China is not only the world's most populated nation, with more than a billion and a quarter people; it is also one of the fastest growing. Nevertheless, as C. H. Tung reminds us in a Washington Post article, 60 percent of its people (780 million, more than twice the population of the United States) still live in rural areas. Millions of young people make their way each year into the big cities,  hoping to get an assembly line job and otherwise join in the novel activities of urban life.
          When the republic was founded 60 years ago, average life expectancy was only 35 years, and the illiteracy rate was a high 80 percent. There was little organized education, no health care to speak of and no social security. There was no industry worth noting and little basic infrastructure.
          Today, after six decades of strong, centralized communist leadership, some of it very rough indeed, the change is dramatic. Average life expectancy has risen to 73 years, and illiteracy has dropped to five percent. Nine-year education is available to all; health care and social security have improved. A variety of modern industries have developed; roads, railways and airports blanket the country. It is not unrealistic to opine, as many have, that at no other point in history has so much improvement been made for so many people in such a short period.
          Civil rights remain the biggest issue from a Western point of view (recall Tiananmen Square). On the other hand, the Chinese government defends its iron fist by pointing out that its 13 billion people have moved from abject poverty to a greatly improved livelihood.
          Historically, populations undergoing such vast social change are open to new ideas, not only materially but also spiritually. Accordingly, the Chinese have shown unusual interest in the Christian gospel, especially when the message is shared by fellow countrymen. Estimates of new followers of Jesus Christ vary widely, but all agree that the number is in the millions, and Chinese Christians have develped a powerful missionary impulse, as in the "Back to Jerusalem" movement I wrote about a few weeks ago.

            When I am facilitating a group Bible study I try to focus on three simple questions: 1) What does it [the text] say?  2) What does it mean? and 3) What does it mean to me? Of these three questions, the first is the most important. If we get the first question wrong, or ignore it, we miss the other two altogether. I was reminded of this last night as I watched TV reporting on Secretary of State Hilllary Clinton's remarks to a group of Pakistani journalists.
         Mrs. Clinton was criticizing Pakistan's failure to locate and apprehend al-Qa'eda's top leaders (bin Ladin and associates) during the past three years. She found it "hard to believe" that no one in the Pakistani government knows where they are and couldn't get them "if they really wanted to."
          Immediately White House correspondent Martha Maddox and others expressed deep concern that Mrs. Clinton was inexplicably criticizing Pakistani efforts against the Taliban, in spite of the fact that Pakistan has currently mounted a strong offensive against the Taliban in the Swat Valley and South Waziristan. The reporters feared that Mrs. Clinton's remarks were going to seriously damage the relationship between the two putative allies, Pakistan and the United States.
          But the reporters hadn't really heard the Secretary of State. Mrs. Clinton was not referring to the Taliban at all. What she actually said was related to al-Qa'eda, not the Taliban.  And while the Pakistanis may not like appreciate her comments, the comments themselves will not damage relationships. If anything, it will help to place on the table a reality that needs to be discussed and resolved between the two countries.

            Yesterday evening Georgia and I attended the mid-week Bible Study at the church she has joined since coming to Lynchburg. (I am not quite ready to join the church yet.) About 15 were present and participating. The study was led by the pastor, who came across as an intelligent and courteous person, on easy terms with the members. The members themselves were friendly.         
          But participating in the study itself was like stepping back in time. The Bible used was the King James Version. The theological context for the discussion was the kind of pietistic fundamentalism I grew up with eighty years ago.          
          For the sake of family unity I have no doubt that I will be attending this weekly Bible Study regularly. But it’s going to be a cross-cultural challenge. On the other hand, cross-cultural interfacing is what I have been doing all my life, so it’s a challenge I welcome. I expect to learn much from participating in this group, and I hope, in due time, to be able to contribute to it as well.

