Two generations of evangelical leaders are beginning to step aside for a younger group of thinkers, doers, and potential leaders. Evangelicalism has been led by a group of remarkable social entrepreneurs that built new churches and organizations and movements beginning in the 1950s by familiar figures such as Graham, Schaeffer, Henry, Ockenga, and Engstrom; and then by those that splashed across the front pages and airwaves from the 1970s to today–such as Falwell, Dobson, Colson, Robertson, and Bright. The giants are passing or getting long in the tooth, and tomorrow will belong to the often brash and confident young Christians who are somewhat anxious to carry the torch. 

 The evangelical torch that is being passed has illuminated a spiritual path for billions of people over the last 40 years. But that same flame has been wielded at times in a scorched earth policy that has left little good will for orthodox Christians, and insufficient cultural connections to the millions of people who still need to touch the hem of Jesus’ garment. Today’s warriors are left with the good, the bad, and the ugly results of the bold engagement of their predecessors. 

 New generations rarely recognize the magnitude of the accomplishments of those who precede them. Today’s norms seem, well, normal, although they have often been achieved at a heavy price over many years:  

•  Certainly World Vision would not be the largest private provider of relief and development for the world’s poor if 1970’s president Stan Mooneyham hadn’t been a maverick neo-evangelical voice for the holistic gospel, even to the point of sacrificing his own health, marriage, and life.
• Millions of quality, affordable homes would not havebeen built for the poor if Millard and Linda Fuller hadn’t dedicated their lives and fortune to that cause and launched massive Habitat for Humanity.
• And yes, abortion rates certainly would have not dropped on their own in the last 40 years if it wasn’t for the unpopular actions of the leaders of the pro-life movement and millions of evangelical and Roman Catholic activists.

 Nonetheless, “we are seeing a head-snapping generational change,” contends Michael Gerson, who was a speech writer for both President George W. Bush and Chuck Colson. “The model of social engagement of the religious right is increasingly exhausted ” Gerson says. At the National Association of Evangelical’s 2010 convention, Gerson offered three reasons for the change: a recovery of scriptural emphasis, a revolt against the tone and style of the Religious Right, and the effects of short-term mission trips on young Christians. According to Gerson, young Americans return from short-term mission trips with a changed worldview. Their exposure to poverty, HIV/AIDS, and economic injustice make them concerned about these issues and want to improve the problems.

To fresh minds, many of the standards of the status quo seem just the intellectual stubbornness of tired leaders. The need for change is obvious; it is the route and rate of change that will test these emerging leaders. There will be many opportunities to navigate turbulent times and to determine the wise use of a powerful torch. 

Over the next two weeks I will introduce 10 challenges for the new generation of leaders.  These include:

1. Navigating Newfound Authority
2. Waging a Bloodless Revolution
3. Overcoming Spiritual Superficiality
4. Creating Culture
5. Returning to Virtue
6. Bridging to Everyday Relevance
7. Resisting the Seduction of a New Social Gospel
8. Learning to Communicate Again
9. Embracing the Diversity of the New Christian World
10. Responding to Militant Islam

An Islamic cabbie was stabbed by a white guy in New York City.  The all-knowing Left jumped on this as clear proof that Republicans are to blame for this.  Juan Cole said this explicitly.  Foster Kramer at the Village Voice wondered aloud if this was the first "Ground Zero Mosque" hate crime.  (More finger pointing from the Left noted by Michelle Malkin.) 

Turns out the attacker supports the building of the mosque.  Little inconvenient truth, that.  And the cabbie?  He’s opposed to it.  This just turns the Left’s arguments upside down and they’re scrambling to deal with it, updating those posts to try to tie this attacker to the Right, or blame the Right for him regardless of his politics.

What’s next, liberals firebombing the offices of a Democrat?  Why, yes.

But hey, those Tea Partiers are just so violent, right?  Right?

From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Last month, UPS executives proudly detailed the profitable quarter that drove the company cash trove above $4 billion. Wall Street’s response? “Show me the money.”

