For the time being, I am not blogging daily. I need to concentrate exclusively on the book I am currently writing.

          The Mississippi Delta – not a delta, really, but an alluvial plain in the northwest corner of the State – has some of the richest farmland in the world, but some of the poorest people. (They are also extraordinarily talented; the Delta has produced the likes of blues musicians B. B. King and Muddy Walters.)         
          In the Delta, as reported by the National Institutes of Health, the infant death rate is on a par with that of Lybia. It has the highest rates of obesity, hypertension and teen pregnancy in the country. So after decades of frustration and millions of dollars invested with dismal results, writes Ann Puderbough, Mississippi health care pioneer Dr. Aaron Shirley (photo) decided to reach out to Iran – yes, Iran – for help.         
          Iran has had stunning success in providing medical care for its rural area. Their strategy is simple, and centers around “health houses,” of which they have more than a thousand. These are small facilities located in each village. Health care workers are chosen from within the village and trained. The focus is on preventive care and priority is given to high-risk groups such as mothers and children. In addition, the trained workers, trusted by their neighbors, monitor diseases, collect data, and follow up patients. Preventive and curative programs are fused seamlessly as the “health houses” in turn are integrated into a larger system of clinics and hospitals.         
          Dr. Shirley, who works out of Jackson State University, spent a good deal of time last year at the Shiraz University Medical Services in Iran studying the Iranian system. Returning to the Delta, Dr. Shirley has developed a pilot community health house plan and to date 15 Delta communities are involved.          
          All this demonstrates that help can come from unexpected places. When we look outside our borders we can learn a lot from others. Perhaps I should mention that I came across this story on LinkTV, whose slogan is “Television without Borders.”

             The U. S. Government Accountability Office now reports that the F-35 Joint Fighter project (see photo) is not only two and a half years behind schedule but has risen dramatically in cost. Each one of the planes in this photo is now priced at $112 million. Since the U. S. plans to build 2,400 of them, we are talking about $325,000,000,000! And this is only one small part of American’s war machine.          
          Secretary of Defense Robert Gates tells us that these mammoth expenditures are necessary to “save” our children and grandchildren. His perspective reflects the views of leaders on both sides of the aisle, Democrat and Republican alike. Worse still, the project commands support from Reinhold Niebuhr-style “Christian realists” of virtually all denominations (the Anabaptists perhaps being the only exception).          
          Donning my “holy fools” cap, I say that we Christians – not to mention the nation as a whole -- are tragically mistaken and misguided. We have unthinkingly and uncritically adopted a worldly wisdom that affirms that national security depends on overwhelming military power – a perspective denied by both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. “Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit,” the Lord God Almighty told the prophet Zechariah in a passage directly related to the security of Israel. Consequently, as the prophet Haggai reminded the people of Israel, “You earn wages, only to put them in a purse with holes in it.”         
          Jesus warned us that he who would save his life will lose it. He told the story of a rich man who, rather than share his abundance with the needy, determined to “tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will story my surplus grain.” Jesus called this man a fool (not a holy fool, mind you). In recent months many Americans raised a hue and cry over the cost of providing health care for millions who cannot afford it. These same folk don’t blink an eye at spending 325 billion dollars on the fool’s errand of the F-35 which many experts believe will never get off the ground – and billions more on other “national security” projects. From a biblical perspective, I can’t see that such people are “realists” at all.                   

