David Bok, left, a long time friend (and world-class Monopoly player) from Malaysia, will be visiting us this weekend.  So this may be my last blog till Monday or Tuesday of next week.

   

          Dr. Lee Bollinger,the president of Columbia University, made a fool of himself yesterday when, introducing the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bollinger indulged in a ten-minute spate of personal insults to the Iranian.  Ahmadinejad responded with grace, saying, "In Iran, tradition requires that when you invite a person to be a speaker, you actually respect your students enough to allow them to make their own judgment, and don't think it's necessary before the speech is even given to come in with a series of complaints to provide vaccination to the students and faculty."  He added, "Nonetheless, I shall not begin by being affected by this unfriendly treatment."

 

 

 

 

          President Ahmadinejad's prospective speech at Columbia University later today is causing an uproar.  Rather foolish, in my opinion.  Are Americans so insecure that we cannot bear to listen to a presumed enemy?  In any event, his presence in our area gives me an opportunity to express a truth about the "war on terror" that so many Americans do not seem to understand.  In spite of bombastic speech and occasional horrific activities against the West, the West is not the real target of Islamic fundamental-ism.  Islamic fundamentalism's true objective is the defeat of modernist Muslim states such as Pakistan, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and Egypt and the constitution of Shari'a government in all Muslim countries.  This has been so for a century or more.  The latest indication of this is Osama bin Ladin's call for the defeat of President Musharraf of Pakistan.  Attacks on the West are opportunistic and are meant to punish Western nations for their support of modernist Muslim states -- and also to send a message to modernist Muslim leaders that they too will meet their doom.  Recognizing this does not make terrorist attacks on America and other Western nations acceptable, but it ought to mute our shrill and fearful reactions toward people like Ahmadinejad.

         

 

 

          The generation that followed Martin Luther King, Jr. rightfully expended its energies in exploiting the hard-won victories of the civil rights movement of the 1960s.  But the demon of racism was not permanently banished from American life.  It has resurfaced again in Jena, Louisiana where six African-American teenagers face trial on charges that could land them in prison for decades.  The teenagers beat up a white classmate in what amounted to a schoolyard fracas.  But this was the climax of months of racial tension in the small town, set off by the sight of three hangman nooses dangling from a tree.  No charges were ever filed against those who hung the nooses.  As a result, a new generation of youthful Americans are staging marches and rallies not only in Jena but in other parts of the country, including Orange, New Jersey, one of Paterson's neighbor cities.  I regard this unexpected awareness on the part of a new generation as very encouraging.

 

 

 

 

          The most surprising book I've read recently is The Gospel of Inclusion, by Bishop Clayton Pearson, left.  Bishop Pearson is an African-American Pentecostal minister.  What's surprising about the book, beside the fact that its author comes out of a tradition about as far from my own as one could possibly get, is that his "gospel" bears a close resemblance, at least in some aspects, to what I propose in my about-to-be published What About the Cross?  It startles me that two minds, from two very different backgrounds, could reach such similar conclusions.  It is perhaps less surprising that we arrived at our conclusions from almost opposite directions.  I won't say more just now, but will wait till my book is available.  Then I may use this space to compare and contrast.

 

 

 

 

         

          The New York Times ran a disturbing article recently calling attention to the need for pain-relief drugs for terminally ill people suffering from diseases such as cancer, especially people in poor countries in sub-Saharah Africa.  Pain relief drugs (e.g. morphine) are cheap and, theoretically, should be available even to the poorest of the poor. But they are not.  Even here in the United States, 50 percent of all seriously ill or dying patients do not have their pain managed adequately.  This is because physicians, here and overseas, worry about investigation by various regulatory agencies.  Some doctors worry about addiction, but studies conducted a generation ago established that patients with pain do not become addicted.

          Obviously, government regulations are often warranted -- a current instance being the problem with lead-painted toys from China.  But the U.S. suffers from regulation overkill. Take the case of Naline Ghuman, a noted musicologist of Sikh (Indian) ancestry, 34 years old, married, a British citizen.  She has a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley and teaches at Mills College in Oakland, California.  Mills College President Janet Holmgren calls Ghuman "one of our most distinguished faculty members."  She has lived and worked in the U.S. for the past ten years.  Without warning a year ago, she was refused re-entry to this country after a quick visit with her parents back in Wales.  No reason was given.  After a year of constant inquiries from her Mills College lawyer, she still has not been told the reason.  "I don't know what I'm accused of; there's no opportunity to defend myself.  I'm completely powerless." 

 

          President Bush last night called for an "enduring relationship" with Iraq.  So now, after a more than two centuries of resisting the temptation, the United States has become a colonial power, intent on occupying a distant nation with tens of thousands of troops for the forseeable future.  And this he calls a "return [investment] on success," meaning the presumed success of the military surge that began eight months ago. Meanwhile four million Iraqis have been dispossessed of their homes, half of them fleeing to other countries.  Hundreds of thousands more have lost their lives or been wounded by American arms or by the ongoing civil war between Shi'ite and Sunnis.  President Bush thinks he is doing God's will.  I think his actions are ego-driven and have little or nothing to do with the will of God.

 

 

 

 

          When I went out to Lebanon in 1960 one out of every four children born in the Middle East and North Africa died before age five.  Today that figure has dropped dramatically to one out of 20.  And according to the United Nations Children's Fund, that happy trend persists throughout the world.  For the first time since record-keeping began in 1960, the number of deaths of young children around the world has fallen below 10 million a year.  This is due from widespread campaigns agains measles, malaria and bottle-feeding, and from general improvements in the economies of most of the world outside sub-saharan Africa. 

 

 

 

          The Austrian Jew, Sigmund Freud, left, was the father of psychoanalysis and undoubtedly the foremost psychiatrist of our time.  He was a lifelong atheist but, according to Mark Edmundson, a University of Virginia professor, during the final years of his life he came to a profound conviction of the importance of faith to human life, history, and culture.

         

 

 

 

 

         Rev. Alfred Steele, left, is the senior pastor of Seminary Baptist Church here in Paterson.  He is also our representative in the State Assembly.  And he was arrested yesterday in an 18-month long sting operation.  He is charged with taking bribes in exchange for enabling certain companies to obtain state contracts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

          I'm a graduate of the American University of Beirut (Lebanon), so I take special interest in any new American University springing up in the Middle East.  In the photo at left, taken nine months ago, the developer is pointing to the proposed location of a new American University of Iraq.  A few days ago a groundbreaking ceremony was held, and the first classes will begin this month in a nearby rented office building.  The university is located in Sulaimaniya, in the northern Kurdish region of Iraq.

 

 

         

 

          Dr. David P. Gushee is Professor of Moral Philosophy at Union Univesity, a Southern Baptist institution in Tennessee.  He is also a regular columnist for Christianity Today.  In the latest issue of CT, Gushee writes that "When the Iraq war is over, we [Americans] will need a time of national (and Christian) mourning and repentence.  For evangelicals, the majority of whom strongly supported the war initially, one lesson is clear, he declares: We must become more discerning when our nation's leaders advocate military solutions.