“You’re sitting on a lot of cash,” complained one analyst in a conference call last month with executives, joining a chorus of investors who wanted to know why UPS wasn’t paying them higher dividends or using the money to expand the company.

It’s a question that could be asked of a lot of companies these days.

Economic growth has been anemic overall, yet corporations that cut deeply during the Great Recession are seeing soaring profits. And they’re stuffing mountains of cash into their bank accounts.

But they are not hiring.

Company cash reserves topped $1.84 trillion in the first quarter, up $382 billion from a year earlier, according to the Federal Reserve.

The nation’s businesses are sitting on that cash for a variety reasons, including still-weak customer demand and an uncertain outlook for the global economy. After the recent painful downturn, businesses say they’re also worried about how taxes and regulatory policies could change under President Obama’s administration.

“A lot of companies had near-death experiences in the last year,” said Kurt Kuehn, chief financial officer at Sandy Springs-based UPS. “People are still feeling the shock.”

Most companies probably will remain jittery — and slow to spend or hire — for several more months until there’s a brighter forecast for the economic and business climate, he added.

Companies are looking for stability in the economy, so they can plan for it.  But, as John Stossel explains, the government keeps throwing the economy out of kilter, not allowing businesses to be able to plan.

Why isn’t the economy recovering? After previous recessions, unemployment didn’t get stuck at close to 10 percent. If left alone, the economy can and does heal itself, as the mistakes of the previous inflationary boom are corrected.

The problem today is that the economy is not being left alone. Instead, it is haunted by uncertainty on a hundred fronts. When rules are unintelligible and unpredictable, when new workers are potential threats because of Labor Department regulations, businesses have little confidence to hire. President Obama’s vaunted legislative record not only left entrepreneurs with the burden of bigger government, it also makes it impossible for them to accurately estimate the new burden.

In at least three big areas — health insurance, financial regulation and taxes — no one can know what will happen.

And hence they’ll take a wait-and-see attitude.  When the stock market is up and down all over the place, investors sit on their cash and wait for a definite bull, or even bear, market.  The same goes for corporations.  If there is no trend, they aren’t going to jump into the volatility.  And the government is creating that volatility in the name of removing it.  But the result is:

New intrusive rules for health insurance are yet to be written, and those rules will affect hiring, since most health insurance is provided by employers.

Thanks to the new 2,300 page Dodd-Frank finance regulatory act, The Wall Street Journal reports, there will be “no fewer than 243 new formal rule-makings by 11 different federal agencies.” These as-yet unknown rules will govern lending to business and other key financial activity.

The George W. Bush tax cuts might be allowed to expire. But maybe not. Social Security and Medicare are dangerously shaky. Will Congress raise the payroll tax? A “distinguished” deficit commission is meeting. What will it do? Recommend a value-added tax?

Who knows? But few employers will commit to a big investment with those clouds hanging over our heads.

Stop tinkering!

Good morning.

1. Divination.
2. For those that need a Bastiat clobbering.
3. An economically well modeled computer game played (HT: CT).
4. Talking beer.
5. More on the Koyzis essay I wrote about last night … for my reading it seems that what is presented as Koyzis ‘reading” of Mills is better than Mr Nivens. 
6. The jam ends, the cause … regulation?
7. H-Fit?
8. Our President in a nutshell.
9. Firestorm.
10. Criticism of the right from the right.
11. Sex and the single life.

David Koyzis has been writing about oppression, here and here.

Thomas Jefferson wrote in his Declaration that the purpose of government is to preserve and protect Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. While it is pretty clear what Life meant, and that Happiness for Jefferson ran along Aristotelean lines, which is to say along the lines of something like eudemonia. But Liberty … now there is a tricky word. In colonial America, historian David Hackett Fischer in a book everyone should read (or at least have as a reference) Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a Cultural History), identifies four folkways or distinct communities in colonial America. These folkways had very different about almost every aspect of life but in particular they all had distinct and non-overlapping ideas of what the word Liberty meant. Alas, while I say (and really think) this is a great reference book it turns out my copy is at work … and not here at home where I’m writing this so some of this is going to be from memory. Read the rest of this entry

World Vision is a humanitarian organization based on Christian values and, as part of their stated goal, they aim "to follow our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in working with the poor and oppressed to promote human transformation, seek justice and bear witness to the good news of the Kingdom of God."  Its founder was an evangelical pastor who wanted to help orphans and other needy children.  Its articles of incorporation include doctrinal statements.

