The stories out of Southeast Asia are heart-breaking. It’s impossible to comprehend 40,000 people dying from a single natural disaster and the ensuing fallout. Some of the firsthand accounts have been pretty spectacular, since a disaster of this scale is so rarely seen. This account from the Washington Post caught my attention:

As I swam to shore, my mind was momentarily befuddled by two conflicting impressions — the idyllic blue sky and the rapidly rising waters.

In less than a minute, the water level had risen at least 15 feet, but the sea remained calm, with barely a wave in sight.

Within minutes, the beach and the area behind it had become an inland sea that rushed over the road and poured into the flimsy houses on the other side. The speed with which it all happened seemed like a scene from the Bible, a natural phenomenon unlike anything I had experienced.

And I thought playing the old board game Operation was launching my surgical career:

MARINA DEL REY, Calif. (Reuters) - If Dr. James Rosser Jr. had his way, every surgeon in America would have three indispensable tools on the operating room tray:a scalpel, sutures, and a video game controller.

Rosser looks like a football player and cracks jokes like a comic, but his job as a top surgeon and director of the Advanced Medical Technologies Institute at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York is to find better ways to practice medicine. At the top of his list — video games.

Surgeons who play video games three hours a week have 37 percent fewer errors and accomplish tasks 27 percent faster, he says, basing his observation on results of tests using the video game “Super Monkey Ball.”

link

Let me take this moment to promote the fact that when I was in 7th and 8th grade, I did a science fair project entitled, “The Effect of Video Games on the Players’ Heart Rate”. I went to the state science fair in 7th grade. This story could have been about me had I continued my research. If only …

Sounds like a problem that ought to be addressed:

The Vatican’s university in Rome is starting a seminar on satanism and exorcism to try to curb the spread of devil-worship sects in Italy which now number as many as 1,000, a college official said.

“Satanism confuses human, religious and cultural values,” said writer and journalist Carlo Climati, who teaches at the Regina Apostolorum University.

“The aim of the course is to provide priests and novices with keys to understanding.”

The seminar, entitled “Exorcism and prayers of liberation,” would seek to remedy the clergy’s problems in dealing with “such delicate themes.”

Lord, our God, we praise You for Your Son, Jesus Christ, for He is Emmanuel, the Hope of all people.
He is the Wisdom that teaches and guides us.
He is the Savior of us all.
O Lord,
let your blessing come upon us as we light all candles of this wreath.
May the wreath and its light be a sign of Christ’s promise of salvation.
May He come quickly and not delay.
We ask this in His holy name. Amen.

This essay by Walter Wink is making the rounds. It’s a nice little discourse on homosexuality and the Bible. It raises some important issues that are at the core of the current debate among Anglicans, Methodists, and others. While I appreciate his desire to push Christians towards a new understanding of the Bible that makes sense in a post-modern world, I think Wink, like too many others, doesn’t truly understand the position of conservative evangelicals. This passage reveals this:

We in the church need to get our priorities straight. We have not reached a consensus about who is right on the issue of homosexuality. But what is clear, utterly clear, is that we are commanded to love one another. Love not just our gay sisters and brothers who are often sitting beside us, unacknowledged, in church, but all of us who are involved in this debate. These are issues about which we should amiably agree to disagree. We don’t have to tear whole denominations to shreds in order to air our differences on this point. If that couple I mentioned can continue to embrace across this divide, surely we can do so as well.

But the church HAD reached a consensus on the issue of homosexaulity. Wink even points out that anytime that Scripture mentions homosexuality, it clearly condemns it. For almost the entirety of the history of Christianity, the church taught that homosexuality is a sin. During the times of both antiquity and modernity, Scripture and tradition have been in harmony on this particular topic of human sexuality. It’s only been in the last 30 years that some have begun to challenge that idea.

Now, I’ll concede that the church has been wrong on things before. Certainly views on slavery, the role of women, and the nature of science in many cases have been revised. But I think it’s a logical fallacy to suggest that simply because the church has been wrong on issues in the past, it must, therefore, be wrong on this issue.

I think the problem that conservative Christians are facing isn’t an interpretive one. Rather, I believer it’s a pastoral one. It’s relatively easy to inventory the sinfulness of human beings. The Bible and the church have both provided us with plenty of guidelines for doing so. The bigger question is how do we deal with this sinfulness?

Evangelicals have been so caught up in condemning the sin and doing their best to put up fences to keep it out of the church and society that no concerted effort has been made to figure out how we care for the souls of homosexual people.

That’s why I think Wink and others need to understand the conservative position. We aren’t advocating buring homosexuals at the stake. We aren’t advocating banning them from church attendance. At the very worst, conservatives don’t want to grant them church membership or positions in leadership. I’d even be willing to say, let’s hold up on installing any homosexuals into leadership positions. Don’t rush into something that will be difficult to undo.

The interpretive issues are certainly numerous. I mean, why should evangelicals be expected to discard centuries of teaching and tradition simply because some believe that representative behavior ought to be treated as normative? The burden of proof remains on the shoulders of those advocating for the normalization of homosexuality within the church. As of yet, I haven’t heard a suitable attempt at this.

