Red Sox Withdrawal

I must confess that I am experiencing what you might call Red Sox withdrawal. I cam home last night around 8:30 p.m. and there were no more playoff/World Series games: just mind numbingly dumb TV shows. No more Josh Beckett pitching a stellar game; no more Jonathan Papelbon blistering fastballs; no more Jacoby Ellsbury spectacular catches or hitting.

Actually, watching the Red Sox on the mission trip was one of the fun things that we did as a group. All thirteen of us would watch the games and cheer the Red Sox on. We really enjoyed it. It became known around Camp Hope that a group of folks from Boston were around and that they were big Red Sox fans. I miss Ken, a young man from Denver and a Rockies fan who watched with us. He was a great sport, and we watched several of the games together.

Anyone else going through withdrawal?

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Thought for the Day

Few men during their lifetime come anywhere near exhausting the resources dwelling within them. There are deep wells of strength that are never used.
--Richard E. Byrd

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Grace in the News

In case you don't subscribe to the Boston Globe, in today's paper one of our members who is a journalist with the Boston Globe, Don Aucoin, has an article about Grace Akalo, "No Forgetting" in it. Grace, a young woman from Northern Uganda, was kidnapped by The Lord's Resistance Army when she was 15 and spent seven terrifying months with them before she escaped.

On September 30th she gave the message at both services and two weeks later she returned and spoke to Senior High Fellowship and the confirmation class. She has coauthored a book about her experience, Girl Soldier, and we have a number of copies at the church office. If you missed that service, you can check out the DVD for September 30th.

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Thought for the Day

Everything that is done in the world is done by hope.
--Martin Luther

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Day 5 and Afterward

I was disappointed not to have stayed current with my blogging on the mission trip. The 5th day, Friday, was a long work day—we worked nine hours—and Ron had to return a day early for an extended family member’s funeral so I didn’t have a computer with pictures with which to blog. We had an early flight out on Saturday morning and spent the day traveling. That coupled with exhaustion and a cold that I contracted the last day there, all conspired to keep me from my blog. But I’m feeling better and want to post the last blog for the mission trip.

Day 5 was a beautiful day, the kind that we had everyday on the trip last year. Our two Americore supervisors had made arrangements to stay late so we could put extra time on the house. Typically we end around 3:30 p.m. but on Friday we ended up working until 6:00 p.m. After making a trip to get a good cup of coffee (something that the coffee drinkers among us longed for) we began working around 8:15 a.m. We wanted to finish siding the house, if possible, and doing the necessary things inside so that the drywall professionals could come in and do their work. For those of us working on the siding it was slower than we had hoped, because of some difficult cutting that we had to make around the edges of the roof.

Joann and her daughter, Barbara, who was visiting from the Baton Rouge area wanted to buy us lunch so we ended up having Popeye’s fried chicken, biscuits, corn on the cob, and cole slaw.
We had a nice lunch break with them and heard more of their stories. Cassidy came by and Barbara’s husband was there as well.

We went back to work wanting to make as much progress as possible. Finally around 5:45 p.m., Doug and I finished the siding the side of the house assigned to us by hammering in a small triangle at the peak. It felt good to have accomplished at least that, but I think the whole group wished that we could have come back one more day. I think we might have finished siding the whole house if we had.

We gave hugs and said good-bye to Joann and her family, and to the two Americore young people, Katie and Jordan, and headed back to Camp Hope. We spent time debriefing, having devotions, cleaning up, and heading into New Orleans for one last meal there. All of us were exhausted, so we came back and hit the sack as soon as we could.
It has been a powerful experience as it had been last year. Our mission team worked hard, laughed a lot, and looked after each other. It was a gift to have been able to travel there with them to serve Jesus by serving those in need. Thank you for your prayers, they made a difference.

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Thought for the Day

The one who speaks with me is my fellow human; the one who sings with me is my brother.
--German Proverb

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Sunday's prayer

Almighty and everlasting God, increase in me the gifts of faith, hope, and charity, and, that I may obtain what you promise, make me love what you command; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, One God, for ever and ever. Amen.

