I always will.

We hope you will come visit us soon.

Thank you again for making us feel so welcome and loved.

A New Amateur Radio satellite Launched from Kazakhstan. In the "so cool" department, ham radio operators got a new satellite in orbit. Read all about on the Amateur Radio Relay League's website. (What? You don't want to read all about it? You don't think its cool? That really hurts.)

A Dose of Reality. As some of the kin know, I have been researching "end-of-life" issues in preparation for a seminar I will be leading at the Christian Life Conference at Montreat College. The conference begins on July 3 and goes for 3 days. My seminar is just one of a number of small group opportunities that the conference offers, along with big plenary sessions of Bible study, great preaching and worship. I have been reading statutes and cases dealing with "living wills", termination of life-prolonging procedures, physician assisted suicide, and the like. I have also been looking at websites and reading books and articles written by orthodox Christians and others.

On Thursday of this week, the Pulmonary Hypertension Association had its annual conference at the Inter-Continental Hotel in downtown Miami, very near my office. There were over 1000 people who attended the conference: physicians, nurses, representatives of drug companies, patients, and family members. One of the seminars offered at the conference was entitled "End of Life Issues", and Linda Carr, who organized and ran the conference, gave me a ticket to attend. I did so yesterday afternoon.

Linda Carr is the mother in the Carr family, and that family lives near us and attends our church. Linda helped start the Pulmonary Hypertension Association and is a past president of it; the oldest daughter, Hannah, a rising high school senior, suffers from Pulmonary Hypertension ("PH")("Suffers" does not do justice to the way that Hannah and the rest of Carr family deal with the disease. Frankly, if I were a disease, I would not want to fool around with the Carr family); the father, Austin, is a very good trial lawyer and leads a long-running Friday morning men's breakfast where we meet, read scripture and pray; Cody, their son, is a rising senior at Columbia in NY (he's only 19 years old), and Abby, their younger daughter, is such a good soccer player that she plays keeper on the boys' teams. They bless our church and are a remarkable family.

A physician and two RNs led the seminar. Mostly patients attended, although there were some family members and at least two social workers. I had been thinking of "end-of-life" issues as a Christian lawyer, of course, struggling with how the law's rules of decision-making intersect in this context with Christ's commandments to love God and love one another. What the people wanted to know at the seminar, however, was what its like to die. That was their primary "end-of-life" issue.

A lot of people die of "PH". Ten years ago, when physicians in Miami diagnosed Hannah with PH, they told Linda there was not much to be done and that Hannah would soon die. Instead, Linda, through the internet, prayer, and with maternal ferocity, found her way to a physician at Presbyterian Hospital in NY who was working with experimental drugs to deal with PH symptoms. That physician has been working with Hannah since then. Hannah, now a varsity basketball player who has achieved county-wide recognition, is doing well.

But a lot of people die with PH. Maybe most of them die of that disease. I'm not exactly sure about the statistics. But a lot die of it. I think most of the patients at the seminar expected to die of PH, and that's why they were there. There was plenty of time for questions and comments, and one of them said she was in the end stages of the disease (she had a portable oxygen machine that she pulls along behind her, as did several others) and wanted to know whether the physician would describe the stages until death through which she should expect to pass. The patients at the seminar wanted to know whether at their death they would suffocate, was it like drowning, or would they go suddenly?

One person who spoke was a father whose little boy had recently died, and he described the experience at the hospital where his son passed away, surrounded by his family, indicating that it was a gentle death in those circumstances. The doctor answered that sudden death is one of the ways people die and the other is "shortness of breath", the suffocating experience that the people there fear so much. He did not have a lot more to say than that, except to say that people with heart disease die that way too. One of the nurses did not want to use the word "suffocate" and rejected the "drowning" analogy, but said that the way people died was too individualized to give general guidance.

But the other nurse, who in some respects seemed the least articulate during the seminar up to that point, said something very simple and profound: "I am there with the patient as the patient dies, and if he wants something to deal with the discomfort, I will give it to him." God bless such nurses.

So now I am not sure what I am going to say about "End-of-Life Issues", other than to suggest to people that they find the hospital where the little boy died or track down that nurse and have her there when its time for them to go. But I appreciate God leading me to that seminar yesterday. There are, of course, many more things to say about end-of-life issues, but I am going to be thinking about those people at the PH Association seminar for a long time. May God bless them and their families too.

Europe vs. America. The WSJ comments on a report by two Swedish economists entitled "The EU vs. USA" comparing the GDP per capita of Europe to the USA. Its astonishing what a difference there is between the two places. For example, the percentage of Americans living below the poverty line has dropped to 12% from 22% since 1959. In 1999, 25% of American households were considered "low income, " meaning they had an annual income of less than $25,000. If Sweden were judged by the same standard, about 40% of its households would be considered low income. Germany and Italy just barely exceed Arkansas in GDP per capita. If the US had frozen in place at 2000 levels while Europe grew, Switzerland and Britain would need until 2010 to get there if they continued growing at their present rates.