Is World Vision a church?  No, they don’t claim to be, and neither are they directly affiliated with any church or denomination.

So then; can World Vision claim the religious exemption to employee discrimination laws?  Can they require their employees to also be Christian and to represent the organization’s doctrinal stance?

That’s the question that came up before a 3-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court, and they release a ruling yesterday in the case Spencer v. World Vision that says that, yes, they qualify for the religious exemption.  It was a 2-to-1 decision, and the dissenter seems to think that in order to be religious you have to have worship services or, at least, Bible study or preaching. 

Eugene Volokh does a yeoman’s work distilling the ruling down to 5 points.  It’s worth a look.  The 77-page full opinion is, well, optional. 

We were one vote away from suddenly having religious organizations that don’t hold services legally considered secular and losing their right to hire folks of the same beliefs.  In today’s judicial climate, I just hope we can hang on to it.

Good morning.

1. Blogs and peer review.
2. Yes, a tax cut is not a payment.
3. Someday it will occur to someone on the left, that there are two ways to attack the deficit by cutting spending or raising taxes, alas not today however.
4. I can’t even imagine how to spend money like that, do they burn it?
5. Stony Ithaca, a place to set my head?
6. A repulsive thing.
7. From the “I can’t imagine any need for secrecy in wartime” department.
8. Housing.
9. 25%!!! Amazing. A cultural divide if there ever was one.
10. Hope and change transform.
11. Books read and micro-reviews supplied.
12. As life imitates Airplane.
13. On war, which theory of war posits that making public a “I’m quitting and going home” date as a having any strategic value?

Brandon on that very serious blog, Siris (a spelling mistake I made long long ago) offered this interesting post some time ago. I had linked it with the intent of writing a little later, and later finally has arrive. That post as well, links back to this one originally, which expands the argument posed by Brandon a little and (twice) offers that quantum mechanics has not had anything to say about determinism. I think that’s wrong, and the paper by one of my favorite mathematicians (Conway) which I blogged a bit about demonstrates the case that Physics offers regarding determinism. But … to the main point, I think this misses an essential point which might be termed the divide between childhood and adulthood. 

Strawson’s argument in brief attempts is:

(a) It’s undeniable that the way you are initially is a result of your genetic inheritance and early experience.

(b) It’s undeniable that these are things for which you can’t be held to be in any way responsible (morally or otherwise).

(c) But you can’t at any later stage of life hope to acquire true or ultimate moral responsibility for the way you are by trying to change the way you already are as a result of genetic inheritance and previous experience.

(d) Why not? Because both the particular ways in which you try to change yourself, and the amount of success you have when trying to change yourself, will be determined by how you already are as a result of your genetic inheritance and previous experience.

(e) And any further changes that you may become able to bring about after you have brought about certain initial changes will in turn be determined, via the initial changes, by your genetic inheritance and previous experience.

I offer the following rejoinder, without denying the premise or argument the conclusion is wrong. That is to say it is only true if you are a child and choose to remain a child. 

Adulthood comes when we accept the cards we are dealt as belonging to ourself and assuming that responsibility for those cards. One stakes the claim that your actions are in fact yours, for better or worse. Fate, the devil (made me do it, upbringing or genetics …. all fall into the same bin. Your words and actions are yours. By accepting that as a premise you put away childish ways. 

I am informed, over and over, as it turns out about “strict liability.” Liability laws in this country, for whatever reason, irk me. More below the fold.  Read the rest of this entry

Once again, government tinkering screws things up.  It gave out and $8000 home buyer’s tax credit earlier this year, which boosted sales a bit, but now they’ve crashed to the worst low point since the National Association of Realtors started keeping stats in 1999.

Just like Cash for Clunkers, all we’ve done is shift future buying to the present, and then pay the price not very far down the road.  Worse, I’m wondering how many of these sales were made by folks, spurred on by the additional money, bought more home than they could afford, which is what got us into this situation in the first place.