          I hope I will live to see the completion of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial. It is scheduled for completion toward the end of 2011.
          The Memorial will be a crescent-shaped part on the Tidal Basin (where Thomas Jefferson's Memorial is also located). Its central feature will be a two-and-a-half story sculpture called the Stone of Hope (photo). The statue itself is being created by the Chinese master sculptor Lei Yixin.
          So far as human rights is concerned, Martin Luther King, Jr., along with Mahatma Gandhi of Inida, is one of the towering figures of the 20th century. It is fitting, in my opinion, that he should be memorialized in America's capital city along with Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln -- although the association with Jefferson is somewhat ironic, considering that Jefferson sired a number of children with his slave consort, Sally Hennings.

            Matthew Hoh (photo), 36, the senior State Department official stationed in the Zabul province of Afghanistan, has resigned his post, in protest of the war there. According to The Washington Post (which I have taken to reading now that The New York Times is not conveniently available here in Lynchburg) Hoh stated in a letter to his superiors,         
          “I have lost understanding of, and confidence in, the strategic purposes of the U. S. presence in Afghanistan…I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why, and to what end.”         
          Hoh is not a particularly influential person, so his resignation is not likely to have an effect, one way or the other. But I call attention to it because, as readers of this blog know, I have been saying for months that the American strategy in Afghanistan is misguided and that as a consequence both Afghani and American lives are being needlessly wasted.

          It was a fateful day in 49 BC when Julius Ceasar crossed the Rubicon. For an as yet unknown number of Anglicans it was an equally fateful day last week when Pope Benedict XIV issued an open invitation for Anglicans (aka Episcopalians in the U.S.) to metaphorically cross the Tiber and retun to the Roman Catholic fold. The offer is tempting for, on the one hand, it includes the promise that returnees may retain their bishops, married priests and liturgy and, on the other hand, provides spiritual relief for Anglicans and Episcopalians who are distressed by their communion's liberal views on the ordination of gays as priests and bishops, the permission of same-sex marriage, and similar contemporary departures from tradition.
          How many will accept Benedict's invitation is a moot question. My good friend David Virtue (photo above, taken on the occasion of his receiving an honorary doctorate a few years ago) publishes a web site called Virtueonline.org which rightfully bills itself as the voice of global conservative Anglicanism. He shares the conservative concerns noted above, but is among those who are unlikely" to cross the Tiber at this time. "I'm still a true son of the Reformation," he maintains.
          As always, church politics are involved. The Eastern Orthodox churches have long permitted a married priesthood and are independent of the Pope. So why shouldn't Reformation Anglicans opt for Orthodoxy rather than Roman Catholicism? That very question is being raised among Orthodox communities who suspect that the Pope is trying to steal a march on them. Stay tuned.

      
Photo: Chief Kenneth Branham of the Monacans 
          
          Lynchburg, our new home town, was founded in 1757, three decades before the Constitution of the United States of American was adopted.  But of course other people were already present when Charles Lynch started farming on the banks of the James River: the Native Americans or, as they were known at the time, the First Nations, or simply, the Indians.         
          Well into the 20^th century many believed that the Indians who lived in what is now the Lynchburg area were Cherokees. My wife’s family even today claim part-Cherokee ancestry. But in reality, the Lynchburg area Indians were the Monacan tribe. And interestingly, they were actually part of the Sioux (or Dakota) language group, as opposed to the Iroquois or Algonquins who dominated the east coast of the U.S.         
          Most of the Siouxs were pushed by the white immigrants from the east coast into to the Great Plains where I grew up. Only a handful survived to remain in the greater Lynchburg region. But their tribe was never recognized officially by the U.S. government. Earlier this week, however, a bill cleared the floors of both the House and the Senate recognizing the Monacans along with several other previously unacknowledged tribes.         
          Today about 900 Monacans live at the Bear Mountain Settlement where they maintain the Monacan Ancestral Museum at Natural Bridge in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia..