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Day 4, continued

Since the blog only accepts four pictures per blog and I have two more that I want to share, I have continued today's blog here. The first picture is of many on our team who are getting rid of a huge pile of building detritus. The last picture shows part of the group meeting for devotions after today's work. Every day we meet to debrief and to have devotions together and is an important part of the mission trip.

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Day 4

Camp Hope is like the Ritz compared to Camp Fish where we stayed last year. We actually get to sleep on bunk beds with real mattresses and we eat in the cafeteria where young people from Americore cook our food and then clean up. Some things don't change however. Notice an uninvited guest that was on the ceiling in the cafeteria over one of the tables.

Today we arrived at the work site at 8:15 a.m. ready for work. We split into different groups to do our variously assigned tasks. I was back on one of the siding teams working with Carol and Doug. It has been slow going partly because we had never sided before, and partly because rather than using a saw to cut the siding we had to use a utility knife.

One task in which everyone got involved was putting insulation inside. A professional crew is arriving tomorrow morning to put up the drywall so all of us stopped our different projects for a couple of hours and put in insulation. Afterward, the dry wall arrived and we all became involved in taking it off the truck and stacking it inside so the crew can install it tomorrow.

During our morning break we met the owner of the home that we are building, Joanne. She is a great grandmother with seven children, 15 grandchildren, and 5 great grandchildren. She and one of her grandchildren, Cassidy, who was there with her today, shared their experience during Hurricane Katrina. They had evacuated to a safe place further north and taken three days of clothing with them. They never dreamed that they would lose everything, but they did. Five months after evacuating Joanne's husband died. So she will be moving into the home we're building and hoping that Cassidy will live with her. (In the picture you will see Cassidy sharing home made cookies with us.) Cassidy is 19 years old, attending a junior college nearby, and begins work next Monday. Cassidy is very hopeful. She is excited about the progress that she sees all around her. She beamed as she told us how green everything is again. It was brown for a long time after the disaster. I think all of us were affected by Cassidy's as cheerfulness and hopefulness.

Joanne and Cassidy shared that they came back because this is home. Most of the family wanted to come back and did come back. Joanne didn't want to live in another place than her family was living. It is a close knit community as well, and they wanted to come back to their friends and their church.

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Day Three

Finally we saw blue sky and sun today! The weather was chillier than we expected but it warmed up to the mid 60's by afternoon. And no rain!

We arrived at the house around 8:15 a.m. ready for work and learned that we had a new site supervisor, Derek, who is the person in the picture with Joan and Barbara. We spilt off into our teams and began work. I have included several pictures of people working so that you get a sense of what we did. There are two teams doing siding (of which I am on one) and we made significant progress today.

Tomorrow we will have to do a lot of cut out work as we get near the roof, so we will slow down some. At the end of the day the insulation arrived so tomorrow we will insulate the interior of the house, Derek came by and told us that putting up the insulation in the inside walls is easy, but doing it under the house (the house is sitting on pilings about four feet above the ground). There are brown recluse spiders under the house, so aren't going to be going under there until the exterminator comes (a few of us were not excited about tangling with poisonous spiders.
Tonight we are going to go to a place down the road that has a TV so that we can watch the Red Sox win their first game of the World series. While we have not been obnoxious, many people here have learned that we are from the Boston area and avid Sox fans. One of the good things about being in New Orleans is that we are in the central time zone and can get to bed at a decent hour after watching the game.

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New Hope and Old Concerns

Today we began work at a home about three miles from Camp Hope. The family lives on the property in a FEMA trailer. We weren’t able to meet the family but hope to tomorrow. The first picture shows our team getting briefed by the Habitat for Humanity (HFH) site supervisor at the house. We split up into several teams: two teams worked on siding, one team worked on caulking, and a couple of teams worked inside the house. They were hoping the house would be completed by November 1st, but they are behind schedule and it won’t be ready by then.

