I took a course this summer to help me transition into my new role as Guidance Head at the high school that I teach at. Largely, like any education course, it was useless. There were some glimmers of hope though. One day we had a bereavement counselor come into speak to us about children and death. She was someone who had her parents die as a teenager and has devoted her life to counseling kids as young as kindergarten deal with the death of a parent.

I learned a lot from the presentation. For example, she said that when an adult grieved the loss of a spouse it was akin to drowning in the ocean. However, when a kid grieves the loss of a parent it’s more like drowning in a deep puddle. The difference is that kids can easily move in and out of that puddle. When they’re out of the puddle they’ll appear to have moved on, playing with their friends without a care in the world. But, when they’re in that puddle they’ll feel the depth of their loss as deeply as any adult would. So it’s not weird for a kid to seem as if everything is alright after a parent has died. They’ll come back to it and the pain will be intense.

Good tip.

Unfortunately, this woman was very weak when it came to matters of God and death. Whereas she continually appealed to the ‘facts’ when it came to the psychology of bereavement she transitioned to a vapid subjectivism when it came to God. Who was she to judge a person’s beliefs about the after life? Huh. Really?

Now I see the struggle with counseling people who have diverse religious beliefs dealing with death. I get it. But my God, death is serious and God is even more serious. It’s no time for an appeal to a self-indulgent fact-value distinction.

To see what I mean watch the clip below. As someone who has spent some time in hospitals with dying people there are few things more reprehensible to me than gooey liberal chaplains. You’ll see what I mean.

A thought for the Lord’s Day. JP Moreland on what it means to take up your cross:

“Taking up ones cross daily” means to form through repeated practice the daily habit of living each day with a specific attitude and outlook. More specifically, one is to form a passion for the daily practice of giving up on the failed project of making one’s self the center of focus and, alternatively, to live hour by hour for God’s kingdom. It is to be preoccupied with learning skillfully to find one’s place in his unfolding plan and play one’s role well, to give one’s life away to othe’s for Christ’s sake.

J.P. Moreland, Kingdom Triangle.

Kevin Deyoung has some wise words that apply to both Mark Driscoll and Rachel Evans:

I know conservatives want to push back the tide of feminism and fight against the emasculation of men in our culture, but offering stereotypes is not the way to do it. It’s not fair to say, without qualification, that “Real men hunt and fish. Real men like football. Real men watch ultimate fighting. Real men love Braveheart. Real men change the oil and chop firewood.” It’s one thing for pastors to give men permission to be like this. It’s another to prescribethat they must. You simply can’t prove from the Bible that manliness must look like William Wallace. If you insist on one way to be a man, you’re in danger of two things: 1) Hurting godly men who are manly but don’t do things with sports, cars, or the outdoors. 2) Making your particular expression manhood the standard for everyone else. And when complementarians overreach with their definition of manhood they play into the hands of those who say there is no definition of manhood at all.

On the other hand, a different set of Christians needs to be careful they don’t make Jesus—as the quintessential man—into a progressive beatnik. Some Christians reject the stereotype in the previous paragraph, only to replace it with another. So Jesus—and therefore, every real man—hates all violence, protests social inequality, and probably painted with watercolors. Not only does this ignore Jesus the avenger (Revelation 6 and 19) or Jesus the friend of rich people (Zacchaeus), it flattens the biblical narrative into another predictably anachronistic tale of how Jesus was a man exactly like me. So yes, Ted Nugent is not the only way to be a man. But that doesn’t mean Sting is the alternative.

And Anthony Bradley has written on what he deems to be Rachel Evans’ slander and libel. I’m not so sure.

This is a joke. Rachel Evans, whose claim to fame has been chastising Mark Driscoll for being a bully (the horror!), is writing a new book. It’s tentatively titled “The Quest for Biblical Womanhood.” Evans explains below:

Starting October 1, 2010, I will commit one year of my life to following all of the Bible’s instructions for women as literally as possible. From the Old Testament to the New Testament, from Genesis to Revelation, from the Levitical code to the letters of Paul, there’s no picking and choosing. (Well, except for polygamy…and a few other things that I’ll tell you about later.)