            The name of Lynchburg, our new home town, naturally raises a question about its possible association with the detestable act of lynching. There is such an association, but it’s not what you might expect.         
          The 250 year old town of Lynchburg was named after its founder, John Lynch, who established a ferry across the James River in 1757. Lynch was a Quaker and the Quakers “sat out” the War of Independence. But there were a few exceptions. One exception was John Lynch’s brother Charles, who was a Colonel in the George Washington’s army.         
          At one point in the War of Independence, Charles and a couple of other officers set up a military tribunal on his homestead. Captured British soldiers and Tory sympathizers were brought before the tribunal where they were summarily judged, tied to a tree, and whipped.         
          This harsh treatment became known as “Lynch’s Law.” There is no record of Colonel Lynch ever hanging anyone; however, over time “lynch law” became a synonym for mob injustice, usually hangings, and usually inflicted on African-Americans. But there is no record of a lynching ever occurring in Lynchburg town.         
          (This info I have taken from a history of Lynchburg by Drs. Clifton and Dorothy Potter.)

          Another TIME magazine cover, but this one is from 1933 and features Senator Carter Glass -- one of Lynchburg's most famous citizens. He served in the U.S. Congress for 40 years, from 1902 to 1946. A fiscal conservative, hHe is best known for co-authoring the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 which separated the activities of banks from those of Wall Street security brokers and created the FDIC, the agency that insures bank deposits. 
          Why am I reporting this bit of ancient history? Because over time Glass-Steagall was watered down and, in 1999, finally revoked. This made it possible for banks to act like Wall Street and to make highly leveraged (borrowed money) investments on their own behalf, that is, on behalf of their shareholders and ordinary depositors. Much of these risky investments were for unregulated derivatives (see yesterday's blog). Such investments, over a period of a decade, brought America and much of the rest of the world to the brink of financial disaster.
          Unless something on the order of the Glass-Steagall bill is re-enacted, and banks return to their traditional business of lending to individuals and businesses -- leaving Wall Street investment houses to take the big risks with other people's money -- there is nothing to keep the great crisis of 2008 from happening again.
          This seems like common sense, and Paul Volker, former head of the Federal Reserve Bank, and Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, are urging the Obama administration to do it. But Obama has surrounded himself with men such as the ones I wrote about yesterday, who oppose separating banks from investment houses. 
          Will we never learn?
         

"Prudence is a fountain of life to the prudent, but folly brings punishment to fools" (Proverbs 16:22).

          If you ever have a chance to view a re-run of The Warning, a PBS program that ran last night here on the East Coast, do take advantage of it. It featured Brooksley Born (on the left in the photo), the leader of a minor, but independent, department of the federal government during the Clinton administration a decade ago.
          At that time she was "a voice in the wilderness," warning one and all about the folly of unregulated derivatives, the financial instruments that brought the great economic collapse a year ago. She was strongly opposed by the three men to her right in the photo above (a TIME magazine cover): Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan, center, and Larry Summers.
          All three men were high government officials. All were closely tied in with Wall Street. Their unmatched prestige allowed them to convince Congress that Brooksley Born's warnings were no more than Henny Penny shouting "the sky is falling" and could be safely ignored. She was forced out of office.
          Brooksley Born was proved right, of course. Ultimately Alan Greenspan, the former head of the Federal Reserve Board and a staunch defender of laissez-faire economics, was compelled to admit publicly, "I was wrong." Robert Rubin went on to become senior counselor to Citigroup, which then had to receive billions in government bailout money. Most oddly, in my opinion, Larry Summers is now President Obama's National Economic Council director.
          Will we never learn?

         

          President Obama is in the process of reviewing, and possibly altering his Afghanistan policy significantly. But he has already reviewed and significantly altered his Sudan policy. In doing so he has been influenced by Major General J. Scott Gration, shown here with the President.         
          Gration is the son of a good friend of mine who was a missionary in Central Africa for some years. In later life the senior Gration became a missions scholar at the graduate school of Wheaton College in Illinois.  His son, meanwhile, by virtue of having been raised in Africa and being fluent in Swahili, accompanied Barack Obama on his pre-presidential tours of Africa. Although a Republican, he gained the President’s trust and is now the President’s special envoy to the Sudan.         
          Mr. Obama’s new policy reverses his “tough” stance as a presidential aspirant and now favors the more conciliatory approach advocated by General Gration – a mix of incentives and pressures designed to compel the Sudanese government to abandon its oppression of its western province of Darfur and prevent Sudan from continuing as a haven for terrorist groups such as al-Qa’eda.           
          It is unclear at this point whether the Gration strategy will produce the desired results. Alex DeWaal, an expert on the Sudan at the Social Science Research Council, says of the general, “I think Gration’s understanding is pretty sound. He’s not naïve. But he has a folksy way that makes him seem to trivialize things and sometimes does him a disservice.”

