Provocations
Short-take commentaries and conversation starters
Today’s Fight for Abolition
Thu 15 Feb 2007 • Responses: 3 • by Jody Hassett Sanchez
“The concept that it is wrong for any individual to own and control another remains as powerful a catalyst for change today as it was in Wilberforce’s time.”
LOME, TOGO—Amazing Grace, the new film about William Wilberforce, concludes with what many consider his greatest life work—the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1807. But a walk through a dusty open-air market in Lome, Togo today makes it painfully clear that the slave trade is flourishing two hundred years later.
Tiny boys—they would be considered “preschoolers” in the West—strain to push overloaded wooden carts through the crowded market. Their workday begins before dawn and continues until late in the evening when they are permitted to collapse beside their cart, in the dirt, for a few hours of rest.
Most of these young laborers can’t remember what rural village they came from or who their families are. All they know is that they will be beaten and killed if they attempt to escape those who took them from their homes and force them to do this brutal work.
More Than Human
Tue 23 Jan 2007 • Responses: 3 • by David Cook
“Research is too important to be left to big business and scientists on their own.”
A new face transplant is but the latest in the never-ending search for cures for the diseases and accidents that plague humankind. But what begins with the best of intentions in relieving pain, distress, and suffering can be abused and used for other ends and purposes than originally intended.
The Folly of New Year Resolutions
Thu 04 Jan 2007 • Responses: 11 • by David Aikman
“Why do we repeat this folly, when empirical evidence shows that statements of a desire to change, in and of themselves, almost never cause people to change their behavior in actuality?”
The turkey has been digested, the gifts put away (or put on, if they are clothes), and the wrapping paper thrown out. After the Christmas gustatory extravaganza, it’s time for a few days of slow movement, of writing thank-you letters, and self-congratulatory exhalation. Christmas has been survived once more and life can continue its uneventful way forward.
But no. Within a week of Christmas many people find themselves practicing yet another ancient cultural ritual, the challenge of New Year Resolutions. The end of one year and the beginning of another always offers two opportunities: to look back at the previous twelve months and ponder the ups and downs of that period; and to look ahead to the next and wonder what can be done differently then. By the office water cooler, over coffee in a friend’s office, on the phone late at night with a close friend, conversations year after year turn to the subject of New Year Resolutions.
A Season to Laugh
Thu 21 Dec 2006 • Responses: 1 • by Dan Russ
The Christmas season should remind us that the very quality of time has been transformed. Time is now on our side.
The Bible recounts the unfolding comedy of redemption with its endless zigzags of how God created in the beginning, is redeeming in the meantime, and (in his own timing) will consummate his creation in the end. By comedy I mean that perspective on life, best known in comic stories, that sees life first and finally as a good gift from a good God. It is this same good God that we celebrate during the season of Christmas for having entered history, not only to redeem persons but to redeem time itself.
It is both profoundly comic and really funny to believe that an infinitely wise and all-powerful God could create everything from nothing and then choose to redeem it all through graciously loving his creation back to himself. It takes a bit of a fool to believe that God should do this through particular persons like Sarah, Moses, Joshua, Deborah, Hannah, Ruth, David, Hosea, Mary of Galilee, and Jesus of Nazareth. And if we can swallow the story up to this point, then could we believe that such truth would be turned over to a group of fishermen, obscure Jews, an excommunicated rabbi, and a motley crew of redeemed humanity called the Church?
The Paradox of the Pursuit of Happiness
Fri 15 Dec 2006 • Responses: 1 • by Wilfred M. McClay
In today’s culture, not only are you unhappy, your unhappiness is your own fault.
It’s almost impossible to speak about “happiness” in a general way without sounding like a child, or a cynic, or more likely a purveyor of tired and shallow truisms. The problem is that while happiness is a subject of central importance to our existence, and a matter of irrepressibly consuming interest, many of the most reliable truths about it may easily come across as disappointingly flat and trite and commonplace. But there is one maxim that is the exception to this rule: Happiness is a matter of having the right expectations.