More on Non-Profit Hospitals (Maybe not so good) and Something on Cutting off Medical Care to Lawyers. The NY Times has an article about non-profits being sued for overcharging poor people who are uninsured. (I have been following this story for a couple of years in the NYT and WSJ.) On a related note, see this article about a proposal that was made to the AMA at its recent convention about cutting off medical care to lawyers who sue doctors, also in the NYT. How about refusing medical care to drug dealers and other criminals? Maybe people who jay-walk. I'm about to be a little embarrassed for South Carolina, because it is a doctor from that great state who proposed this idea. (Actually, he said he was trying to draw attention to the malpractice problem. Well, fair enough then.)

"Once it was established that charges had to be brought at any cost and despite everything, threats, violence, tortures became inevitable. And the more fantastic the charges were, the more ferocious the interrogation had to be in order to force the required confession." Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago

SpaceShipOne - Way, Way Cool. For photos of this private, manned spacecraft and its launch platform, look at this website. The next test flight will be on June 21. Stayed tuned!

Vintage Craig Barnes. Many thanks to Walt for pointing me toward's National Presby's archive of old Craig Barnes sermons, available in real audio and in text. Scroll down to the bottom of the page to find the start of his available sermons.

Meanwhile, here's some of Craig's good theology:

In the words of the old Pietists, prayer is a means of taking shelter under the broad folds of a sacred mantle that covers all who bow their heads before God. Surrounded by this loving mantle, you are left with "a peace that passeth understanding." My grandfather used to speak frequently about the peace that passeth understanding. But we don't hear that phrase so much anymore. And that's a shame, because it is exactly what we search for when life is confusing. What we need is a peace that goes beyond understanding since understanding is exactly what we do not have and may not get for a long time. We can live with that confusion, but only if our souls stop churning.

How do we find this cherished peace that passeth understanding? The same way David did. By allowing the Holy Spirit to move our prayers beyond our desires to encounter the desire of God, which is that we remember his steadfast love. Psalm 25 begins with a request for direction, but moves quickly to a soulful renewal under the mantle of God¹s love. Similarly, we may begin our prayers asking, "What about my job?" or "Where is this relationship going," but if we are listening in prayer, we'll hear the still small voice of the Spirit telling us, "I love you."

If you know that, if you are again convinced that you are loved and forgiven by God, you know that you¹ll be okay no matter what happens. That is because you understand that your life will end up in the right place not because of your good choices, but because of the choice God made to love you. And this love is waiting for you at either fork in the road.

Having been renewed through prayer, in the merciful love of God, David then says, All the paths of the LORD are steadfast love and faithfulness. There is so much freedom in this! God owns all the roads. Option A and option B both belong to God. So you cannot choose your way outside of the love of God.

The choice that God is concerned about most is not about your job options, but about your true calling to look for the grace of God on every road of life. If God wants you to be a butcher, baker, candlestick maker, you're not going to be able to miss it. In the words of C.S. Lewis, God uses all the wrong roads to get us to the right places. If you believe that God owns all the forking roads, and that if out of his gracious love, God has already chosen to lead you to a future filled with hope, then you are free to make the best choices you can without anxiety that your life is on the line every time you choose.

Can God, Would God, Will God Save Without One Knowing Christ?

"Here is another thing that used to puzzle me. Is it not frightfully unfair that this new life should be confined to people who have heard of Christ and been able to believe in Him? But the truth is God has not told us what His arrangements about the other people are. We do know that no man can be saved except through Christ; we do not know that only those who know him can be saved through Him. But in the meantime, if you are worried about the people outside, the most unreasonable thing you can do is remain outside yourself. Christians are Christ's body, the organism through which He works. Every addition to the body enables Him to do more. If you want to help those outside you must add your own little cell to the body of Christ who alone can help them." C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity.

"For he that illuminates inwardly by giving men the Holy Spirit, the same one, by way of commandment, said unto his disciples, 'Go into all the world, and preach the Gospel to the whole creation' (Mark 16:15). And so in Philippi, Paul preached the Word outwardly to Lydia, a seller of purple goods; but the Lord inwardly opened the woman's heart (Acts 16:14). And the same Paul, after a beautiful development of his thought, in Rom. 10:17 at length comes to the conclusion, 'So faith comes from hearing, and hearing from the Word of God by the preaching of Christ'.

"At the same time we recognize that God can illuminate who and when he will, even without the external ministry, for that is in his power: but we speak of the usual way of instructing men, delivered unto us from God, both by commandment and examples." The Second Helvetic Confession, secs. 5.006 and 5.007.

Canadian Medicine Redux. A new Canadian study shows that not-for-profit hospitals are better at containing costs (and saving lives) than for-profit.