             America’s prisoners are growing older. One third of all prisoners will be 50 years old or older by this time next year. Courts are handing down longer sentences and tightening parole. Because more prisoners are dying in jail, about 75 prisons have started hospice programs and half of them are using inmate volunteers. (Source: John Leland reporting from the Coxsackie Correctional Facility in New York State.)         
          The hospice programs with inmate volunteers, designed for prisoners with less than six months to live, met with resistance at first, particularly from prison guards. More recently the guards have come to accept the programs. Dying patients bond with fellow inmates and vice versa. And the new procedure saves taxpayers money. “You volunteer,” says one inmate, “thinking you are going to help someone; instead, they end up helping you.”         
          Should governments be in the “compassion” business? The question is misplaced. Governments are not living entities. It is the people within governments who are making compassionate decisions. Such programs also reflect the impress of the spirit of Jesus on the public at large, which elects the legislators who make the laws that create such programs. It is good to know that during he past three centuries the Gospel has in fact transformed the American public mindset in the direction of compassion even toward malefactors.
          On the other hand, we have to recognize that the opposite spirit is evident in the longer sentences and tighter parole regulations we see today. And there is also the mercenary factor noted above: it is cheaper to employ inmates for hospice care than to hire outside companies.         

          This afternoon Georgia and I drove down to Bedford, Virginia. This is where she graduated from high school. It’s only a 20 minute drive from Lynchburg.         
          We drove to Bedford to visit the D-Day Memorial, dedicated to those who stormed the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944. Why is such a national memorial located in the little town of Bedford? Because Bedford lost more of its sons per capita than any other city in America on that fateful day.          
          I was impressed. The Memorial is much larger than I expected, and is located atop a high hill with commanding views in every direction – most notably, of course, the Blue Ridge Mountains. The Memorial’s centerpiece is Overlord Arch, surrounded by the flags of all the Allies who participated in the invasion. (For readers too young to have experienced World War II, Overlord was the name given to the Allied invasion of France.) 
           It was very chilly and windy today, so we just circled the Memorial and drove back home. But we agreed to return on a warm spring day next year, God willing, and take a walking tour through the entire Memorial, taking in its many fascinating facets.

          
         

          Not long before he died the great scientist Charles Darwin penned these words to a friend: “I can hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so, the plain language of the [biblical] text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my father, brother, and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.” 
         Such harsh words cause many Christians to despise Darwin and to equally disparage his theory of evolution by natural selection as being totally antithetical to Christianity.
          On the other hand, Darwin truthfully speaks not just for himself but for millions upon millions of people who have lived on planet earth since the dawn of humankind. In doing so, he raises a fundamental missiological issue – a seemingly intractable problem for Christian missions in particular.
          Any missionary with experience in Asia or Africa will confirm that the fate of ancestors is what keeps many an Asian or African from embracing the Christian gospel – for they sense little “good news” in the dogma that all their loved ones past and present are destined to spend eternity in the never-ending agonies of hell fire because they have not received Jesus as their Lord and Savior.
          This is one of the conundrums I explore in my book, The Renewal of All Things. If you have ever asked yourself, “Are all my non-Christian loved ones, all my ancestors extending far back into time immemorial, presently writhing in everlasting and unquenchable torment?” you may want to read Renewal and compare my own exposition of the gospel.

          Do you frequently experience extreme fatigue? muscle and joint pain? sleep problems? difficulty concentrating? If so, you may be among the one million Americans who are afflicted with chronic fatigue syndrome. My wife Georgia is one of the million and this is what led to her early retirement and our move down here to Lynchburg, Virginia.
          Chronic fatigue syndrome is something of a medical mystery, debated contentiously among doctors, patients and researchers. Is it a single disease, or a collection of symptoms that may have different causes in different patients? No one knows for sure. Sometimes it has been stigmatized as being more mental than physical, and the patients themselves labled neurotic, depressed or hypocondriac.
          A study published in Science magazine last week, and reported by Denise Grady in the New York Times this week, reports that a retrovirus tagged XMRV has been found in 98 percent of people with chronic fatigue syndrome. This discovery isn't conclusive, but it is very suggestive. The XMRV has also been found in patients with prostate cancer, common among men my age. So both my wife, among many others, are hoping that further research will be given high priority.