            One of the more senior citizens in our complex – a widow whose husband left her rather well off – is cruising the South Pacific this summer. That got me thinking about Easter Island and unintended consequences.
          Easter Island (Rapa Nui) is perhaps the most isolated acreage on the globe. It lies in the middle of the Pacific Ocean 2,000 miles west of Chile. Polynesians explorers settled it about a thousand years ago, soon thereafter sculpting and erecting hundreds of massive statues (mo’ai: guardian spirits, as in the photo above. This was all part of their surprisingly sophisticated culture.         
          During the decades that followed, the island’s population exploded, even as its resources, particularly its trees, diminished. Eventually not a single tree was left. The land eroded, crops failed, and vicious clan warfare began. By the time Western explorers came across them, the islanders were in dire straights. By 1877 only 111 Rananui remained, and of these, only 36 had descendants.         
          Consider our world today. Since my birth 80 years ago, its population has tripled from two billion to six billion. Demographers now project a global population of nine billion by the year 2050. This population explosion is the unanticipated consequence of amazing advances in medical science.          
          Infant mortality has dropped everywhere and people are living much longer, on average. Pressure on earth’s natural resources keeps rising, thanks to the green revolution, but the distribution of those resources is demonically uneven. Competition for them increases – hence our planet’s unending series of national and tribal wars. The same science that produced the population explosion has also made possible weapons of mass destruction. Who knows whether there will be anyone left by the year 2050.

            My wife, Georgia, is a Life Member of the NCNW, the National Council of Negro Women, an organization that supported her strongly during her six-year tenure as the first African-American Freeholder (county commissioner) in northern New Jersey. Yesterday Dorothy Height, photo, who was president of the NCNW for 40 years, died at the ripe old age of 98. Few people live so long or serve so well.                 
          Born here in Virginia and famous for her hats, President Obama frequently referred to her as “the godmother of the civil rights movement.” During the height – no pun intended -- of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, Dorothy Height organized "Wednesdays in Mississippi," which brought together black and white women from the North and South to create a dialogue of understanding.          
          Ms. Height (she never married) served for decades on the national board of the YWCA, where she headed up the Y’s leadership training program. Until her death, she served as chairperson of the executive committee of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the largest civil rights organization in the USA.  Fifteen years ago she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor.  This country will be the poorer without her presence

          Professor Peter Phan of Georgetown University reminds us that the figure of the “holy fool” has a long and distinguished pedigree, not only in the Christian tradition but also in other cultures, e.g., the Sufi majzub, the Hindu avadhuta. Jesus once prayed, thanking God that he had hidden certain truths from the worldly wise but revealed them to “little children” (Matthew 11:25). During his lifetime Jesus himself was regarded as a “holy fool” by both his family and the religious leaders of the day (Mark 3:21-22). The apostle Paul admitted he had become “a fool for Christ’s sake” (I Corinthians 4:10).         
          I am thinking that perhaps one of my daughters is such a “holy fool.” (I won’t name her lest I unwittingly offend my other daughters who, for all I know, may be “holy fools” as well!) My daughter and I have been having a conversation about the role of war in our contemporary world. We both abhor it. I for one believe it to be utterly stupid and blasphemous. But, given human nature at homo sapiens’ present stage of evolution, I think it is unavoidable and occasionally (rarely) justified.         
          My daughter, on the other hand, is a pure pacifist, condemning war on any pretext whatsoever. Obviously this is abject foolishness, as far as conventional wisdom is concerned. If someone strikes you, you must strike back harder. It may even be necessary, the wise men of the world assure us, that if we believe someone may strike us, we should strike them first – “preemptively,” I believe the word is. Thus during the past century we have had Christians slaughtering other Christians by the millions in the name of some “democratic values” or "just war theory" presumed to override Christ’s primary command to “love one another” (John 13:34).         
          By contrast, my daughter is convinced that there are enough people in the world – a silent minority – who acting on this principle, even in isolation from one another – could change the world. Perhaps this is so. I remind myself that St. Paul asked, “Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” Again, cites the prophet Isaiah (another “holy fool”) who has God declaring, “I will  destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate” (Isaiah29:14).

    
        I've just finished reading TEETH, by Timothy James Dean. It's a great adventure story, and the best evocation of the tropical jungle since Chapman's The Jungle is Neutral, which I read way back in the 1950s!  Three young men (Japanese, Australian, American) and a man-eating monster crocodile known to the local people as The Father, are entwined in Papua New Guinea toward the end of World War II. Only two of the four survive. Besides being impeccably researched, author Dean has his own spiritual perspective that adds unsettling depth to the novel.