And what got folks back then buying too much home?  Government tinkering.  There’s a trend here.

Good morning.

1. Upcharge for extra mass.
2. Cinema.
3. Low church and liturgy.
4. A the Quantum people attack back.
5. We are more alike than different.
6. Traffic.
7. A good word for Mr Carter.
8. Not me.
9. Heh.
10. He knew that, but didn’t seem fit to mention that the failures were basically all on the government side (especially when you recall the safety equipment is by government mandate).
11. Suffering for art’s sake.
12. The state of Mr Obama’s buddies state.
13. The professional left.
14. Goin’ green … is clearly more fun if you’re a wealthy professional humorist.
15. The Cato purge apparently wasn’t.

I had this joke I was going to try to tell about how now that I’m back biking a lot more regularly but have a new puppy, we have this symbiotic relationship. She licks the sweat of me after a ride reaping salt … and I don’t have to take showers anymore. But I decided not to tell it, aren’t y’all grateful? 😉

I’ve gleaned the personal finance columns and come up with suggestions on a combined theme of  “things not to buy when your personal economy sucks” and “things not to buy to avoid being stupid.” Here are–10 things you shouldn’t pay for and 10 things you shouldn’t buy new:

10 Things You Shouldn’t Pay For

(h/t: Money magazine and CNN)

1. Cell Phone — The service plan may be expensive, but the phone itself doesn’t have to cost a thing. Most major carriers will give you a free phone, even a free smart phone, with a two-year contract.
2. Water — Besides the monthly utility bill, there’s no reason to shell out money for every bottle of water you drink. Bottled water is so last decade anyway. We’re over it, and into tap, filters, and reusable water bottles. It’s cheaper and healthier for you and better for the environment.
3. Books — There’s a cool place in your town that’s renting out books for free: the library. Remember that place? Stop by and put your favorite book on reserve. And if you don’t feel like getting out, visit www.paperbackswap.com and find your books there (small shipping fees apply).
4. Pets — There are likely many pets down at your local animal shelter that could use just as much love as the pure-bred types. There may be a small fee due to the shelter for shots and basic care, but you’ll have your pet home without paying a mini-fortune.
5. Shipping — If you like to buy online, you probably use coupons to get a percentage off of your purchase. Take your skills to the next level and look for coupons or promotion codes that offer free shipping. If in doubt, visit a site like www.freeshipping.org.
6. DVD Rentals — Did you know that you can rent DVDs from RedBox locations for $1 a night? And better yet, if you use one of the coupon codes from www.insideredbox.com you can avoid the $1 charge. Free DVD rentals! Most libraries now have free DVD rental as well.
7. Basic Computer Software — Thinking of purchasing a new computer? Think twice before you fork over the funds for a bunch of extra software. There are some great alternatives to the name brand software programs. The most notable is OpenOffice, the open-source alternative to those other guys. It’s completely free and files can be exported in compatible formats.
8. Your Credit Report — You don’t have to pay for your credit report. You could sign up for one of the free credit monitoring services online to get a quick look at your credit report. You just have to remember to cancel the service before the end of the free trial. Or you could do one better and visit www.annualcreditreport.com, the only truly free place to see all three of your credit reports for free once a year
9. Many Household Items: The Freecycle Network, a nonprofit community group with an environmental mission, lets users “recycle” unwanted items by posting ads on local online bulletin boards. If you see a chair or a computer that you’d like, respond to the ad. The site is a great way to acquire a perfectly good coffeemaker or piano while doing your part to reduce waste. What’s the Catch? You’re responsible for getting the stuff home.
10. Photos:  In addition to photo sharing and online albums, Dotphoto and Snapfish provide 15 to 50 free prints when you sign up. You have to pay for shipping, which usually isn’t more than a few dollars

 10 Things You Shouldn’t Buy New

(h/t:Yahoo)  