The Iraq we don't hear about.

An article in the London Times makes a number of interesting observations, including but not limited to the following:

In the last quarter, Iraq's currency has increased by almost 15% against the dollar and the two most traded local currencies, the Kuwaiti dinar and the Iranian rial.

Despite the violence, Iraq has attracted more then 7 million foreign visitors, mostly Shi'ites making the pilgrimage to Najaf and Karbala where (despite sporadic fighting) a building boom is under way.

Iraq is earning a record 41 million to 44 million British pounds a day from oil sales. (That money goes into a fund controlled by the UN but Iraqi leaders want control transferred to the new interim government at the end of the month.) This has lead to greater economic activity, including private reconstruction schemes.

This year Iraq has had a bumper harvest with record crops, notably in wheat. It could become agriculturally self-sufficient for the first time in 30 years.

Iraq will have a soccer team in the Olympics.

During the last 10 months elections have been held in 37 municipalities. In each case victory went to the moderate, liberal and secular candidates. The former Ba'athists, appearing under fresh labels, failed to win a single seat. Hardline Islamic groups collected 1% to 3% of the vote.

WMD. Aha?

1 Corinthians 4:1-5

I remember a particular class session during an American History course that I took in college. I was a history major, it was an upper level course, and the teacher was marvelous. She gave us an assignment during the class. I listened very carefully to her as she described it. It seemed hard and I was not sure I completely understood it.

After class I went up to the professor and I asked her about the assignment. I described to her what I understood it to be and I expressed to her my uncertainty about it. She said that I understood it correctly, that I should go ahead and deal with the assignment the best I could, and "let the chips fall where they may". For some reason, that answer simply clicked and, rather than feeling frustrated by the answer, I felt relieved. I think she probably understood that the assignment was not all that easy. She also handled my inquiry with respect and her response indicated that she had a certain level of confidence in me, confidence that I lacked up to that point. I went ahead and did the assignment. I have no recollection now about what it involved. But I have remembered the circumstances and that conversation with her to this day. And it helps me with whatever problem I am facing.

Really, no one can expect you to do more than you can do. You don't always know exactly how to accomplish something you need to accomplish, but you have to start on the project, you have to do it as best you can, and you can't run away from it So you do it and you let "the chips fall where they may". It doesn't matter what third parties think about how you did. It is a secret thing between you and God, just as Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 4 1-5.

This reminds me of the dynamics of committing a sin. When someone else is involved, we think of that person sinning against us or of us sinning against them. But David wrote in Psalm 52, "Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight." When I sin, then, it may be obvious to third parties, but it is really a secret thing between God and me. I remember how careful my father was to avoid humiliating me before others when he needed to correct me, and I also remember the fear in my heart when he took me into the bedroom and closed the door behind us and dealt with the problem more or less in secret.

And the same thing applies when another sins against us. We think, "I am aggrieved!" And all sorts of destructive behaviors proceed from our sense of righteous indignation. But the sin was against God, not against us. God will deal with the sinner, he will deal with that person perfectly. There will be perfect justice meted out to him or her, we can count on it. As for us, the person who was hurt by the other's sin, we are released from our grievance and can proceed with our lives.

Steve Qunizi. Steve Quinzi is our new music director at FirstPrez in Miami Springs. He has encouraged me to sing, and I have sung a number of new songs and arrangements during the worship service as a result. He is a fabulous keyboardist: you hum something, and he will pick it right up and play it in any one of a number of rhythm's and styles until he finds something that sounds right. He is a composer and music entrepreneur. If you type his name in Google, you will find a number of sites in which he appears. Here is one of them. Here is another.

Wal-Mart and H.E.B. in Mexico. Those of us who are fans of Central Market (owned by H.E. Butt Grocery Co.) might be interested in reading this article on the fight between H.E.B. and Wal-Mart over the Mexican market.

Florida Trusts and Estates. I am experimenting with a new blog for my law practice. I am not happy with the advertisement that appears at the top of the page, but this seems to be how the new Blogger, under Google's ownership, will support itself. I am looking into a different blog approach for the firm. But in the meanwhile, we will experiment with this blog.

The primary purpose of the blog will be to allow the other three lawyers and me to post practice nuggets for the benefit of each other. We are continually developing little pieces of knowledge as we work on various cases. But we often forget them and almost always fail to pass them on to one another. So now we have a place where we might put this information.

A secondary purpose would be to attract other lawyers to comment on our posts. Another would be to generate some publicity.

I am talking to a web designer about designing a webpage that will have a blogging feature. We would blog on that webpage, of course. But by having the blog inside our own webpage, we would be able to grow into something more involved than just the blog.

We still have our FindLaw/West Publishing webpage, but we find it difficult to deal with. Blogging is so easy and so much fun. With a local web designer (who also does some sort of hosting), we might be able to be more effective.

I think a blog by lawyers is called a "blawg".