          I will be out of town for the next ten days, and probably too busy to post any new blogs.  Check back in about Wednesday, April 21st. 


 

          


             This morning our small-town newspaper, the Lynchburg News & Advance, carried the following  letter to the editor. What are your comments?

          “I am a participant in the war tax resistance movement. I identify myself as a conscientious objector and pacifist. That means I don’t believe in killing other people. Nearly half of our federal income taxes go to support past, present, and future wars.
          “Many people believe that war is hell but feel powerless to do anything about it. I will not voluntarily pay for drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan that kill innocent men, women and children with missles controlled from thousands of miles away in the USA and financed with US tax dollars.
          “The killing goes on, and I want to stop it. I feel driven to take direct action, non-violent civil disobedience because my country accepts militarism and war as a necessary evil. The US is constantly at war. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, US military expenditures in 2008 represented 41.5 percent of the total world military expenditures.
          “There is a poster that reads, ‘It’ll be a great day when day care centers have all the money they need, and the Navy has to hold a bake sale to build battleships.’ I couldn’t have said it better myself.”
                    (signed) Larry  ______

          Writing for Religion News Service, Illinois Repre-sentative Daniel Burke reports that President Barack Obama “bared his soul” at a White House Easter breakfast last week. Addressing “brothers and sisters in Christ,” Obama spoke of “our risen savior” and of the inspiration he takes from Jesus’ resurrection.
          Ordinarily I wouldn’t bother to blog about such a formal breakfast, for they are rather commonplace in political circles, and I am somewhat cynical about them. But there is so much malicious nonsense on the Internet about the president’s personal faith that I’m making an exception today. As the Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell, a Houston megachurch pastor and close friend of former President George W. Bush, put it, “Never in modern history has a president said, ‘I am a Christian,’ and others replied, ‘No, you’re not!’ It’s stupid and an insult.”
          Speaking of Jesus, the president said, “We are awed by the grace he showed even to those who would kill him. We are thankful for the sacrifice he made for the sins of humanity. And we glory in the promise of redemption in the resurrection.” “As Christians,” he continued, “we believe that redemption can be delivered by faith in Jesus Christ. And the possibility of redemption can make straight the crookedness of a character, make whole the incompleteness of a soul.”
          Last fall Mr. Obama participated in a Ramadan dinner, and more recently in a Jewish Passover Seder. Together with the Easter breakfast, he was fulfilling a campaign pledge to make the White House “a place where all people would feel welcome,” aides said.  

           Earlier this week, newly elected Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell (photo) a Republican, quietly proclaimed April as Confederate History Month, a proclamation his two Democrat predecessors had refused to make. The new move was immediately criticized, former Governor Mark Warner saying it does not help bridge divisions between whites and blacks in the commonwealth.
           But the proclamation was poorly worded. It recalled the sacrifices of those who died in the War Between the States, but made no reference at all to the institution of slavery, one of the main causes of the war. Black legislators called the governor’s decision “unconscionable,” “racist,” “offensive,” and “totally unacceptable. The governor beat a hasty retreat and publicly apologized. He will issue a revised proclamation, he said.
          An informal online poll taken yesterday by The Washington Post showed that of 40,500 people responding, only 34 percent agreed with his original decision, with 66 percent disagreeing. Oddly, the Richmond Times-Dispatch agreed with the Post’s negative editorial position, a fairly rare occurrence. But here in Lynchburg, online poll results were much different: 76 percent favored the governor’s action, while only 24 percent disagreed.  
           I’m a new resident of Virginia (as are many others these days), and from the Midwest, so perhaps my own opinion doesn’t count for much. But I suspect the proclamation will help Virginia’s burgeoning tourism industry, and that was why it was made. That makes sense to me. It is likely that the decision will help solidify McConnell’s conservative base. But I must admit, the whole thing looks like a Freudian slip to me; deep rooted racial prejudice is still evident in Virginia.