After we finished for the day at the house, most of us went up to Gentilly to Fran’s and Fred’s house on Riveria Street that we gutted last year. The devastation from the Hurricane was evident on the drive. You would see shopping centers that are abandoned and littered with debris, houses that are still uninhabitable, businesses that are closed intermixed with new stores, new businesses, and signs of life.

But as we approached Fred’s and Fran’s neighborhood, my heart began to sink. Things didn’t seem all that different from 13 months ago when we were here. The road was still a mess filled with large potholes and broken asphalt. When we turned down
Riveria Street the neighborhood was still like a ghost town. It looked virtually the same, as a matter of fact, except that someone was working on Fred’s and Fran’s house. The orange house is theirs. So I was at first excited to see the progress and realize that all of our work had not gone for nothing. But then as we all looked around the neighborhood, there was not one other house on the street that had been or was in t he process of being refurbished. We walked into the house next door, and literally everything was the same. The destroyed grand piano still lay on the first floor like a skeleton. We walked upstairs and all of the clothes, books, computers, were still scattered all over the floors. There were still toiletries in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. It was eerie… For those of us who had worked their last year it was quite an emotional experience.

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Rain and Redirection

We all arrived safely to Camp Hope in St. Bernard yesterday around 5:30 p.m. CDT. The weather was beautiful all of the way, and the flights were uneventful. We were all interested in the Patriots score flying down and were able get an update in the Dallas/Fort Worth airport.

Camp Hope is located in a middle school that was destroyed by the flooding. Habitat is gradually renovating the school and expect it to be operational sometime in the future. I would guess it will be a couple of years. You can see the water marks on the bricks on the side of the building which I would estimate at 12 feet. The Mississippi River is hidden behind a levee a couple of blocks from the school. Habitat has only been in it for about three months. One of the people who works here said that when they came it was completely littered with debris and inhabited with water moccasins. All of St. Bernard Parish was under water after Katrina, ranging in depth from 2 to 28 feet, and lasting for three weeks.

This morning we headed up to the Slidell area north of Lake Pontchartrain to work on a habitat home. However, we have had torrential rains starting somewhere between 5:00 and 6:00 a.m. and continued off and on the remainder of the day. As I write this blog at 9:00 p.m. we are experiencing thunderstorms and are in a tornado watch area. There was so much rain we discovered after driving for more than an hour that the work was cancelled.

Disappointed, we headed back to Camp Hope in the downpour and spent the afternoon sweeping, mopping, cleaning showers and toilets, among other things the staff asked us to do.

Just when we were thinking we were done, the staff at Camp Hope had a call saying that they needed volunteers to help with sandbags for a part of St. Bernard Parish several miles from Camp Hope. There has been so much rain the last 12 hours that streets were flooded. About 30 people Camp Hope volunteered including everyone in our group and we set out in a three van caravan. When we arrived, we found several streets flooded, some of the streets had water in them about knee deep. We met some of the people whose houses were flooded and talked with them a bit. This was the third time since Katrina that this neighborhood had been flooded.
Before Katrina automatic pumps at the end of the street would pump water away whenever it rose to high. Since Katrina, the pumps either don't work, or partly work. The local government doesn't respond, partly, I suspect, because they no longer have the resources.

Tomorrow morning we are going to another site to build a house in St. Bernard parish. However, the forecast is for more torrential rain, at least in the morning, so if that happens we may have that project cancelled. One of the things that you learn quickly on a mission trip is that we always have to be in a "state of rigid flexibility."
Please continue to keep us in your prayers.

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Sunday's Prayer

Almighty and everlasting God, in Christ you have revealed your glory among the nations: Preserve the works of your mercy, that your Church throughout the world may persevere with steadfast faith in the confession of your Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

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Saturday's Poem

Celtic Christians prayed all kinds of prayers for all kinds of occasions and frequently in poetry. Those of us going on the mission trip to New Orleans to help build a home with Habitat for Humanity will be traveling tomorrow. Following is a poetic prayer spoken when going on a journey.