Because of this, ideas have everything to do with happiness. The pattern of expectations to which the pursuit of happiness conforms itself at any given time—that age’s vision of feasible felicity, so to speak, and the means one uses to reach it—is itself a product of the dominant ideas of the time in question: ideas about life, death, God, nature, causality, moral responsibility, and human possibility. In a word, what we believe about the world’s structure and meaning will determine what we think happiness is, and how we can act to gain it for ourselves. What we believe provides the basic structure of what we expect.
Atheism and Moral Clarity
Thu 30 Nov 2006 • Responses: 1 • by David Aikman
A recent book by a militant anti-theist helps to clarify the true sources of attack on our civilization.
A 2004 New York Times best-seller by Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason placed its author, a graduate in philosophy from Stanford, in the forefront of the forefront of anti-theists in America. In his latest book, Letter to a Christian Nation, published in September 2006, Harris brings his heavy artillery as close as he can to the walls of the church. His intention, he writes, is “to destroy the intellectual and moral pretensions of Christianity in its most committed forms.” Welcome to the tradition of Voltaire, Engels, and an eccentric Soviet magazine founded under Lenin called The Godless.
The Christian faith has survived more learned and eloquent assaults than those of Sam Harris, and will doubtless continue to do so.
Gratitude and Leading in Challenging Times
Sat 18 Nov 2006 • Responses: 4 • by Fred Harburg
“Genuine gratitude in the face of difficulty is the attribute that most distinguishes the great from the good.”
Selfless gratitude—the ability to appreciate the goodness of life while simultaneously feeling deep empathy for the pain and suffering of others—is one of a leader’s most important qualities. Yet the anxieties of a world rife with terrorism, economic uncertainty, illnesses, hunger, and injustice, can choke the lifeblood from one’s sense of gratitude. What’s a leader to do?
In closely observing senior leaders from many different walks of life, I have seen that genuine gratitude in the face of difficulty is an attribute—perhaps the attribute—that most distinguishes the great from the good. There are three reasons gratitude is such an essential quality for men and women who are called to positions of service as leaders. First, gratitude is the key to authentic emotional connection. Second, it is the basis for emotional resilience. Finally, the expression of genuine gratitude unlocks the door to discretionary effort.
Iraq: Close to a Decision-Point?
Tue 31 Oct 2006 • Responses: 5 • by David Aikman
When you liberate a nation from a tyrannical ruler—in this case Saddam Hussein—without being able to determine its post-dictatorship development, you have the worst of both worlds.
The mid-term US Congressional and Senate elections, only days away, will in some constituencies in the country hinge on the attitude of voters for or against the US administration’s policy on Iraq. The outcome of the forthcoming US presidential election in 2008 may, in turn, become a referendum by the American people on whether they consider the conduct of the war to have been a success or a failure.
Despite partisan differences over strategy and tactics to be used by the US in Iraq, however, there is a surprisingly broad consensus in Washington on what the reality on the ground is.
The Revolution in France
Sat 21 Oct 2006 • Responses: 4 • by David Aikman
Why are so many French immigrants so obviously not integrated into French society? Perhaps they don’t want to be.
Last fall, when hundreds of cars were torched in suburban housing estate communities in Paris and across France, it was clear that the perpetrators were very largely Arab immigrants to France from former French colonies in North Africa. In addition to the property damage and vandalism, there was violence against people, with the police often being targeted. Yet at the time, the French political establishment and the French media elite were united in proclaiming that all of the mayhem had nothing to do with the vandals’ religion. These unfortunates, they said, were angry because they hadn’t been successfully integrated into French society.
That much was true. The question is, why not? Is it possible they didn’t want to be?
Immigration: Who Is Our Neighbour?
Mon 02 Oct 2006 • Responses: 4 • by Prabhu Guptara
“Can international challenges be tackled merely nationally?” Some questions and answers from European and biblical perspectives may help clarify the issues involved in the debates over US immigration policy.
Considering this vexed question properly involves three different perspectives—Divine, national, and individual.