I look forward to your comments.

Quicksilver and The Confusion

Sean asked me to tempt him to begin Neal Stephenson's "Baroque Cycle", of which the two titles above are the first two of the three book trilogy. I'm not exactly sure what he will find tempting (besides, I want to tempt Jaquandor, too!), so I'll just write the reasons why I kept reading through ~2000 pages of Mr. Stephenson's writing (over the two books).

I learned a whole lot, about all kinds of interesting (to me) things. Here are just a few: Newton, Alchemy, society in France & England in the late 1600s & early 1700s, the beginning of the Enlightenment, the Cromwell Revolution, Leibnitz, the invention/discovery of Calculus, the dispute between Newton & Leibnitz, the Royal Society, swordfighting, horsemanship, where watered steel came from (the material used to make a Samurai's Katana sword), the economic principles that enable banks to function, how we moved from currencies of pieces of gold/silver to paper currency, the development of city states on the Indian sub-continent, how to make Phosphorus, & the ins and outs of the relationships between the royal families of England, "Germany", France, Spain & Russia.

There are a number of interesting characters in the books and I found that if there was a point where my interest in the story was waning, my interest waxed in whatever particular subject matter with which the characters were dealing. And the books are long enough (!) that the characters move through multiple story arcs & twists & revealings in one book.

I like the way Stephenson turns a phrase. My experience of reading these books is often punctuated by the thoughts, "Oh! I never would have described that [feeling/event/scene/apparatus] that way. What an interesting perspective. How on earth did he ever think to write about it in such an original way?"

It takes a bit to get into the first one, but the reader is rewarded for faithfulness and the story grows in complexity and the setting more interesting. I highly recommend them.

Ultimately, I guess it's worth saying that I like the books because I enjoy the stories of the Stephenson's characters. Some characters (IMO) are funny people, others are brilliant, still others are quite mysterious. I've grown quite attached to them at this point and I'm on the edge of my seat while waiting fo the next installment.

Caveat Lector (with apologies to Dorothea): If the books were movies, they'd receive an "R" rating for: on screen sex & violence. Not unusual for a Stephenson book, so this description is superfluous for those who've read Stephenson before.

Offshoring/Outsourcing. Here is a provocative article on US companies sending jobs overseas. The author opposes sending jobs to India, for example. He discusses briefly the BMW plant in South Carolina as if that supports his argument against offshoring and outsourcing. Do you find the use of that illustration condescending? Furthermore, do you find the use of that example a support to or a refutation of his argument against offshoring and outsourcing?

Peggy Noonan on Reagan. See her Wall Street Journal column here.

Canadian Poor Healthier than American Poor. This article makes that point.

George F. Will on Ronald Reagan. A very interesting column.

Ronald Reagan. Sean Meade encouraged me to post a view of President Reagan.

The senior partner of the law firm in which I grew up was George Smathers. Smathers was a US Senator from Florida from 1952 to 1968. He was in not only the law firm in Miami where I worked, Smathers & Thompson, but also had a separate firm in Washington DC, from which he did his lobbying work. He spent most of his week in Washington DC during the 1970s and early 80s, but came to Miami for the weekend and was in the office on Friday. We often went to lunch together on Friday. Senator Smathers, who is a Democrat, told great stories and seemed to know every one in Washington. And he knew Reagan.

When Reagan was running for the Republican Presidential nomination, I asked senator Smathers what kind of man Reagan was. Smathers without hesitation said that he "had great instincts". He compared him to Eisenhower in that respect. I think he meant that both men had the gift of knowing the right thing to do when it needed to be done. I think that proved to be the case.

Sean mentions that Reagan and Bush are alike in that both espouse limited government, but both turned out to be big spenders while in office. That observation may be true, but I would suggest that the men are quite different.

Reagan's administration spent a lot of money on defense in pursuit of a particular strategy that was immensely successful. That strategy assumed that the Soviet Union would attempt to keep up with the US in its own defense spending and, in doing so, the Soviet Union would spend itself into bankruptcy, which it did. The Evil Empire fell as a result.

Reagan began his administration with a very large tax cut. He believed that the only way to limit government was to cut down on what it fed upon, the people's money. He believed that government needed to be limited because it was a grossly inefficient in determining what its citizens needed and in delivering those services. I suppose that if you believe that government can be reformed to become more efficient than the market-place in delivering services, then you would have to say that Reagan was a bad president. But I think the verdict of the 20th Century is that he was right on that point.

When he came into office, the US was coming off of its worst inflationary period of the century and the economy suffered from something called "stagflation". His predecessor, President Carter, told us essentially that we would simply have to live with scarcity. Reagan would have none of that. The tax cut commenced a recovery that lasted through the Clinton years, even though there were some ups and downs during that period - although nothing particularly serious.

The tax cuts and the defense spending did, however, increase the deficit. But that deficit did not hurt us, and it vanquished an adversary.