The Gospel of the God of life

The Gospel of the God of life
To shelter thee, to aid thee,
Yea, the Gospel of beloved Christ
The holy Gospel of the Lords;

To keep thee from all malice,
from every dole and dolour;
To keep thee from all spite,
From evil eye and anguish.

Thou shalt travel thither, thou shalt travel hither,
Thou shalt travel hill and headland,
Thou shalt travel down, though shalt travel up,
Thou shalt travel ocean and narrow.

Christ Himself is shepherd over thee,
Enfolding thee on every side;
He will not forsake thee hand or foot,
Nor let evil come anigh thee.

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Thought for the Day

Compassion is the chief law of human existence.
--Feodor Dostoevsky

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What's New?

Because of a number of pastoral emergencies this week, I have not had the opportunity to blog on a regular basis. This next week I will be leaving for New Orleans with twelve other people from the church who will be working with Habitat for Humanity building a new home for someone. As I did last year, I hope to blog on a daily basis and include pictures of what we are doing so that you can stay abreast of what is happening on the trip. The site where we are staying is supposed to have internet service, so I am hopeful that we don't have any glitches and can keep you up to date. We would appreciate your prayers while we are traveling to and from and while we are actually working down there. Since we leave Sunday morning, we will no doubt search high and low for a TV to watch the seventh game of the ALCS (NB: I am displaying confidence that the Sox are going to win Saturday night!)

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Thought for the Day

To believe and to love are two inseparable dimensions that constitute a person’s mode of existence in the spiritual life.
--Marko Rupnik

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Thought for the Day

There is nothing to make you like other human beings so much as doing things for them.
--Zora Neale Hurston

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Thought for the Day

My reason nourishes my faith and my faith my reason.
--Norman Cousins

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Thought for the Day

Kindness has converted more sinners than zeal, eloquence, or learning.
--Frederick W. Faber

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The Monday Morning Quarterback

Yesterday I finished my mini-series, "Where is God in Evil?" The major point of the sermon is that God has dealt definitively with evil in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. To quote N.T. Wright in his book Evil and the Justice of God, "the Gospel writers have been trying to tell us, that evil at all levels and of all sorts had done its worst and that Jesus throughout his public career and supremely on the cross had dealt with it, taken its full force, exhausted it" (89). The resurrection is the event that trumpets evil's defeat and God's ultimate triumph. God's victory has not been fully implemented yet, and in the "in between times" until God finally makes all things right, we, Jesus' followers, are to address evil with suffering love.

An aspect of evil that I wish I had made more explicit in the series is that evil is present in all of us. Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote many years ago,

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

Some of the greatest atrocities have been committed by people when they don't understand that evil cuts through their own hearts--they project their won evil onto the "evil ones" and then justify what they do merely by saying, "They're evil."

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Thought for the Day

There can be no friendship where there is no freedom. Friendship loves a free air, and will not be fenced up in straight and narrow enclosures.
--William Penn

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Sunday's Prayer

Lord God Almighty, you have made all the peoples of the earth for your glory, to serve you in freedom and in peace: Give to the people of our country a zeal for justice and strength of forbearance, that we may use our liberty in accordance with your gracious will; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

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Thought for the Day

This only do I ask of thy extreme kindness. That thou convert me wholly to thee and thou allow nothing to prevent me from wending my way to thee.
--St. Augustine

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Hooray for the Home Team

Now that the ALCS is here, I hope that the Sox are ready to go. There's an interesting article in the New York Times about David Ortiz's focus after each at bat: "He's a Scientific Hitter in the Computer Age." He has a laptop computer with which he views the previous at bat(s) and how pitchers respond to him. He then tries to take that into account at his next at bat. I had no idea this was occurring during the game. As the article states, others can do that but since they have to go out on the field after the inning, so they don't have quite the opportunity that Ortiz does. Apparently other DH's are doing this as well.

