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I leave tomorrow for Sweden. I am going to be a seminary student there for two and a half months. I plan to study Swedish Baptist Pietism and learn from my Swedish Christians, while, hopefully, helping them to renew their churches. I then plan to go to Ukraine in mid-June. I plan to learn from them and am particularly hoping to work with the young adults dialoguing with them about the Orange Revolution and how it has impacted their faith and what are the ethics of Christian political involvement. I posted a more extensive explanation here before.

I hope you can hold me up in prayer and maybe donate some to help keep me fungible as the cost of this trip is going to be considerable for me and I am still in need of raising more funds.

thankyou and God Bless!
dlw

Gracias a Haysoos Politicas and Rick Bennett, there is a wonderful link to Vanguard Church’s collection of articles on many hot political issues and a collection of Christian organizations from across the spectrum. Vanguard’s spectrum has sparked a long debate on what it means to be in the Christian center. Bob at Vanguard has his reasons, but he does push the boundary of the legitimacy of the spectrum concept.

What is more important than sorting us into different boxes and settling on who is in the center is for more Christians, of a variety of political philosophical persuasions, to provide more constructive leadership to encourage Christians to deliberate on how they are politically active. We need not to gloss over the oft-sordid nature of politics, but to affirm that our involvement with it is inevitably going to be part of our public witness to others.

Bob includes a link to Christianity Today’s recent article on when human personhood begins. The article begins with an example of someone born with a birth-defect with very low autonomy that Peter-Singer-types would want to non-electively abort. They then segway into the issue of personhood and how there is no scientific agreement over when human life attains personhood. They also bring up how even though most evangelicals believe personhood begins at conception, a limited range of belief about personhood does exist among Christians. I guess that means they are not prolife fundamentalists. They bring up the fact that most fertilized zygotes(70%) do not successfuly implant themselves in the womb. However, their focus is on the views of Robert D. Orr, director of ethics at the University of Vermont College of Medicine. Orr has a scholarly essay entitled “Stem-Cell Research: Magical Promise vs. Moral Peril.” where he, and his coauthor, argue for recognizing a unique human individual at the earliest stages of life. From what I’ve read in excerpts, Orr deals with a good part of the literature on the matter, but is providing an argument for why we should treat the newly-formed zygote as a human being, rather than providing a statement of scientific fact. I’m not terribly impressed. A lot of their arguments seems to be based on strawmen or statements like, “These arguments….are feeble attempts to deny the basic fact understood and accepted by scientists for many generations: humanhood begins with the union of 23 chromosomes from the ovum with 23 chromosomes from the sperm.” No citation is given for this basic fact and no time is given to the opposing arguments.

CT goes on to share about the convictions of ordained minister and professor of ethics, Amy Hall, that In Vitro Fertilization is wrong as it undermines a respect for life and the belief that life begins at conception. She shares about the experiences of her friends who, after watching the embryo under the microscope, concluded that life must not begin at conception. She characterizes the practice of IVF to watch the fertilization of eggs and sperm and then freeze the zygotes and discard the lower quality ones as rationalistic and impersonal practice.

The question one can pose is why is it wrong for us to change our beliefs about whether or not we are human beings at conception? Why must these changes be impugned as only reflecting the desire to use embryos for medical research(and why do we seemingly off the bat dismiss the potential good that could come from such embryo-based research)? Why must this view be associated with leading to the view that we should define personhood based on capacities associated with the neo-cortex of our brains?

I agree that the key issue is our possession of the imago-dei. I think that the imago-dei and our potentiality to develop should be our criterion for personhood, since we are future-oriented beings. Yet, I do not associate the imago dei with having human dna, being biologically alive and with the potential to develop. Instead, I associate it with how we recognize ourselves in the other. I find the treatment of soul in the writings of Christos Yannaras helpful in this regard. He points out that most people’s understanding of the term soul is more platonic than Biblical. He points out how the soul signifies the way in which life is manifested in a person, the whole person. As such, we are best to recognize the imago-dei in the unborn by how we recognize ourselves in the unborn. To have human dna is not enough. All of our cells have human dna and are biologically alive, but only around the 48th day of pregnancy does the fetus take on the recognizable shape of a human being.

dlw

Gracias a Jesus politics for the link to Mode for Caleb’s post. Caleb argues that the heat over the Schiavo affair is due to an extensive breakdown of inter-cultural communication in the US. He reflects on his own experience and his impulse to accuse the religious right of being hypocritical. He reflects on how we destroy our ability to communicate with the other when we call them a hypocrite and should be careful in how we use the term.

I feel this strongly as I had some difficult exchanges with my mother last night on the matter. I get emotional when my own family seemingly discounts my studies of issues and decide their positions on stuff that doesn’t seem to make much sense to me. I have a hard time practicing what I preach, particularly at home. I don’t know why. I guess I feel more emotionally entangled with my family and get upset easily. I used to get rather emotional over issues rather easily when I was an arch-conservative undergraduate. I’ve gotten better at managing my emotions on these issues, but at home its hard not to get emotional when loved ones don’t seem to accede more voice to better-informed opinions. Its hard with the Terri case because my Mom is a special-education teacher and values very much lower-functioning students/persons and has (mis)associated Terri with these people.

dlw

My brother in Christ, Rick Bennett posts a wonderful list of things that he believes here.