This means, among other things,  rising before dawn each day (Proverbs 31:15), submitting to my husband (Colossians 3:18), growing out my hair (1 Corinthians 11:15), making my own clothes, (Proverbs 31:22),  learning how to cook (Titus 2:3-5), covering my head when in prayer (1 Corinthians 11:5), calling Dan “master” (1 Peter 3:5-6), caring for the poor (Proverbs 31:25), nurturing a gentle and quiet spirit (1 Peter 3:4), and camping out in the backyard for the duration of my monthly period (Leviticus 15:19-33).

This looks brilliant. Just what we need: another evangelical masochist parading her doubts and embarrassment of Scripture before a watching world. Maybe if she’s lucky the Huffington Post will let her write a blog post from time to time about what she hates about the religious right! Ooooh, how missional! But this isn’t even what burns me up the most about Evans. Does this project sound familiar in anyway? Hmmmm …. oh right. This is an exact rip off of A.J. Jacob’s A Year of Living Biblically. If you’re not familiar with Jacobs, he spent a year trying to follow the Bible as literally as possible. That sounds eerily familiar to Evans “womanhood project.” Evans realizes this when she writes:

Think of it as John Piper meets Martha Stewart meets Julie & Julia meets A Year of Living Biblically. Just enough crazy to interest everyone.

Julia & Julia meets A Year of Living Biblically? This is A Year of Living Biblically. Elsewhere, Evans realizes this and says she wanted to “comment on the contemporary biblical womanhood movement in a fresh way.” A fresh way? No, dear. This was fresh when Jacobs did it. What Evans has done is the equivalent of what the dumbasses at Cactus Game Design Co. did when they copied the award winning board game, Settlers of Cataan with their Christianized Settlers of Canaan. Way to go Rachel. You’re up there with Testamints and other great episodes in evangelical kitsch.

To paraphrase Doug Wilson, evangelicals (even those on the left) are desperate to imitate what the secular world does. But the problem is that the secularists are pretty far down the road and are going pretty fast. And so we chase after them, our fat little evangelical thighs chafing together, whining under our breath because they don’t wait up.

Well I’ve got to go. I’m working on a Christian version of Youtube called …… oh wait …. dammit.

With Central America descending into drug fueled chaos, it’s time for the US (and Canada) to reevaluate its drug policy. Portugal is a good case study. Since July 2001 Portugal has legalized personal drug use. According to TIME magazine (and the CATO Institute) the results have been remarkably promising:

The question is, does the new policy work? At the time, critics in the poor, socially conservative and largely Catholic nation said decriminalizing drug possession would open the country to “drug tourists” and exacerbate Portugal’s drug problem; the country had some of the highest levels of hard-drug use in Europe. But the recently released results of a report commissioned by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, suggest otherwise.

The paper, published by Cato in April, found that in the five years after personal possession was decriminalized, illegal drug use among teens in Portugal declined and rates of new HIV infections caused by sharing of dirty needles dropped, while the number of people seeking treatment for drug addiction more than doubled.

“Judging by every metric, decriminalization in Portugal has been a resounding success,” says Glenn Greenwald, an attorney, author and fluent Portuguese speaker, who conducted the research. “It has enabled the Portuguese government to manage and control the drug problem far better than virtually every other Western country does.”

Compared to the European Union and the U.S., Portugal’s drug use numbers are impressive. Following decriminalization, Portugal had the lowest rate of lifetime marijuana use in people over 15 in the E.U.: 10%. The most comparable figure in America is in people over 12: 39.8%. Proportionally, more Americans have used cocaine than Portuguese have used marijuana.

The Cato paper reports that between 2001 and 2006 in Portugal, rates of lifetime use of any illegal drug among seventh through ninth graders fell from 14.1% to 10.6%; drug use in older teens also declined. Lifetime heroin use among 16-to-18-year-olds fell from 2.5% to 1.8% (although there was a slight increase in marijuana use in that age group). New HIV infections in drug users fell by 17% between 1999 and 2003, and deaths related to heroin and similar drugs were cut by more than half. In addition, the number of people on methadone and buprenorphine treatment for drug addiction rose to 14,877 from 6,040, after decriminalization, and money saved on enforcement allowed for increased funding of drug-free treatment as well.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1893946,00.html#ixzz1TkQpRlv5

And on a topic like this, we can’t leave out good ol’ Ron Paul.