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Thought for the Day

I like to operate like a submarine on sonar. When I am picking up noise from both the left and right, I know my course is correct.
--Gustavo Diaz Ordaz

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Flash Forward

This Sunday I intend to finish my series, "Where is God in Evil?" The texts are Isaiah 55:8,9; Romans 8:18-25; and Matthew 28:16-20. The focus of the sermon is on how God has dealt definitively with evil in Jesus. As I mentioned at the beginning of this series, I will not answering the question in an air tight manner: there is no such answer. In many ways I have only scratched the surface, but I am hoping that in so doing, I invite you to think about and wrestle with this question so that you have a better sense of it yourself so that you can be better prepared to care for those who are suffering and struggling with evil in their own lives.

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Thought for the Day

A tactless man is like an axe on an embroidery frame.
--Malay Proverb

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Thoughts on the Yankees

While I am very glad that the Red Sox are playing for the AL title and I'm glad that they're not playing the Yankees for it, I am also sad about what appears to be Joe Torre's exit as manager. I like Joe Torre. I don't know him personally, of course, but he has always struck me as someone who manages with great respect for his players and as a person of dignity. He never seemed to make excuses for himself or his players, and has been a straight shooter as near as I can tell. In a world of celebrity and narcissism and blaming of others, he had a kind of presence and demeanor that exhibited constancy and groundedness. I wish him well.

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Thought for the Day

When you shoot an arrow of truth, dip its point in honey.
--Arab Proverb

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Odyssey Years

David Brooks has an interesting article in the OP-ED section of the New York Times today with the title "The Odyssey Years." Most of us are aware--at least baby boomers-- that the culture has changed in many ways, but none more that what happens to young people after graduating from college. for those of us born before 1964, markers that generally applied to successfully making the transition to adulthood included moving away from home, becoming financially independent, marrying and starting a family. In fact, 70 percent of young people had accomplished this by age 30 in 1960. However, the result were quite different in 2000: only 40 percent of those reaching 30 had attained these markers.

Brooks writes, "There used to be four common life phases: childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age. Now, there are at least six: childhood, adolescence, odyssey, adulthood, active retirement and old age. Of the new ones, the least understood is odyssey, the decade of wandering that frequently occurs between adolescence and adulthood." While I was aware of this "odyssey" phenomenon was occurring, I hadn't realized that there was a name for it. Brooks writes that "this period of improvisation is a sensible response to modern conditions" and expects that it will only grow more pronounced. I guess I would be more inclined to say that it is an understandable response to modern times, but I wouldn't say that it is sensible. That's not to blame young people, mind you. It's more a commentary on the way that the culture is morphing, by a myriad of forces which conspire to create the environment in which some of the "fluidity" is destructive, I think. Any thoughts about the Odyssey Years?

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Thought for the Day

Would that the simple maxim, that honesty is the best policy, might be laid to heart; that a sense of the true aim of life might elevate the tone of politics and trade till public and private honor became identical.
--Margaret Fuller

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The Monday Morning Quarterback

While I didn't preach yesterday, one of the things that Liz said in her sermon yesterday got me thinking. The focus of her sermon was, Where is God in the Bible? She said that entering the scriptures can open you up to life, or something like that. I agree that they can do that--indeed, they are intended to do that--but that we can use them to close us down to life as well. What I mean by this is that we can use scriptures in a way that create a "cognitive ghetto" to use a term that one of my seminary professors once used, living in a kind of impoverished intellectual and spiritual bubble.

On one end of the biblical spectrum are some people who believe that every word in the Bible is dictated by God and follow it with rigidity and in a way that every piece of reality must fit perfectly into the jigsaw puzzle that we call life. On the other side of the spectrum are those for whom the Bible is an interesting ancient document that doesn't have very much, really, to say to us. On the conservative side the scriptures dam God up and on the liberal side the God is almost completely leached out of the scriptures.

I believe the scriptures are intended by God to usher us into God's great story of rescue and hope, in which we live and love the creation and others in the way that they were meant to be loved. This story centers on the great redemptive act of the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus, who has ushered in the reign of God which one day will arrive in its fullness. In the meantime, we broken icons need by God's grace to be living the Jesus Creed: loving God and loving others...