I agree that we are commanded to love one another. That means loving our gay brothers and sisters by praying for them, treating them with respect and dignity, but it also means exhorting them to good works and holiness. It doesn’t mean turning a blind eye to behavior that we believe to be out of line with Scripture. There’s much to be said for speaking the truth in love, which I think both sides would do well to practice.

The White House is planning to disable GPS service in the event of a national emergency:

President Bush has ordered plans for temporarily disabling the U.S. network of global positioning satellites during a national crisis to prevent terrorists from using the navigational technology, the White House said Wednesday.

Any shutdown of the network inside the United States would come under only the most remarkable circumstances, said a Bush administration official who spoke to a small group of reporters at the White House on condition of anonymity.

The GPS system is vital to commercial aviation and marine shipping.

The president also instructed the Defense Department to develop plans to disable, in certain areas, an enemy’s access to the U.S. navigational satellites and to similar systems operated by others. The European Union is developing a $4.8 billion program, called Galileo.

The military increasingly uses GPS technology to move troops across large areas and direct bombs and missiles. Any government-ordered shutdown or jamming of the GPS satellites would be done in ways to limit disruptions to navigation and related systems outside the affected area, the White House said.

As much as I understand the need to put a plan like this into place, I have to wonder about the unintended consequences of pulling the plug on such a mission critical service like GPS. It would be especially important during a time of national emergency to help non-terrorists safely arrive at their destinations or to find specific places for medical treatment or rescue, for example. GPS is one of those technologies that everyone loves, but ultimately isn’t as open source as it feels.

Lord, our God, we praise You for Your Son, Jesus Christ, for He is Emmanuel, the Hope of all people.
He is the Wisdom that teaches and guides us.
He is the Savior of us all.
O Lord, let your blessing come upon us as we light two (purple) candles and the third (pink) of this wreath.
May the wreath and its light be a sign of Christ’s promise of salvation.
May He come quickly and not delay.
We ask this in His holy name. Amen.

I think this is a great little ad put together to promote Advent services at a church.

Last night was Tom Brokaw’s finale on the NBC Nightly News. I guess that means we now can start the long goodbye for Dan Rather who will be leaving in March.

One of the popular games right now is guess who will replace Rather at the CBS anchor desk.

The inside track seems to belong to CBS White House correspondent John Roberts. He’s 48 but doesn’t seem to have the name recognition or street cred to be successful. If the gig was simply about an order of succession, then Roberts would be a lock. But CBS needs something more than just a company man to fill that seat.

The favorite among some news junkies is NBC’s Washington Bureau Chief Tim Russert. He’s great on Meet the Press but is under contract with NBC until 2012. In terms of pure likability, I think Russert has an edge. He’s got great credibility in Washington and has been visible on NBC and MSNBC. The 54 year-old will likely stay right where he is.

Speaking of likability, if CBS could score Matt Lauer, it would certainly be a coup. They’d hurt NBC in the morning and bolster their evening news. Lauer does have some news credibility, but probably isn’t enough of a heavyweight to carry the evening newscast. It would be very difficult for someone like Lauer to move from the Today Show which is such a mix of news and entertainment to the evening news which has to be completely news.

There is plenty of talk of either Diane Sawyer or Katie Couric taking the job. Sawyer would be a good pick, but I don’t think she wants it or would be able to get out of her current contract. I won’t even dignify the Couric speculation with a comment.

If this decision were up to me, here are the names I’d be considering:

If CBS really wanted to shake things up, picking FOX News’ Brit Hume would be the way to go. Hume jumped to FOX in 1996 from ABC News where he was the White House correspondent. I know Hume is seen as being the too conservative, but I think he’d bring a lot of his FOX audience with him, healing the rift among that audience and CBS in the wake of Rather’s bungling of the National Guard story. I don’t know if Hume would even want the job, but it would signal a new direction for CBS.

My personal favorite is Lester Holt from MSNBC. He used to anchor the local 10pm in Chicago on WBBM-TV 2. His stint at MSNBC has been nothing short of stellar. He’s credible, likable, and as an African-American, would certainly represent a nice step forward for CBS. He’s relatively unknown by most viewers because, well, no one watches MSNBC. But that might work in his favor. Most of the names above already are associated with other networks and other roles. Holt could come on the national scene and build a great reputation for himself in the anchor chair.

There are plenty of other wildcard names that are fun to throw out like Jon Stewart, CNN’s Bill Hemmer, and Chicago’s own Carol Marin. I doubt CBS will choose any of these names, but it’s fun to play this game.

Anyone who wants to see what the Kingdom of God looks like ought to read this article by Jim Wallis of Sojourners. Wallis is unashamedly a liberal evangelical. He’s in the same camp as Tony Campolo and Ron Sider. They are important voices within the evangelical movement that should not be dismissed. These voices come from the opposite side of the tent as the voices of the Religious Right.

Bill Bright was a part of the Religious Right before it was cool among evangelicals to stand on that ground. Almost 30 years ago, Bright was mixing faith and politics before Jerry Falwell, Tim LaHaye, or Pat Robertson got on-board. That put Bright and Wallis at odds.

Wallis recalls his relationship with Bright and the reconciliation that both men found over the years. It’s a beautiful picture of what Christians should be modeling for the rest of the world. If two evangelical Christians on opposite ends of the political spectrum can come together under the Lordship of Christ, then red states and blue states shouldn’t really be an issue.