Here’s Warren Buffett’s idea to help solve the American debt crisis:

The Church is too skittish about politics. Has anyone even heard a sermon giving advice for an upcoming election? I know I haven’t. With an upcoming provincial election in Ontario I’d like to give some practical advice for Christians trying to negotiate a faithful presence at the ballot box. Obviously what I’m proposing is not exhaustive, but is just one perspective on the process.

One starting point for looking at this is to revaluate our definition of the church. Peter Leithart points out that when Paul discusses the church in the New Testament, he deliberarely chooses to use Greek political terms.

Nearly every word used to describe the church in the New Testament was used by Greek political writers. The most common term for the church in the New Testament is ekklesia, the word behind the English “church.” In the Greek world, ekklesia referred to the assembly of citizens of the polis. When Aristotle spoke of the sovereign “assembly” in Greek democracy, he spoke of the ekklesia. Koinonia likewise, normally translated colorlessly and apolitically as “fellowship,” was also a political term. Aristotle’s Politics begins with the claim that “every state is an association (koinonia),” a term that in some translations is rendered as “community.” Aristotle recognized that there are various kinds of associations, various ways in which men share projects, goods, and talents with each other, but the city (polis) is the highest kind of koinonia, a political koinonia.

The political ramifications of this are enormous. As the NT adopts this imagery what we end up with is a canon inflamed with political overtones. Even such innocuous words like ‘church’ and ‘fellowship’ become dangerous. There’s no Lutheran two kingdoms schlock for Paul (sorry R. Scott Clark). Paul’s gospel confronts all the cities and empires of the world with the claims of an alternate city and empire. When Paul in Philippians says that we are citizens of heaven he, egads, actually means what he says. As Christians, though we are citizens of various nation states, our primary allegiance is to another nation that is not ephemeral or gnostic: the City of God. And contrary to popular parlance, water is thicker than blood.

This means then that when it comes to the ballot box, our chief interest is to be the church, not our nation. Canada, Ontario, Toronto. Though these are important spheres of interest they are not primary. We can see this prioritization in the teachings of Jesus and the early church. A common belief is that Jesus taught that our standing in the final judgment will be based on how we treated ‘the least of these’ or the poor. In his excellent commentary on Matthew, D.A. Carson has shown that the ‘least of these’ refer not to the poor in general but to our brothers and sisters in Christ. This emphasis is seen also in Galatians. In 6:10 Paul entreats the Galatians to do good to all people, but especially to the people of God.

I realize that this is just one perspective on voting priorities, but nevertheless, it’s a neglected perspective and should be focused on. The lads and lasses over at Empire Remixed believe that the church should focus on the poor when it comes to the ballot box and rightly so. But, never at the expense of the church. If the church is to be our primary political context, we should be asking ourselves questions like: what party will help serve the interests of the kingdom of God? Which party will do the most to stifle the preaching of the gospel? It’s when those questions are answered that we can move along to other social justice issues. Our agenda must not be set by the Fraser Institute or the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. Social justice? Yes. But, first for the baptized.

With this in mind then, the question is, what provincial party will best serve the interests of the church? What do you think?

Thirty years ago, MTV started the music video on August 1, 1981. TIME magazine looks at the top 30 music videos of all time. Here are my top three:

Johnny Cash, Hurt:

Weezer, Buddy Holly:

OK Go, Here It Goes Again:

Thomas Sowell and and Paul Krugman have very different opinions on whether household income has gotten better or worse since the 1970s for Americans. What do you think?

Sowell also tackles corporate greed as well if you’re interested.

I just finished up a philosophy course by John Frame from Reformed Theological Seminary. In it, Frame touched upon an interesting facet of Blaise Pascal’s thought. When discussing what to do when the believer struggled with doubts, Pascal recommended they they continue to go to mass, participate in communion, etc. and they would eventually be able to believe. “Act as if you believe, and eventually you will.”

In his lecture notes, Frame says the following:

Is Pascal recommending hypocritical participation in worship as a preparation for true faith? This is unlikely in view of his general emphasis on heart commitment. More likely he is talking about people who have intellectual doubts. For them, often, the best advice is not metaphysical arguments, but to get involved with preaching and worship, to attend to areas of the relgious life other than the strictly intellectual. This life-style can create the passional prerequisites for actual Christian belief.