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Thought for the Day

All adventures, especially into new territory, are scary.
--Sally Ride

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Sunday's Prayer

Almighty and everlasting God, you are always more ready to hear than we to pray, and to give more than we either desire or deserve: pour upon your church the abundance of your mercy, forgiving us those things of which our conscience is afraid, and giving us those good things for which we are not worthy to ask, except through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ our Savior; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

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Saturday's Poem

I have been reading Tracy Balzer's book, Thin Places, an exploration of Celtic spirituality. The Celts were incredible disciples of Jesus. They were also a poetic people and authored many prayers and blessings in poetic form. In the mid-nineteenth century, Scotsman Alexander Carmichael collected many of the Celtic prayers, blessings, etc. and published them in his Carmina Gadelica (Latin for Gaelic Songs).

Here is a wonderful blessing from the Carmina Gadelica (280):

Peace between neighbors
Peace between kindred,
Peace between lovers,
In love of the king of life.

Peace between person and person,
Peace between wife and husband,
Peace between woman and children,
The peace of Christ above all peace.

Bless, O Christ, my face,
Let my face bless every thing;
Bless, O Christ, mine eye,
Let mine eye bless all it sees.

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Thought for the Day

If they have any money, [the merciful] don't give till it hurts--they give till it's gone.
--Clarence Jordan, Sermon on the Mount

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Addressing Climate Change

Sometimes I print articles that I read on line but then don't have a chance to read them--sometimes for weeks. This is the case with an article in the September 27, 2007 issue of the New York Times OP-ED section. Vaclav Havel, the former president of the Czech Republic and a philosopher and writer, wrote the piece entitled, Our Moral Footprint." I tend to read the articles that he writes because I find him a thoughtful author who will make me think. Far too often I find highly partisan and shrill articles a huge turnoff. Probably because I am always looking for "middle ground," I generally am put off by people on both the left and right whose strident and arrogant words tend to polarize and not invite into thoughtful consideration.

Havel is not like that. He doesn't make grandiose statements about global warming, but states that we need a good dose of "humility and circumspection." I found one paragraph particularly compelling:

Maybe we should start considering our sojourn on earth as a loan. There can be no doubt that for the past hundred years at least, Europe and the United States have been running up a debt, and now other parts of the world are following their example. Nature is issuing warnings that we must not only stop the debt from growing but start to pay it back. There is little point in asking whether we have borrowed too much or what would happen if we postponed the repayments. Anyone with a mortgage or a bank loan can easily imagine the answer.

He eschews simplistic answers and is doubtful that "a problem as complex as climate change can be solved by any single branch of science." He believes that ethical, educational, and ecological training are all needed.
It's a pleasure to read a sane and thoughtful voice about this problem.

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Thought for the Day

A good friend--like a tube of toothpaste--comes through in a tight squeeze.
--Anonymous

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Thought for the Day

What is to give light must endure burning.
--Victor Frankl

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New Study by Barna

The Barna group has a new study about what young people ages 16-29 think about Christianity.
Here is a quotation from Barna's newsletter:

The study shows that 16- to 29-year-olds exhibit a greater degree of criticism toward Christianity than did previous generations when they were at the same stage of life. In fact, in just a decade, many of the Barna measures of the Christian image have shifted substantially downward, fueled in part by a growing sense of disengagement and disillusionment among young people. For instance, a decade ago the vast majority of Americans outside the Christian faith, including young people, felt favorably toward Christianity’s role in society. Currently, however, just 16% of non-Christians in their late teens and twenties said they have a "good impression" of Christianity.

It seems to me that the church needs to seriously address this issue. How do we as a congregation grapple with this data?

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Thought for the Day

It is the desire for God which is the most fundamental appetite of all, and it is an appetite we can never eliminate. We may seek to disown it, but it will not go away. If we deny that it is there, we shall in fact only divert it to some other object or range of objects. And that will mean that we invest some creature or creatures with the full burden of our need for God, a burden which no creature can carry
--Simon Tugwell, The Beatitudes

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The Future of Marriage: Chapter 2

Chapter 2 of Blankenhorn's book has the title, "Prehistory." He begins the chapter this way: "What were the basic patterns of sexual behavior in our species before the emergence of marriage? How did these patterns lead to marriage? No one really knows, but the origins of marriage appear to coincide with the origins of human civilization" (23).