1. DVDs and CDs: Used DVDs and CDs will play like new if they were well taken care of. Even if you wind up with a scratched disc and you don’t want to bother with a return, there are ways to remove the scratches and make the DVD or CD playable again.
2. Books: You can buy used books at significant discounts from online sellers and brick-and-mortar used book stores. The condition of the books may vary, but they usually range from good to like-new.
3. Video Games: Kids get tired of video games rather quickly. You can easily find used video games from online sellers at sites like Amazon and eBay a few months after the release date. Most video game store outlets will feature a used game shelf, as well.
4. A lot of your clothes: While you can’t find everything (shoes are tough), you can buy an amazing number of clothing items (especially in this hyper-casual era) at a Salvation Army Thrift Store or at Goodwill. This is especially true of Special Occasion and Holiday Clothing and Maternity and Baby Clothes:.
5. Games and Toys: How long do games and toys remain your child’s favorite before they’re left forgotten under the bed or in the closet? You can find used children’s toys in great condition at moving sales or on Craigslist, or you can ask your neighbors, friends, and family to trade used toys. Just make sure to give them a good wash before letting junior play.
6. Musical Instruments: Purchasing new musical instruments for a beginner musician is rarely a good idea. (Are you ready to pay $60 an hour for piano lessons?) For your little dear who wants to learn to play an instrument, you should see how long his or her interest lasts by acquiring a rented or used instrument to practice with first. Unless you’re a professional musician or your junior prodigy is seriously committed to music, a brand new instrument may not be the best investment.
7. Home Accent: Pieces Home decorating pieces and artwork are rarely handled on a day-to-day basis, so they’re generally still in good condition even after being resold multiple times. If you like the worn-out look of some decor pieces, you can be sure you didn’t pay extra for something that comes naturally with time. And don’t forget, for most of us, discovering a true gem at a garage sale is 90% of the fun!
8. Office Furniture: Good office furniture is built to withstand heavy use and handling. Really solid pieces will last a lifetime, long after they’re resold the first or second time. A great used desk or file cabinet will work as well as (or better than) a new one, but for a fraction of the cost. With the recession shutting down so many businesses, you can easily find lots of great office furniture deals.
9. Cars: You’ve probably heard this before: Cars depreciate the second you drive them off of the dealership’s lot. In buying a used car, you save money on both the initial cost and the insurance. It also helps to know a trusty mechanic who can check it over first. This way, you’ll be aware of any potential problems before you make the purchase.
10. Sports Equipment: Most people buy sports equipment planning to use it until it drops, but this rarely happens. So when sports equipment ends up on the resale market, they tend to still be in excellent condition. Look into buying used sporting gear through Craigslist and at yard sales or sports equipment stores.

Good morning.

1. A word, Eurosclerosis … used … and stimulus measurement. Why oh why is there spending out to 2015?
2. A non-story begins … and ends. 
3. The despicable left.
4. More stupid liberal tricks here … and for measure more ways to curb your freedom.
5. On ethnicity and church.
6. Tanks for the memories.
7. Ten maxims of advice for prayer.
8. Jokes from the CBO.
9. The mosque kerfuffle and cognitive bias.
10. St. Nicholas … a before picture.
11. Testing QM.
12. Duh.

Government doing what it does best. Finally, government cracking down on illegal operations.

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Going to university just isn’t what it used to be –

…the entire college degree industry is a scam, a self-perpetuating Ponzi scheme that needs to stop right now.

It might not be the best move to get that higher education within the halls of college.

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Rubber figures, handed out at a public school, and considered offensive. No, they weren’t anatomically correct blow-up sex toys… they were rubber fetuses. Evidently, a group of Christian high school students were handing out 2 inch rubber fetus dolls, in an effort to promote abstinence – until school officials stopped them.

Our society has very misplaced values. In an age where gratuitous violence, such as Pulp Fiction, is glorified, and the humanity of the fetus is censored. If one is offended by the sight of a rubber fetus, then there should be a traceable path back to the root of that offense. I would contend that a rubber fetus too readily expresses the inherent humanity of the fetus. Logic would dictate that such a connection be then applied to the practice of abortion.

But logic has never been a weapon of the pro-abort crowd.

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A novel approach to lawn mowing.