          Pope Benedict XVI canonized Father Damien de Veuster(shown in the painting at left) this past Sunday, making him officially a "saint." But Damien was a saint long before Benedict recognized him as such. Damien was a young Belgian missionary who dedicated his life to serving people with leprosy on the Hawaiian island of Molokai during the last quarter of the 19th century. This was time when such folk were severely stigmatized by society and segregated away from the general public.
          Father Damien was among those who insisted that the stigma against people with leprosy was wholly unfounded. Leprosy, he insisted, was not "unclearn," or a punishment for sin. It was an ailment entriely physical, like any other disease. In Damien's day there was no cure for leprosy, so all he could do was care for the sick and dying with the dignity they merit.
          When I was president of American Leprosy Missions back in the 1980s we expended a great deal of time and energy and money trying to educate the public about the reality of the disease. We banned the word "leper" from our publications and urged others to do the same. We referred to leprosy by its proper term, Hansen's disease. (Hansen was the Norwegian scientist who discovered the bacteria that causes leprosy.) We publicized the fact that leprosy is easily cured by a combination of three simple medications taken over a period of six months.
           Yet while Hansen's disease will be globally conquered in the near future, the stigma attached to it persists. Pope Benedict's gesture this week is a welcome contribution toward affording patients the quality of life they deserve.

          Americans relocate constantly, and have been doing so ever since Daniel Boone struck out to the wilds of Kentucky. Consequently it gets harder and harder to have meaningful extended family reunions, for family members may be scattered across the length and breadth of America.
          Most of Georgia's extended family have managed to remain on the east coast, however, and an impressive portion of them came in for Saree's funeral this past Saturday. Altogether more than 400 family and friends overflowed St. Paul Baptist Church, since in addition to family, Saree was well-known and liked around town.
          The funeral was well organized and dignified, but also very emotional and very long. Then the long cavalcade of cars -- mostly family and I estimated 75 or 80 -- wound its way to the countryside cemetary some miles away (where I too expect to be buried). After the graveside ritual they returned to the church for the repast. Family socializing continued till midnight.
          I had never before been involved in such a loarge extended family fellowship. By eveing my head was awhirl from Georgia's introductions. "This is my cousing _____; he's the gradson of my mother's father by his third wife." "This is _____; she's my father's brothr's nephew's daughter." Etc., etc., a hundred times over. At times I felt grateful that we Scotts, though undoubtedly just as extended a family, are too far-flung for such high-intensity gatherings.

          What will happen to me when I die? I cannot say for sure. the Christian hope is that "to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord." but no one knows exactly what that means.
          Some -- the ancient Greeks, for instance -- believe that our souls are immortal, that when our bodies die and decay, our souls escape to live on. Hindus also believe in immortal souls that will be reborn indefinitely (reincarnation).
          I find the concept of a disembodied soul -- a ghost? a phantom? a spirit? -- unpersuasive. I believe my "soul" is not a thing in itslef. It is simply a way of referring to who I am uniquely. Or more precisely, who I have become, a person who feels and thinks and acts.
          I believe that when my body dies, my soul no longer exists. It is inseparable from my body. For all effective purposes, "I" am annihilated at death, absorbed into the earth and air, helping to ferilize the environment of future generations.
          What then do I, a Christian, believe it means "to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord"? I believe that who I am, that is, who I have become, is held in God's memory, and that one day God will re-create me, along with all human beings who have ever lived.
          I will be "judged" -- I will know myself as God knows me -- and made fit for uninhibited fellowship with my Creator and all other living beings in an eternal community of mutual love. This is how I understand the Christian hope of resurrection.