          

White ares = Israeli occupied areas
Dark ares = Palestinian
          













          Ever since the presidency of Barack Obama began, American special envoy George Mitchell has been trying to re-start peace talks between the Israeli and the Palestinians. To no avail. The Palestinians, with the exception of the Hamas party in Gaza, have just about given up on armed resistance. So now the West Bank Palestinians are trying a third route on their own: non-violent resistance.
          Martin Luther King III is scheduled to speak at a conference on non-violence in Ramallah, the main city on the West Bank, in May; and Rajmohan Gandhi, grandson of the famed independence leader of India, recently led a protest march in Bilin, a Palestinian village.
          Earlier this month Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad led a group into a West Bank village to plant trees. “It’s about putting facts on the ground,” he told interviewer Ethan Bronner. “I feel we are on a new path that is very appealing, both domestically and internationally. The whole world knows this Israeli occupation has to end.”  

          Everyone knows that internet pornography is a vice that attracts millions and millions of men around the world. Every 40 seconds a new porn video is made; every month upwards of two billion porn videos are downloaded. Porn revenue exceeds the revenues of baseball, basketball, and [American] football combined.  Here in the USA, 40 million adults regularly visit internet porn sites.

          What I didn’t know, and never even thought about, to be honest, is that internet pornography is, “not just a guy issue.” Christianity Today, in a back-page article, notes that one of every six adult women in the USA are now viewing porn.   That’s a large number – more than ten million.

          Crystal Renaud (photo) whose porn addiction began at age 10 when she found a certain magazine in her brother’s bathroom, launched a web site last year (www.dirtygirlsministries.com) with the idea of increasing awareness of the problem among women, helping them realize they are not alone, and utilizing accountability partnerships for recovery. Crystal says that “women often seek porn as a way to escape and receive a sense of intimacy. We want to help them escape secrecy’s stranglehold and encounter the healing touch of Christ.”                   

          For two-thirds of the world’s population Easter is either unknown or meaningless. For the other third, us Christians, it’s something of a mixed bag. Millions of us, particularly in the developing world, will celebrate Easter with fervor and pageantry. In Paterson, New Jersey, where Georgia and I lived for a quarter-century, a few congregations will gather at dawn on Garrett Mountain to commemorate the Lord’s resurrection. For many Christians, however, especially families with kids, Easter will have a semi-pagan flavor – bunny rabbits and the exciting search for colored eggs. A lot depends on the weather.

          But back to the two-thirds world, some four billion Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and secularists, to name only the most prominent. This is their world too, and we share it with them. Globalization connects us all in myriad ways. So we Christians have a choice. We can forge ahead with familiar arrogance, convinced of the superiority of our faith and culture, believing that soon or later Christianity will triumph over all – that’s one meaning of Christ’s resurrection. Or we can assume a posture of realism, knowing this world with its ever-growing population cannot survive this century without fresh creative overtures of friendship and solidarity with the “others” – that’s an alternative meaning to the new life we experience with the risen Christ.

          Realism notes that the center of gravity of Christianity has shifted from Europe and the Americas to Asia and Africa. Realism also recognizes that Islam and other religions hold great appeal. The world is not going to turn Christian overnight. And realism acknowledges that our world with all of its political oppression, nuclear armaments, and economic imperialism is stacked against the innocents.  This means, I believe, that we must continue to evangelize – to share our faith – but less in the context of proclamation and religious conversion and more in the context of friendly dialogue and humble service to the hundreds of millions who suffer from poverty and disease. Over the course of my long life I have seen more and more Christians slowly come to appreciate the value of this kind of Easter realism.                     
.        