I believe I like to procrastinate on busy-work stuff, like preparing for traveling to Sweden and Ukraine.

I’m trying to watch Fargo, but it’s hard for me because I am still hyper-sensitive to the realistic portrayal of violence. I can thank my near-death experience from when I was hit by a car as a seven year old for that. But it was also that experience that led for me to develop a very early interest in politics, history and the social sciences that led me to pursue a PhD in Economics as a means to compromise between my interests in the social sciences and my ability at mathematics.

I believe I also identify too much with the main character in Fargo whose plan is going very much awry. Hopefully, I’ll make it through the movie…

dlw

The answer is evangelism with a more missiological/ecclesiastical focus.

Since I began to write and do research on the politics of abortion, I’ve had lots of opportunities to interact with people from both sides. It can be frustrating to tangle with pro-choicers who implicitly associate a woman’s right to abortion on demand at all stages of pregnancy with womens’ rights in general or who apply the language of economic libertarianism to obfuscate the fact that what is in contention is the legal framework that governs the medical relationship between a woman and her doctor.

But that is nothing compared to Pro-Life Fundamentalism*! A Pro-Life Fundamentalist insists repeatedly that the newly-formed zygote is a full human being and ridicules or slanders the reputation of someone who disagrees with them. They also insist that to accept anything short of making all elective abortions illegal again would be to turn one’s back on the ongoing holocaust of innocent children/babies. Christian fundamentalism/dispensationalism elevates their interpretation of the Bible to the same level as Scripture itself and rules that all others are wrong. In the case of abortion, it elevates a non-essential belief based neither on scripture nor science to mandate a political activism that fails to seek to discern what can and cannot change in the near future about this fallen world that we live in.

It is in part because of the harm done to Christianity’s witness to the world by Pro-Life Fundamentalism that we need to have more pastors/theologians do more to encourage the development of deeper habits of political deliberation among faithful believers. They must perform the pastoral role of exhortation in the development of political virtue, rather than the high priestly role of pointing to what is holy/right conduct in the political sphere.

dlw
*Fundamentalism is used here for when a matter of fact is objectively open to legitimate differences and one side claims that its view is the right position and that all other positions are wrong. One can believe in one’s heart of hearts that the newly-formed zygote is a human being an not be a pro-life fundamentalist. What makes you a “fundamentalist” in this regard is when you deny that others can legitimately as Christians see things somewhat differently. I do believe that Christianity does mandate that we should value the sanctity of human life above our personal autonomies. That should make us be conservative in our community standards and willing to extend the period when the human fetus is a legally-protected-person. But that does not mean we should insist that to use a morning after pill to end a pregnancy prior to the zygote’s implantation on the womb is murder, like with a late trimester elective abortion or infanticide. Both sides often implicitly treat all abortions as equal and this is a grave mistake that has prolonged this debate seriously.

Fundamentalism, as a form of heresy/wrong doctrine, does not affect one’s relationship with God. It does negatively affect one’s witness to the world. In my understanding of the matter, hard-core pro-choicers obstinence on various moderate reforms to the abortion industry are, in part, a reaction to the vehemence of hard-core pro-lifers that insist that to permit legally any elective abortions is to cordone murder.

dlw

I found out via Steve at Knightopia about Jeff Jarvis’s recent post about how the religious right may have exceeded its reach with the Terri case and may be about to experience a back-lash.

I know that with my family that they felt it was a family issue that the federal gov’t should not have gotten involved with.

dlw
ps, Sarah Posner does a good expose on how some activists on the religious right are trying to radically change the US judicial system. I know some like Chuck Colson have helped to win voters like my mother over on this issue. It really is tragic and an issue that requires more responsible leadership, since most USAmericans don’t know a lot about the decisions made by the US Supreme Court. However, they may believe that their decisions will affect the future of US’s moral values and vote for the candidate they perceive to have better moral values. Ron Sider was wrong to affirm this position in his pre-election letter to Evangelicals for Social Action’s Prism E-pistle.

dlw

I’m driving to my sister’s house in NDakota to spend Easter weekend with her, her husband and my almost one-year-old niece before I leave for Sweden and then Ukraine.

As you may know, I gave up movies for Lent. I violated that fast the other night so I could watch Underworld with my father. I wanted to spend time with my father before I leave for four months and help him watch a movie that I used to obsess over, in large part, because it portrays an anti-manicheistic world-view very well. It is a pseudo-realistic action thriller about a war between Vampires and Lycans(or WereWolves). The viewer starts off identifying with the vampires as the good guys and learns that neither side is truly good or bad. **Spoiler Alert** If you’ve seen the movie, you know that Michael becomes a half-vampire, half-lycan. Something that many people miss when they watch the movie is that at the very end the one remaining vampire elder’s eye goes black when he is awakened from sleep with the blood of a lycan. There will be more than one half-vampire, half-lycan in the sequel. What I noticed for the first time was that Lucian, the lycan leader, injected himself with a significant amount of Michael’s blood. This may end up resulting in him living if he also becomes a half-lycan-vampire. That would result in three such creatures, which would make a lot more sense than two for an anti-manicheistic themed movie. Beside, Lucian is too cool of a character to kill off.

I’m also watching the Passion Recut with my sister and brother-in-law tonight. I don’t expect to post anymore this weekend. But please do participate in the ongoing debate in the previous posts.

dlw