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I decided to drop one of my classes here in Sweden as I didn´t have time to do both of the classes and my independent projects with my seminary in MN and try to learn Swedish, and have a life and post here.

I also am going to try and use a one hour timer to limit my time spent on the internet each day to two hours, one in the morning and maybe another in the evening.

This is the sort of discipline that I need to incorporate more into my life. Hopefully it will work well and I´ll be able to focus more on quality rather than quantity of postings.

dlw

I am volunteering with an outreach team tonight and tomorrow night at a celebration being held by the university that is next to my seminary here in Sweden. Earlier in a conversation, one of the Christian converts here in Sweden shared with me how he was part of all nighter church service that would minister to people as they left the bars. Often here in Sweden, it is only after people have drank a bit that they open up to others and are honest with their feelings and willing to listen. I´ll have a report of how it goes on monday.

Some stuff worth mentioning.
Christianity Today has a good article on what it is like to be a Christian in the Middle East today and how the move towards more democracy may mean more persecution for them.
There is now a ChristianCounterCultural magazine that looks quite interesting.
I´ve been posting a bit at Dixie Politics as part of my conviction on the need to reduce the regionism that has historically contributed to the extent of racism and the cultural wars in the US. Unfortunately, Bubba doesn´t seem to be interested in doing much more than writing a whiggish defense of all the actions of southern past. This really is quite sad.

And I also received the following from Save Darfur.

Important Darfur Legislation Now Before House and Senate Conferees

Negotiations on two crucial components of legislation to end the violence in Darfur are currently under discussion in the House and Senate conference on the Supplemental Appropriations Bill.

Your support helped get this language approved by the Senate, and now we must urgently support the inclusion of these issues in the final version of the bill that is being negotiated between Senate and House conferees.

One component requests an additional $53 million to help expand and strengthen the African Union mission in Darfur, plus $40 million for additional disaster aid; the other component reiterates that the atrocities taking place in Darfur are genocide, and calls for stronger sanctions against those responsible for these crimes.

Our website makes it easy for you to express these concerns and to urge action. When you fill out the information at the Save Darfur action center, we will send your customized letter (by email) to the leaders of the House conference team. We will also send a copy to your Representative, your Senators, and President Bush. (We provide this service free-of-charge.)

Because of the urgency of this matter, we also encourage you to call Congressman Hyde (202-225-4561) and Congressman Kolbe (202-225-2542) and urge them to keep these provisions to aid Darfur intact in the final conference version of the Supplemental Appropriations Bill. (If you have direct contacts with these Members or any other conferees, that would also be very helpful.)

I did this and would hope that others would do the same.
dlw

I am glad to hear that Tom Delay is likely to have to face the music for how he has abused the ethical rules of the House of Representatives. Incidentally, he attends the church my family attended when we lived in Texas twenty-some years ago when I was between the ages of three and nine. I was blessed with a renewal of some of my old friendships from that time and some of my old friends have grown fatigued of the culturally captivated Christianity of their area. I pray for them regularly.

I also wanted to let others know of a Democrats for Life of America set of proposals entitled the “95-10” initiative. Kudos to Rick Gruzca at Faith-Based Politics for a summary of how this idea has been received on the blogosphere. I am all for prevention measures, but do not think they should exclude some redefinition of when the human fetus is a legally protected human being. New visitors, if I have any, may find interesting my idea for how we may foster compromise in that regard.

dlw

I received a copy of the latest Prism E-pistle from Evangelicals for Social Action.
It included a letter from Ron Sider about Bush´s budget proposal. He wrote,

“When the king is concerned with justice, the nation will be strong, but when he is only concerned with money, he will ruin his country.”
Proverbs 29:4
…
Every budget is a moral document. Your family budget reflects what you value. President Bush’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2006 tells us what he values. As the House and Senate reshape the president’s proposed budget, they are telling us what they value.
…
Do evangelical Christians really want to support tax cuts for millionaires paid for by cuts in food stamps, healthcare, housing vouchers, and nutritional programs for poor Americans? Is that the meaning of compassionate conservatism? If evangelicals want to implement the new NAE declaration’s call to empower the poor to improve their circumstances, they will have to demand that the president and Congress reprioritize the 2006 budget. Eliminating proposed tax cuts for the richest 5 percent of Americans would make available tens of billions of dollars to empower the poor.

I appreciate how Sider sets out facts of the situation in the US and the consequences of the BushAdmin´s policies. I also went here and wrote letters to my elected officials that concerned my desire for better leadership that would make me able to be more proud about my country and its future. I also decided to write another letter to Ron Sider, as I think he and the NAE could help the situation some by taking a different tact to change the dynamics of US politics.
Here is what I wrote to Sider:

I was thinking/hoping that it would be good if Sider would perhaps admit that he was wrong before the elections to accept hook, line and sinker the cultural wars issues as they were framed by the religious right. He gave an awful amount of weight to these issues in his letter to e-pistle readers as part of an NAE-style “biblically-balanced” approach. I still don´t understand why we do not push to have these issues reframed so that they do not continue to crowd out so many other issues from being decisive in our elections!

I would suggest that in the future, it might be wise not to have the NAE be a special interest group. What if the NAE did more to condense and inform objectively its members of the political records of politicians, without assessing for them what a biblically-balanced choice would be, and tried to ensure more ethical conduct by the parties during elections? Now, that would do more to improve our witness to others than picking sides on various issues. If we’re going to champion reforms, perhaps it would be better to concentrate on reforms at level of the rules of the game. The key sorts of reforms I think would improve our witness to others would be to help reduce the importance of the freedom of $peech in our gov’t and to foster a more viable multi-party system.

We don´t need to claim to have “the” biblically-balanced approach to political activism. All we need to do is to affirm that an active involvement in politics can be glorifying to God if done in an ethical manner that is not dogmatic and seeks to widen the range of interests that potentially can be served by the government.

dlw

I´ve written to Sider before. I regret I did not get to talk to him much on this when I was at his conference this spring. He carries an enormous weight on his back as he strives along with Wallis to perform the prophetic role for the US and, particularly, white USEvangelical Christianity. But he don´t draw attention to the fact that we are all fallible in the specific sorts of reforms we advocate and how we frame and evaluate them. He, as an intellectual/analyst/activist, can point better to the consequences of how we act or fail to act on these matters and he, as a man of faith, can and should point out the need to appeal to biblically grounded moral norms to evaluate proposed policy changes. But we still see as through a mirror darkly, and should not privilege the theologian/analyst/activists judgment in our final considerations as to what Jesus would do.

dlw