Sean mentions that the first President George HW Bush labeled President Reagan's economic approach as "voo-doo economics", thus giving the Democrats a pejorative that they could not come up with on their own. George HW Bush delivered that judgment while he was unsuccessfully running against Reagan for the Republican Presidential nomination.

But George HW Bush did not let his views of Reagan's economics stop him from serving as Reagan's running mate.

Furthermore, George HW Bush was not nearly the man that Reagan was. He did not keep his promise to the American people when he raised taxes. He did not keep his promise to the Shi'ite's in southern Iran, when he invited them to revolt against Saddam and then allowed the US to stand by when Saddam massacred so many of them and caused them terrible hardship. We would not be in Iraq today had George HW Bush the character of Ronald Reagan.

My view is that the present President is somewhere between his father and President Reagan, but more like his father. It is very hard for me to understand GW's Medicare Drug Bill, his Education Bill, and the other big spending bills that he has championed or permitted. I think that he and Cheney are big spending Republicans in the same wing that George HW Bush led. I think President Clinton was much more astute in his spending (and cutting) than George HW has been. (When President Clinton served, the Republicans served as an effective check and balance. With GW as President, he is aided and abetted by big spending Republicans in Congress.) Reagan's view of government was entirely different from the view the two Bush Presidents hold.

So I think Senator Smathers was right. Reagan had good instincts. President Reagan served our country well. I thank God that he was our President.

The Great High Mountain Tour. This tour is coming to Winston-Salem this weekend, to Fort Worth on June 14, and to Austin on June 15. World Magazine gave it a good review. Many of the musicians are those that appear on the sound track for the movies O, Brother, Where Art Thou and Cold Mountain. Here is its website.

Greg Ordy Model Rocket Webpage and KAP. Greg Ordy is a ham radio operator to whose webpage I found my way this morning. One of his hobbies is rockets, and on his website he has a video of a flight, where the video is taken from the rocket itself! He also has some stills that were taken from the rocket in flight. Here is the webpage where that video can be found. Greg's webpage also has links to other rocketry sites, some with more videos.

Greg also mentions a related hobby: taking photos with kites. This related hobby is called "Kite Assisted Photography" or "Kite Aerial Photography" or KAP. Here's a link to a KAP enthusiast in Berkeley, CA.

Muslims and "The Passion" See an article on the Christianity Today website about how Mel Gibson's film is doing in the Middle East.

Miami Marathon.
yo-
I'm going to make plans to run at least the half marathon portion of next year's Miami Tropical Marathon and would love to have some company along the way. The race is Sunday, January 30, 2005. It should be a fairly flat course winding its way across Biscayne Bay and through some great Miami neighborhoods. And the free room and board at the Stokes home would make it a most excellent weekend for all. See the website for registration and course info.

Healthcare Watch - Canadian Version. Before we jump to the Canadian model of health care services delivery, maybe we should watch this developing story.

Room for Old Men? InterVarsity now has an Emerging Scholars Network.

Islam and the West. Fascinating interview of Bernard Lewis in the Atlantic Unbound.

From Mars Hill Audio.

"[I]t could be argued that the world of humane good sense, clarity and peace promised by modernity, if only we let go of God, has not been forthcoming. Natural science has turned out to be dumb with regard to values and ends for which it supplies the means in ever more astonishing, if troubling, abundance. The social sciences, far from explaining everything, have no convincing rationale for themselves except as successive rhetorics of power and control and are therefore pathways to nihilism. It should trouble us that one of the greatest successes of the so-called collapse of totalizing meta-narratives or of any attempts to establish truth, meaning and value is the production of the ideal late-capitalist consumer, whose objectives stretch no further than acquiring something, reducing it to rubbish, and going on to the next desirable commodity."

--Janet Martin Soskice, "All That Is," a review of David Bentley Hart's

The Beauty of the Infinite, in Times Literary Supplement, April 9,

God and Photons. As my family, especially Carol, is really tired of knowing, I became interested in amateur radio a year or two ago. For several months, I have been reading three books that I bought at Radio Shack about electronics: Basic Electronics, Basic Communications Electronics, and Basic Digital Electronics. These books are very well written and profusely illustrated. They have examples and questions at the end of each chapter. They explain technical points carefully and clearly so that liberal arts majors can hope to understand them.

In the Basic Electronics book, the last chapter is "How Photoelectric Devices Work". In some ways, the chapter is a culmination of many of the ideas that the authors explained earlier, especially about how semi-conductors work. To understand the point I am about to make, you need to know that the authors are very serious science writers. The book is not for children. And up until Chapter 11 they have laid their points out carefully and rationally, leading the lay reader along with respect for the subject and for the lay reader.