Noting that scholars have wondered and speculated about this for the last couple thousand years. He looks at Aristotle, Plutarch, and Lucretius from ancient Greece and then jumps to the period of the Enlightenment and considers what Hobbes and Locke thought, and finally moves to the nineteenth century and focuses briefly on the beliefs of Freud, Marx and Engels.

He then takes a brief survey of the biological foundation, if any, for marriage. The famous anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss referred to marriage as " a social institution with a biological foundation" (29). He wants to survey biological and anthropological data to see if, indeed, there is a biological base to marriage. Following are some of the observations that he makes:
1. Among primates, parenting really means mothering. Fathers are not involved, or are involved only slightly in the raising of offspring (30).
2. Pair-bonding among humans is primarily a social construction: it is not primarily instinctual (31).
3. Sexual intercourse is not a big deal for primates since females are only sexually active during estrus which occurs during short periods of time. "Copulation is typically a quick, perfunctory, and highly efficient act...In fact, among most primates, most of the time, sexual differences function primarily to keep the two sexes apart" (31).
4. Copulation for humans is very different: It "is the center point...of an entire way of living in which sexual differences function primarily to keep the two sexes together " (31).
5. The loss of estrus in human females transformed copulation for both females and males: "it transforms the male from an inseminator into a father" (33).

Blankenhorn, referring to the considered opinion of many anthropologists, states that to survive and succeed, "the human infant needs a father and the human mother needs a mate...It's the central reason why our species developed the unusual way of living that we would eventually call marriage" (35).

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Encounter with Evil

Scot McKnight has posted a powerful story on his blog for today with the title, "Redemptive Story." A woman shares what happened to her when she encountered evil that struck her family, how it affected her and her faith. Given that we are in the midst of the sermon series on "Where is God in Evil," and we heard Grace Okallo share her experience of evil last Sunday, I thought this might be another apropos story as we wrestle with this subject.

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Thought for the Day

I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble.
--Helen Keller

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More on Marriage

The 9/29/07 issue of the New York Times had a piece in the OP-ED section with the title, Divorced From Reality. It addressed the interpretation of divorce statistics released last week which suggested that the divorce rate continues to increase and the number of marriages that fail to make both 25th anniversary continues to rise.

However, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers write that the interpretation is wrong. Basically there was an error in the way the census data was collected. They argue that when the proper data are gathered and analyzed, the exact opposite conclusion could be drawn. They write, "factoring in an appropriate adjustment yields the conclusion that divorce rates have been falling, not rising. This is not just statistical smoke and mirrors...The narrative of rising divorce is also completely at odds with counts of divorce certificates, which show the divorce rate as having peaked at 22.8 divorces per 1,000 married couples in 1979 and to have fallen by 2005 to 16.7."

The media seems much more interested in pouncing on data and interpretations that furthers "the great divorce myth" I believe because it furthers the notion that marriage is an oppressive institution that is no longer functioning and needs either radical redefinition or extinction.

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The Monday Morning Quarterback

Yesterday grace Akallo shared her story as a child soldier in northern Uganda. Kidnapped by the Lord's Resistance Army, Grace escaped after 7 1/2 harrowing months. She has co-written a book about her ordeal called Girl Soldier. She graduated from Gordon College this past spring and hopes to attend law school. Her passion is to make this 18 year long war and the kidnapping of children that occurs in northern Uganda known to the rest of the world so that this great evil is stopped. We are hoping that as a church we can become part of the solution and hope to have a proposal to the congregation in the next couple of weeks. Grace is working with World Vision and we will be meeting with their rep in the area to discuss ways that we can help.

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Thought for the Day

The respect that is only bought by gold is not worth much.
--Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

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