     When I was young the average life-span of a person was said to be three score and ten. I always hoped I would get an extra year so as to be able personally to celebrate the year 2000 and the arrival of the new millennium. Lo and behold! I have lived 80 years and during my lifetime the statistical life-span of an American has increased to 84 years. So I am thinking I have a few years to go.
          But who knows? Many of my closest friends have already passed on. And death comes unexpectedly to some, as it did this week to Saree, Georgia's dear sister. She was only 60 years old. Her funeral will be this Saturday. So as I move through my ninth decade, perhaps it is understandable that I think not infrequently of death and dying.
          I find I do not fear deth, though I don't welcome the thought of an agonizingly painful death such as Saree's. I know death is common to all living creatures: bacteria, plants, animals and humans. To be born is to die. Think of what the earth would be like if there were no deaths. Billions upon billions of people (not to mention animals, plants, birds and fish) on planet earth, all pushing, shoving, fighting over one square foot of living space! No, death is necessary for the human race to continue to evolve for better or worse.
          [to be continued...]

          Here's how Chicago has decided to stop the street killings of young people:

          The new school superintendent appointed a team of eight people who worked for six months analyzing tons of data to identify the 10,000 most vulnerable students. These students (2.5 percent of the total of 410,000) include both potential victims of violence and perpertrators.
          They will most likely be black, male, without a stable living enviornment, enrolled in special education classes, skipping nearly half of school days, and having records of in-school behavioral flare-ups eight times higher than the average.
          An annual budget of $30 million will be allocated to saturate each vulnerable student with adult attention, including giving each of them a paid job and a local advocate who will be on call 24 hours a day.
          This policy is designed to favor mental health strategies and prevention over policing and punishment. Says the new superintendent, "We believe that if we can change the behavior of these 10,000 students we'll be able to make a significant difference in the level of violence in the city."
          [Source:"Focus in Chicago: Students at Risk of Violence," by Susan Saulny, New York Times front-page article this morning.]
          I invite comparison between the official Chicago approach and the one I suggested in yesterday's blog.

          
          
          How often we forget the millennia of life-experience that preceded our generation! An ancient proverb says, " "Because sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, therefore the heart of the sons of men is fully set in hem to do evil" (Ecclesiastes 8:11).

          Our prosecutors, judges and legislators build their reputations on being tough on crime. They believe that if we threaten wrongdoers with long, harsh sentences, that will deter them. However, reliable research indicates otherwise.
          Mark Kleiman,, professor of public policy at the University of California (a state that mandates long, harsh sentences) and the author of When Brute Force Fails, notes, "The evidence suggests that when criminals are reasonably sure that they will be caught and punished swiftly, even mild sanctions deter them. But not even the prospect of severe punishment is effective if offenders think they can get away with their crimes."
          The Ecclesiastes proverb came to mind as I reflected on all the killings -- primarily black on black -- that are occuring in Chicago these days. Most go unsolved, even when they are witnessed by on-lookers and documented by video cameras. Why? Because of the "no snitch" code prevailing among inner city youth. The code is justified as some kind of "honor" code, but it is no such thing. It is basically a code that ensures that those who report a crime will not suffer subsequent harm themselves. 
          Yesterday I was driving around town with two hard-working African-American men, both married with children. discussing the chicago situation (not all that different than most urban areas) one of my companiions stated bluntly, "I tell my kids, 'no snitching.' Have nothing to do with any trouble going on. Keep it to yourselves. No need for you to be killed too."
          This parental attitude is understandable, but also wrong; quite wrong. As long as perpetrators are reasonably certain they will not be caught, they have no motivation to stop their viciousness. On the other hand, if they are certain that some witness is going to report the crime and identify the perpetrators immediately, they will give their inteded action a second thought.
          The key concepts here are certainty and speed, as the ancient proverb asserts. This runs contrary to modern American concepts of crime prevention, which relies not on certain or speed, but on length of sentence. Those who write our "get tough" sentences need to re-think their position, regardless of how populare such laws may be with the middle class public.

