A couple of days ago, on the next to last leg of my three-week Amtrak train journey -- from Denver to Chicago, with the final leg, from Chicago to New York ahead of me -- I crossed the Mississippi River from Iowa into Illinois.  Just a few miles into Illinois I looked out the train window and saw this water tower.  It struck me suddenly that this was the very town my great-great-grandfather, James Scott, had migrated to from back in the 1840s.
          Born in Philadelphia in 1799, James began life as a trunk manufacturer.  While still a young man he sailed to Argentina for a boatload of special lumber. En route home the ship foundered in a storm and sunk. Having lost his means of livelihood, James moved to Yorktown, just north of New York City, and then, after a few years, led his growing family out to Illinois where he farmed for a while. Unsuccessul as a farmer, he opened a grocery story. Always restless, however, and leaving his family behind to mind the story, James set out for California with a team of oxen and a covered wagon to participate in the famous Gold Rush of 1848. 
          After garnering his fair share of the gold, he and his partner decided to return home, this time by sea. They sailed clear around Cape Horn, the southernmost point of South America and back up to New Orleans. There he was felled by cholera and, while deathly ill, watched helplessly as his partner vanished with most of the gold. Recovering, James made his way up the Mississippi to Monmouth, with no more money than when he had started out three years earlier.
          My own trip was much more rewarding.  I was able to visit all of my five children -- Melody, Cheryl, Greg, Doug, and Linda --and most of their grandchildren, plus my brother David, his children and his one grandson. Perhaps because all my children are now middle-aged, we had long, open and in-depth discussions which I found most rewarding.           
          My itinerary: south from New York to Charlotte, North Carolina and Atlanta, Georgia, then west to New Orleans, Austin and San Antonio, and Los Angeles (where I experienced a fairly strong earthquake -- 4.7 on the Richter Scale -- while staying in a Chinese hotel) opposite the train station), then north to San Francisco, then eastward back home via Salt Lake City, Boulder, Colorado, Omaha and Chicago, about seven thousand miles all old. During a layover in Chicago, Navigator Bob Eschmann, my erstwhile administrative assistant back in the 1970s, met me at the train station for several hours of stimulating of stimulating discussion.
          Altogether the trip was memorable, though somewhat tiring, and I am glad to be home again. Georgia drove over to Penn Station in New York to meet me.  We drove back to Paterson, talking non-stop, with only a brief stop at a Friendly Restaurant for banana splits.

          Pope Benedict XVI leaves today, I believe, on his pilgrimage to the Holy Land. God willing, I leave tomorrow on my own pilgrimage of sorts: a three-week, cross-country trip, by train, to visit my children and grandchildren and a few other relatives and friends. So this will be my last blog for this month. I hope to resume it when I return home again the first of June. Till then…God’s blessings on you all.

For people familiar with the Bible, Babylon has special connotations. It represents power and oppression and exile. It conjures up notables such as Daniel and Nebuchadnezzar. So it is of some interest that the provincial government of Babil (recall the Tower of Babel?), just south of Baghdad in Iraq has reopened what remains of Babylon to tourists, much to the dismay of archaeologists. They are convinced that said tourists are going to damage the already badly damaged site before adequate protections are in place. As reported by Steven Myers, a $700,000 project by the World Monuments fund was supposed to address both conservation and tourism at Babylon, but hasn’t begun work yet. Nevertheless Iraqi prime minister al-Malaki is anxious to “convey the real, civilized image of Iraq" – and also initiate another source of national revenue in addition to oil. Next month the U.S. military will hand over a second famous archaeological site – Ur, the birthplace of Abraham – to the Iraqis. The photo above shows the partly restored Ishtar Gate in Babylon. In Babylonian religion, Ishtar was the personification of the planet Venus, and the goddess of fertility, love, sex – and war.

          One of the issues I have wrestled with in each of the last two books I have written is the problem of evil: that which inflicts pain and causes suffering. Intentional evil – moral evil – is caused by human beings and is fairly easy to account for (though not easy to understand or justify). Natural evil – earthquakes, seaquakes, tsunamis, famines, pandemics, all of which cause suffering, not least to innocent children – is another matter. The noted British theologian, N. T. Wright, has said that we shouldn’t waste our time on trying to discern the origin of natural evil. The important question to ask is: Has God done, or is God doing, anything about it?         
          I can’t brush off the question so blithely, however. My worldview remains incomplete if I can’t understand at some level the origin and purpose of natural evil in a universe created by an all-powerful, all-loving God.
          Tsunamis, as well as earthquakes, are the consequence of plate tectonics, the movement of giant rock plates under the surface of the earth. But plate tectonics are what produce mountain ranges, and without plate tectonics, earth’s land would be submerged to a depth of several thousand feet.  As Dinesh D’Souza, writing in Christianity Today, observes, “Fish might survive in such an environment, but not humans.”

          Thus the world as we know it – with both its good and bad features (from a human perspective) – is the necessary foundation for the evolution of Homo sapiens. This is what philosophers of science call the “anthropic principle,” the idea that the universe is “finely tuned” to the emergence of H. sapiens. My own spin on this is that the human species is part and parcel of nature. We are all made from stardust or, as the Bible expresses it, from “the dust of the ground.” But that very dust was created by gigantic explosions of stars millions upon millions of years ago.          
          So I believe that God has embedded into nature, from the Big Bang forward, a certain freedom of action, of randomness, that on the one hand necessarily allowed for the possibility of evil but, on the other, ultimately produced the human race. And the creation of the human race, destined for eternal fellowship with God, free from all suffering, in my mind justifies the necessary suffering inherent in the process. 