In Chapter 11, the authors introduce again the kind of semiconductor known as a diode. What we did not know up to that point is that such semi-conductors actually emit light. You are probably familiar with this property and don't know it. Those little lights that tell you when a thing is on or off, ready or unready, etc., are LEDs, or "light emitting diodes". All diodes emit light, but some are designed to emit light in brighter ways and to function as you see them function on the front panel of some sort of thing that does electricity.

So the authors in Chapter 11 carefully explain how these things are used in circuits and applications. Then they get to a couple of questions at the end: (1) How can forward current in a p-n junction diode produce light? and (2) Do all p-n junction diodes light up when they conduct? Here is what they say about these questions:

"The answer to the second question is yes-they all produce light. . . In an LED, the p and n regions are shaped and positioned so that a lot of the light shines out instead of being absorbed [by the silicon crystal]. . .

"As to the first question, light is produced whenever free electrons fall into holes in a semiconductor crystal. . . [W]hen each free electron drops to the lower energy level, the potential energy it loses is instantly converted into a photon, as if by magic. The photon zips away from the junction in some random direction traveling at the speed of light . . . "

"As if by magic?" That sounds like superstition to me. Is this the best these guys can do on the naturalistic end? I guess so. People accuse Christians of finding God "in the gaps" of scientific knowledge. They say that it is just a matter of time before one particular gap or another will be filled in by science. OK. But at the least, at Radio Shack I found a gap. I think the whole thing about electrons in holes, the special properties of semi-conductors, all this wonderment, proclaims the glory of God. Not just the gaps but the non-gaps. But the gaps remind us of the ultimate truth, do they not?

Myron Update. Myron came been home from the hospital last week, but Tuesday night he suffered an embolism and went to the ER where he was immediately admitted. The clot travelled up from his leg, through his heart (the doctor said that if his heart had not been strong, this would have killed him) and it has lodged in one of his lungs, diminishing the capacity of that lung substantially. Yesterday he underwent an operation where a cage was inserted in his aorta to catch any further clots. He is in intensive care, and the physicians are waiting out the clots in his lung and his leg, hoping that his body will dissolve the clots without further damage. So, again, I ask you to pray for Myron.

Theolicious! I'm currently reading Regarding Karl Barth by Trevor Hart. Mary picked it up for me while she was interning at InterVarsity Press a couple summers ago. I just got around to picking it up a month ago, and I have to tell you, I'm so glad that I did!

I highly recommend it if you'd like to understand more about one of the most influential theologians of the 20th and 21st (so far) centuries, from an author who approaches the subject as a "friend" of Karl's. (This as opposed to authors who have particular bones to pick with Karl.)

You can borrow my copy when I'm done with it (Mary has first dibs). I want it back, since it's all marked up with my own brand of marginalia, but you might like it since I have a pretty healthy glossary of my own what-does-that-mean? words. Because I'm reader friendly, that's why.

(I'm back, by the way, from camp. You can read some of the results here.)

Hip-Hop Ministry. Greater Miami Youth for Christ has a hip-hop ministry called "Catalyst". There have been 300 first time decisions for Christ this year as a result of that ministry. Check-out the webpage. A young man by the name of Joel Stigale is the staff member who has developed this ministry. He needs your prayer. For one thing, he is not great at fund-raising. (Like Intervarsity, staff members have to raise their own support. His peer group is the hip-hoppers, which may not be a great hunting ground for donors. And Joel himself is not someone who would be in the middle of a traditional church community.) For another, Joel is losing his eyesight to glaucoma. (It is getting treated but I am not sure how effective the treatment is.) Nevertheless, he leads an event each Saturday night in a warehouse where, among other things, people come and "emcee", "dj", spray paint on big plywood panels that are hoisted for each event, dance, or whatever else hip-hoppers do. There is a point where he gets to give a short gospel message, and people quiet down for that. Not everyone buys it, but even the people who reject the gospel admonish the others at these meetings to show Joel "some respect", and they do. And the Spirit has been finding its mark, as the Spirit will do. So when you pray for Joel, praise God for the way he works out his redemptive will.

I unreservedly recommend the new greatest album:
Pedro the Lion's Achilles Heel

Myron got Hurt. Some of the kith and kin know Myron Harden, a good friend of mine and a member of our church. He is an excellent singer and guitarist, and plays on our Praise Team ("the Joyful Noise"). He has been commuting by bicycle to the Okeechobee MetroRail station from his home in Miami Springs. Last week, however, he fell off his bicycle and broke his hip. He is a nurse at the VA hospital but will have to stay home for four weeks while he heals. He is now getting around on a walker, but hopes to regain all of his mobility at some point. So keep him and his wife, Kim, in your prayers and drop him a note. If you need his address, send me an email. Thanks.

Ham Radio, Rockets, and Little Sisters. Amateur Radio Operators have their own national organization, called the Amateur Radio Relay League. Its 90 years old this year. A group of hams will be trying to boost a transceiver into subspace on Monday with a rocket and you can read about it on the ARRL website. I won't be in a position to receive its signals on Monday.