         
          One this day 100 years ago Wilbur Wright flew his airplane 20 miles in 33.5 minutes, at an average speed of 40 miles per hour, from Governor's Island in New York Harbor up the Hudson River as far as Grant's tomb, and back to the island. According to the New York Times front-page story of that day, Wright flew "with the grace of a sea gull and the strength of an eagle."
          In other front-page news of a century ago, 21 young women staged a strike, walking out of their Sundary School class at Brown Memorial Methodist Episcopal Church, rebelling against their pastor-teacher. They marched over to the home of their previous teacher and persuaded him to teach them.
         

          No real blog today. It's been a long, hard day. Georgia's younger sister, Sally (Saree) passed away after an illness of one month. (We took her to the hospital the first day we moved from Paterson to Lynchburg.) She died a few hours ago.  Most of her numerous siblings, her three daughters, two grandchildren, and close friends and in-laws, including myself, gathered at her bedside to share her final hours which were intensely laborious and painful. The experience reinforces my conviction that there is something amiss with our medical ethics when we insist on prolonging life by every possible means, rather than allowing people to die when the pilgrimage on earth is clearly over. Christrians believe that "to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord." Why do we think that living a few more hours or days in agony is superior to that prospect?

          My daughter Cheryl drew my attention to a TIME magazine report of the discovery of water on the moon. The discovery was made by the Indian Space Research Orgnization's lunar probe, Chandrayaan, fitted with a NASA research instrument.
             Since the Apollo program four decades ago, scientists have believed the surface of the moon to be dry. Moisture found in rocks brought back by those early missions was thought to be the result of contamination from theearthh's atmosphere. The new research, which used the intensity of the colors that bounce off the surface of the moon when it's hit by sunlight, proves that there are traces of both water and a closely related molecule called hydroxyl.
          According to the TIME article, critics question the logic of a country such as India, battling dire poverty, spending milliions of dollars on exotic scientific pursuits. Supporters of the program argue that a lunar mission will provide untold technological spin-offs -- to say nothing of inspiration, respect and prospects for international cooperation.
          I agree with the latter. Sooner or later humankind will colonize the moon, and the endeavor will be much easier and less expensive if water is available on the moon than it has to be imported from earth.

          Yesterday China celebraated the 60th anniversary of the People's Republic. As a college freshman, home from three years' service in the old Army Air Corps. I read reports of Chairman Mao Zedong's speech to the assembly that gathered to inaugurate the new nation. I felt at the time that this was a pivotal event in modern history. (In my sophomore year I took classes in Chinese history and Chinese philosophy.) And so it turned out to be. Here are some excerpts from that speech:

          Fellow Delegates, we are all convinced that our work will go down in the history of mankind, demonstrating that the Chinese people, comprising one quarter of humanity, have now stood up!
          The Chinese have always been a great, courageous and industrious nation. It is only in modern tmes that they have fallen behind. and that was dure entirely to oppression and exploitation by foreign imperialism and domestic reactionary governments...
          We have closed our ranks and defeated both domestic and foreign oppressors through the People's War of Liberation and the great People's Revolution, and now we are proclaiming the founding of the People's Republic of China.
          Ours will no longer be a nation subject to insult and humiliation. We have stood  up!
          Hail the victory of the People's War of Liberation and the people's revolution!
          Hail the founding of the People's Republic of China!

          This has been a week of disasters. A typhoon sweeps across the Philippines; a tsunami crashes into Samoa; an earthquake devastates Sumatra. All this in the west-central region of the Ring of Fire -- the belt of volcanoes circling the Pacific Ocean (see map).
          The earth's crust is composed of 15 tectonic plates which "float" on the partially molten layer below them. The Circle of Fire marks the boundary of the plate beneath the Pacific Ocean and the surrounding plates. Of the 850 active volcanoes in the world, over 75 percent of them are part of the Circle of Fire (source: Answers.com).
          However, this week's disasters were not precipitated by volcanoes. Rather, two of the three were brought about by the movement of tectonic plates 35 miles or so beneath the surface of the sea. Such catastrophic events are not the work of the devil, nor the consequence of human sin, as many suppose as they contemplate the terrible loss of lives. They are simply a tiny part and integral parcel of our ever-evolving universe.