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Recent events show that the cultural wars political issues of Abortion and Homosexual Marriages are being cultivated to be wedge issues for this coming year’s election.  We cannot allow this to happen.  It is not enough to argue for a biblically-balanced approach like what Ron Sider and ESA did during the last election.  This is because, as most USEvangelicals for whom these issues are important realize, given the existing the highly polarized nature of the issues, to weight them less in their voting decisions practically means to accept the status quo on them.

   
As such, the only real way out is to reframe the issues to ask and answer different sets of questions.  As a member of the post-RoevWade generation, who is full of dismay over how poor intercultural communication on all sides of these issues, have poisoned our democracy for the past thirty-some years, I would hope that we do not elevate the dogmas of the past and shelter them from frank discussion.  Read more

Dan Froomkin at the Wapo writes

President Bush now says his 2004 victory over Democratic Sen. John Kerry, who is mulling a comeback in 2008, was inadvertently aided by al-Qaida terrorist leader Osama bin Laden.

Read more

Josh Marshall quotes Peter Galbraith’s concise, crisp summary of why Bush is a miserable failure as president. 

Much of the Iraq fiasco can be directly attributed to Bush’s shortcomings as a leader. Having decided to invade Iraq, he failed to make sure there was adequate planning for the postwar period. He never settled bitter policy disputes among his principal aides over how postwar Iraq would be governed; and he allowed competing elements of his administration to pursue diametrically opposed policies at nearly the same time. He used jobs in the Coalition Provisional Authority to reward political loyalists who lacked professional competence, regional expertise, language skills, and, in some cases, common sense. Most serious of all, he conducted his Iraq policy with an arrogance not matched by political will or military power.

May God give wisdom to the miserable failures of presidents in the US and Ukraine not to cleave to power at all cost and to value the greater good. 

dlw

The WaPo show how things have headed south recently for Bush, particularly re:his handling of Iraq and that the main bright spot for Bush is that he could be viewed as badly as Cheney.  “The poll found that 46 percent hold a negative view of Cheney and 18 percent hold a favorable view, down from a 23 percent favorable rating in January.”

Now is the time to kick in with the prayers for wisdom for our leaders.  I believe wisdom calls for leaders who do not simply seek to hold onto power and are open to compromise and public dialogue with their opponents. 

dlw

Iran’s president said Monday that his country supports calls for making the Middle East a nuclear arms-free zone, but he also urged the United States and Russia to give up all their atomic weapons as a threat to the region’s stability.

In a session with journalists, Ahmadinejad was asked about calls from the United States, Kuwait and other Arab states for the Middle East to be kept free of nuclear arms. He said Iran also desired that, but added his government wanted to see the whole world free of nuclear weapons. “We believe that these weapons, possessed by the superpowers and the occupiers in our area, are a threat to stability,” Ahmadinejad said.

Read more

One of my brother’s in Christ is Big Chris, a Conservative Reformed Baptist who used to interact with me a bit over at my old blog.  Big Chris has posted recently parts of a letter he received from Focus on the Family on how the US Senate is scheduled to take up the Marriage Protection Amendment on June 5.  Apparently, they’re only seven votes short of passing the legislation and are calling on people to badger their Senators.  I find it interesting because of the way they frame the issue.  Read more

Today, Gary Dorrien spoke more about Progressive and Liberal Theology.  He made the difference between the two, allowing that Progressive Theology was more broad than Liberal Theology.  He frames the prevalent conflict as between Progressive forms of Christianity and Orthodoxies that resist changes.  He believes the future of Christianity lies with Progressive Christianity, of course this follows almost like a tautology from the way he’s defined his terms. Read more

Tonight I attended with my high school biology teacher an incredible sermon by the Church Historian and int’l manipulations rhetorical analyst Gary Dorrien, Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary.  Read more

As I mentioned a while back, there is a group called Soul Force, that is going to be visting my alma mater, Bethel University as part of it’s equality ride.  One of the people organizing this ride, David Durand, posted a comment at this blog and I wrote him a brief letter, where I expressed my concern about his group showing respect to Bethel University during their visit and also my concern that gay marriage shd not be politicized for this upcoming election. 

He wrote back to me with the following Read more

Thanks to the encouragement of Ron Sider of the Evangelicals for Social Action, I just signed up with the National Religious Campaign Against Torture and would like to encourage you to do the same.  We need to trust God to provide for our security and turn away from the support of the use of torture.  An article just came out in Christianity Today on this topic, as well.  Read more

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