Hams have had their own satellites going around in orbit for many years, but they got up there by piggy-backing on a NASA launch. They are not in a fixed orbit. That is, a satellite will come up on one horizon and go across the sky and then "set". While it is racing by, however, one can communicate with other hams by using the satellite as a repeater, in a way somewhat similar to the way that we use a cell in the cell phone system. I have a transceiver that can do that, but I don't yet have the antenna and have not communicated with it. You have to aim the antenna at the point on the horizon at which you think the satellite will come up, and then, when you have it, you have to track it with the antenna as it goes across the sky. You can do this manually or you can construct an antenna with some sort of motor that will follow the thing. All of this is on my to-do list, but pretty far down toward the end of it.

This also makes me think about the times that Macon, Walter and I were building model rockets and shooting them up from the East Drive athletic fields in Miami Springs and from the playground at the high school. If there was a breeze (and there always seemed to be), we would shoot a rocket up and then spend the next 15 minutes or more chasing it down, as it floated on its parachute eastward or northward or wherever. We lost a few.

You could get a rocket that would have a compartment in it in which you could put things to launch. We didn't ever get one of those, but thought about it. We thought about putting a lizard or a mouse in the rocket and launching it. They didn't make those compartments big enough for little sisters.

Downloading Songs Releasing Time Praising God. I am an amateur singer, and help with the music ministry of our church. That ministry is in the midst of a radical transformation from traditional to contemporary. The church recently hired a new “music minister”, Steve, a keyboardist, composer, and music transcriber by profession. He is from the secular side of the music aisle, and is little acquainted with “church music”. Furthermore, as a Roman Catholic, Steve is not very familiar with “the Reformed Tradition”.

But Steve knows contemporary music, he knows what sounds “right” to younger folks in the pew, he can play anything on his computerized keyboard, and he brings a point of view that I would say, at the risk of sounding a little heretical, gives new life to the music side of our worship. He is a great complement to our new minister, Van, who has brought new life to the preaching of the Word at our church. Van does not consider himself a musician, but he is interested in music, he knows what he likes, what he likes is often what people in the pew like, and he has an ear for songs that go with themes in his text and in his sermon. So Van will mention a song to Steve. Steve will get the music somewhere, and then Steve will look at his amateur musicians and see whether someone might be able to do the song. Steve does not have a lot to work with in our church, but he and the layman who heads our worship committee, Rick, are doing very well in teasing out talent from our community.

So last Wednesday night Steve gave me a song he wanted me to sing today at church. It was a song that Van had asked him to do, “O Lord, You’re Beautiful” by Keith Green, a song that has been in the “praise song” library for many years. I knew the song a little bit and Steve had a copy of the original music that Keith Green had sung. The original music was a little different from
the praise song I knew, however. For one thing, it had a strange bridge that was hard to get just reading the music. So I decided that Saturday I would have to go to the Christian book store in
Hialeah, look through the CD collection there, and see if I could find the song. If successful, I would buy the CD, bring it home, and then just listen to it again and again, which is how I learn
new songs.

Saturday was very busy. Early in the day I was able to go by the book store, because I had another errand in the neighborhood. But it was before 10AM and the store had not yet opened. I had to run other errands, mainly downtown, and found myself back home in mid-afternoon and prepared to go back to the book store. But then I remembered that now one can buy and download songs from the internet. I called Walter and he pointed me to the Apple site,
Ipod.com, and the Wal-Mart site, Walmart.com. The Apple site required Windows 2000, which I do not have, but Wal-Mart would take Windows 98. And there on the Wal-Mart site was the original Keith Green recording. For 88 cents I downloaded it!

After downloading, it took some time for me to play it. I discovered that my Windows Player was obsolete, and I had to download from the Microsoft webpage the latest version. That took a while. But by the end of the afternoon, I was playing the song, singing along with it, and getting it firmly planted in my head. This morning at the worship service I sang it, with Steve on the keyboard. It turned out OK.

The point of all of this is to describe what was, for me, a revolutionary way to locate and acquire a song. I know. I know. This is old stuff to the generation below me. And even I knew that this was out there. But to experience this distribution system is astonishing. My routine of going to the bookstore, finding the right CD (if the right CD happens to be there), buying it and bringing it home, takes a great deal of time that I have little of to spare. The cost of the CD that has the song I want is often 15 dollars, on the order of more than 15 times what Wal-Mart charges for that song. But this is the least of the costs that the old way of find the song requires.

A few weeks ago I was able to download not the recording but the sheet music of a song I heard that I thought might do at church: “You Raise Me Up”, which is a cross-over from the secular to the Christian music world. I was able to buy the sheet music off the internet and print it out on my printer. I have the file in my computer (just as I have the file from the Keith Green song) and I can print out the music anytime I want to print it out. There was no way I would have been able to locate that sheet music at the book store in Hialeah, because it had just crossed over. But there it was, right on the internet.