          In Greek mythology the Nymphs were nubile young women who presided over springs, clouds, trees, caverns, meadows, and beaches. As such they were closely associated with the prime gods of nature such as Hermes, Dionysos, and Artemis. They seduced men who might come across them in a shady glen or by the riverside.

        But today, thanks to a tip from friend Maggie in Nairobi, Kenya, the nymphs I write about are tiny baby grasshoppers. At times they can number up to 1,000 per square yard. Think of it! And when they mature full-grown they swarm over every surface like a rug. When they have eaten any plant life available, they will even eat the paint off the side of barns. In this “swarming” phase they are usually called locusts – a name familiar to those who have read about the plague Moses called down upon Pharoah.

        If a swarm of grasshoppers lights on a field like the Idaho soybean field above, absolutely nothing will be left in a matter of minutes. So farmers and ranchers in the western United States are bracing for a major grasshopper infestation predicted for this summer. Millions of acres of crops and grazing land are expected to be devastated. 
          The federal government will spend about $40 million this year in suppression efforts; it costs about ten dollars to spray an acre. In spite of this, many farmers and ranchers in places like Nebraska, Wyoming and Montana are likely to lose the whole of their crops.
        Now there will be those like the Rev. Pat Robertson who will be quick to attribute this destruction to God -- punishment for American laxity toward abortion and homosexuality. But actually, as reported in the Wall Street Journal, such infestations are regular and cyclical. The numbers mount rapidly for two or three years and then plunge back to normal when the insects run out of food or a disease spreads through overcrowded swarms.           

          The West African Inoko Tree is tough, dense, and durable, like teak. That's how his friends saw Dr. Adeyemo Tokunboh, left, one of the major figures in recent African Christian history who died a couple of weeks ago after losing his battle with cancer. Along with many others, I too want to honor his memory on this Good Friday.
          Adeyemo and I were colaborers in the World Evangelical Alliance back in the late 1970s. Born into a prominent Nigerian Muslim family, he was converted to Jesus in his early 20s. Always convinced of the value of education, he went on to earn two doctoral degrees in theology (Dallas, Texas) and philosophy (Aberdeen, Scotland). At the time of his death he was the executive director of the Centre for Biblical Transformation, and the chancellor of the Evangelical Graduate School of Theology, both in Nairobi. But for 22 years earlier he had served as general secretary of the Association for Evangelicals in Africa. It was in this capacity that he and I worked together on a variety of different projects.
          Adeyemo wrote several significant books, but one of his most lasting contributions was as General Editor for the Africa Bible Commentary, which I have in my personal library and consult frequently.         
          From his own point of view, Adeyemo's greatest challenge was to provide leadership for Africa. "Africa's problem," he often said, "can be summarized in one word: leadership. We need leaders who do not focus on greed, but see themselves as servants of the people." He was one such leader.

         


          Writing in the New Mexicans for Science and Reason, physicist Max Boslough reports that the Alabama state legislature has voted to change the value of the mathematical constant π (pi) from 3.14159 to the 'Biblical value' of 3.0. "This is in keeping with the cultural values of the Bible Belt," a spokesman for the state government announced.
          In a related story, Bob Carroll, creator of the online Skeptics Dictionary, announced that he was abandoning skepticism and embracing the Christian belief in divine design. He attributed his conversion to an epiphany that occurred after doing yardwork:
          "I came in afterward and noticed that there were several weeds stuck to my socks and shoes. It was like a hammer to the head. I started to see the patterns. There was clearly a design here. The weeds excreted a sticky substance that allowed them to cling to my clothes. When I moved around I carried their seeds with me and had unwittingly deposited them throughout my yard. But I wasn't concerned about the yard. I had a bigger problem. I had seen that randomness could not account for the weeds' behavior. The weeds clearly know what they are doing. They didn't just accidentally cling to me. There is no way this was just matter randomly and meaninglessly behaving in a way that looked like design. This was truly design at work."