          The Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP) was conducted by the Harvard Medical School in 2006. It took ten years to complete and cost two and a half million dollars. 1,800 patients undergoing coronary artery bypass surgery were divided into three randomized groups. Two of the groups received prayer from Christians experienced in praying for the sick – but only one of these two groups knew that they were being prayed for. The third group had no one praying on their behalf.         
          The results? The group whose members knew they were being prayed for actually did worse in terms of post-operative complications than the group who did not know they were the beneficiaries of prayer, or the group who were not prayed for at all. In other words, the study seemed to indicate that prayer – at least prayer from strangers – might be deleterious to one’s health.         
          This would not have surprised the famed novelist C. S. Lewis.  He opined that real prayer cannot exist under laboratory conditions, as it were.  “Otherwise, a team of properly trained parrots would serve as well for the experiment,” he asserted.  “Such an approach to prayer treats it as if it were magic, or a machine.”          
          But father and son Christopher and Gregory Fung, pathologist and biochemist respectively, offer another interpretation of the experimental results. “The real scandal of the study,” they say, “is not that the prayed-for group did worse, but that the not-prayed-for group received just as much, if not more, of God’s blessings.” True to character, God appears inclined to heal and bless as many as possible, within the constraints of nature, without regard to the quantity or quality of prayers. God is a loving, generous God.        
          Why pray then? Drawing from various passages of Scripture, the Fungs suggest that “we pray not only because God answers prayers; we also pray so that we might recognize and received God’s answers, not matter how they come; we pray so that we may know how to respond; we pray in the hope of “seeing” God himself.”         
          The Fungs conclude: STEP encourages us to believe that God is eager to answer our prayers with seemingly little regard for our competence in prayer or even our orthodoxy. God is a loving, generous God.  

          Joshua Dubois (upper right corner) is younger than he appears in this snapshot -- he's 26, going on 27 -- but he is President Obama's choice to head up the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. It will not be an easy task for Dubois, for the office, as Christianity Today writer Sarah Pulliam notes, is criticized from both left and right. But Dubois has help from an ecumenical 25-member advisory council that includes at least four prominent evangelicals: World Vision president Richard Stearns; former Southern Baptist Leader Frank Page; Sojourners president Jim Wallis; and megachurch pastor Joel Hunter.
          Recognizing that faith-based groups (such as our own Holistic Ministries) provide much more bang for the buck than parallel secular agencies, former President Bush initiated the office, an innovation at the time. During the eight years of the Bush administration, the office achieved mixed results, and there was speculation that President Obama might do away with it, or modify its mission. But not so. Dubois notes that his job is straightforward and essentially non-political. "Our job is to communicate the opportunities and provide technical assistance to faith-based groups, like how to write a good application," he says.
        

          There's a lot going on here in the U.S. domestically these days -- the Chrysler bankruptcy, the Supreme Court vacancy, the swine flu epidemic -- but because of my international work history I tend to be more interested in foreign affairs. And leaving North Korea aside, America's interface with the Muslim world in all its variety, is surely the most pressing affair, being fraught with both danger and opportunity -- the classic definition of crisis.        
          The almost impossible task of all those working in foreign affairs is to see and embrace (which is not the same as agree with) the legitimacy of the other party's concerns. During the previous administration, little or no effort was made toward this end. President Obama and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, both seem to recognize the need to take the time and make the effort to understand where the other parties are coming from, and why their agendas reflect their national interests.
          Mrs. Clinton  has two special envoys in place: one for Afghanistan-Pakistan, and the other for the Palestine-Israel. I'm not sure about Mr. Holbrook, the Afghanistan-Pakistan envoy, for he has a history of confrontation; but the other envoy, George Mitchell, has an excellent record of balance and fairness. Thus I think he is well-suited for his assignment. However, this in itself does not ensure success, for Benjamin Netanyahu, the new prime minister for Israel, is a adamant fellow, prone to issue ultimatums and conditions, much like George W. Bush. And the two Palestinian leaders (PLO and Hamas) have unresolved problems between themselves that inhibit their dealing with Israel in a unified way. But if anyone can mediate in this kind of situation, Mitchell can. 

          I'm sticking my neck out, and I may be proved wrong, but it seems to me that this whole swine flu (H1N1) pandemic is being vastly overrated. Vice President Joe Biden cautions us not to travel by subways or airlines. I rarely ride subways, and I never fly, but I am planning a trip on Amtrak railways in a week or so. (Mr. Biden didn't mention trains, which aren't all that different than subways or airplanes, but perhaps that's because he himself rides Amtrak daily!) Viruses mutate, and it's conceivable that H1N1 may begin to reproduce faster than it is now, and may become much more virulent than it is now. But for the moment, I'm assuming that since the current virus is relatively mild, and having survived the normal winter flu season (which in the U.S. results in up to 30,000 deaths per year) I am not likely to be felled by H1N1.