Oh, Brave New World!

Walter-I-want-you-to-come-right-home-dept. Read about people in Austin who need a life.

Off to camp!

I'm going to summer camp for the next two weeks. You can check on my progress at the Coast & Crown weblog. (link in right sidebar) I hope to make some entries while at camp. I'll have to shanghi someone's computer, but that shouldn't be a problem. I'm a Ninja.

Audrey's Graduation. Carol and I flew to Tallahassee Saturday morning to attend the law school graduation of our niece (my sister's daughter) Audrey Gay. Audrey was diagnosed with MS about 6 months ago. She had been suffering from it unknowingly for years. She just thought she was tired. But when she woke up one morning without sight in one eye and went to the eye doctor, within 24 hours she was referred up the medical food chain to a neurologist who specializes in the disease, and she received the diagnosis.

Because she is young, her MS doctor felt free to hit her with chemicals and medicines about as hard as one can hit in an effort to get the disease under control. Meanwhile, the Stokes family and friends undertook some serious praying (which continues).

The fact that she was able to go through law school with the disease undiagnosed and untreated and then, when the crisis occurred, withstand the medication (which continues to this day), finish law school and graduate, is a credit to the density of her backbone and the power of prayer. Three cheers for Audrey and thanks be to God!

Awful, Actually. Its not a good thing to walk into a video store without any idea of what to get. I did that last Friday night. The only thing I had with me was a burned out brain and a desire for some mindless tube watching. (Its a little like going to a grocery store when you are hungry, but at least you usually have a list when you go grocery shopping.) I hadn't been in the video store for a long, long time, so there were a lot of titles I had not seen. Because Carol would be watching the video with me, I knew I needed to get a chick flick. That eliminated quite a few titles. (I won't mention the names of any of them, not a one.)

So I came across "Love, Actually". Hmmm: Same producer that did "Notting Hill" and "Four Funerals and a Wedding", and they were sort of fun, and Carol liked them; good actors too - Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson, Alan Rickman, Colin Firth (Mr. Darcy), Liam Neeson. This looked like a winner.

Awful! Awful! Don't even think about seeing this nihilistic, softly pornographic, foul mouthed, sophomoric trash. What were these people thinking? If there is anything remotely redeeming or interesting in the movie, then it is the over-the-hill rock star character, who was funny several times, but he is not enough to come close to saving this thing.

Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson are the only "normal" people in the movie. They have been apparently happily married for many years as the movie opens. They have two children and mother Emma is spending most of the movie getting them ready for the Christmas play at school. During the movie, Alan betrays Emma with a slut in his office. That's what Emma gets for being a faithful wife all these years. So be careful out there. Don't trust anyone and do whatever you feel like doing immediately.

I need to remember to consult Sean's blog for direction on movie titles.

Ten Reasons to Believe in a God Who Allows Suffering. My friend, Austin Carr, pointed me to this website that addresses the problem of suffering.

What's going on in the Stokes lab these days? I just finished assembling a "QRP" wattmeter from a kit. "QRP" is one of a set of "Q-signals" that are abbreviations for certain questions or statements that are used in communications. Q-signals were first developed when radio operators used Morse code (known as "CW" for "continuous wave"). For example, "QTH Miami" would mean "my location is in Miami". "QTH?" would mean, "What is your location?" The signal "QRP" means "I decrease power" and "QRP?" means "Can I decrease power?". So a "QRP" wattmeter is a meter that measures small scale RF power.

There is a minimalist subgroup of ham radio operators who use as little power as possible to communicate over the air-waves. Five to ten watts of output power is considered the top range of QRP operating. The maximum that the FCC allows amateur radio operators on most bands is 1500 watts of output, and the average ham rig has an output of 100 watts. On the other hand, some QRP fans try to stay under 1 watt of output power. In fact, the meter that I built has three scales: a 10 watt scale, a 1 watt scale, and a 100 milliwatt scale.

About a year ago I built from a kit a QRP transceiver that operates on 20 meters on CW only. Its top output, according to the meter that I just built, is about 7 watts. I have "worked" (meaning, I have communicated with via CW) people in NY, Texas, PA, NC, Indiana, and Guatemala with this "rig".

One of the advantages of building a kit is that, via email, one can sometimes communicate with the owner of the business that sells them. This was the case with the kits I built. The kits are not "plug and play" sorts of products. I ran into some difficulty in building both kits. I contacted the owner through the internet and he talked me through each problem over the course of about a week. Having the problems that I encountered worked an advantage for me, because I learned more dealing with these problems assisted by a competent mentor who really cared than I would have had I simply stuck everything together and it worked the first time.

Hmmm. Is there some theology here?

Nanoscience and self-manufacturing. Look at what science is offering up in this area.