From hate

The child Ismael learned to hate and blame America for poverty and for the bad marriage of his parents.

His dad was a founder of the Communist Party of Puerto Rico, and Ismael was forced to listen to 7-hour speeches by Fidel Castro (Communist dictator of Cuba). But he soaked it up and admired his dad. "I wanted that kind of steel, that kind of commitment for a cause, and I eventually joined the party with him."

But his life experience started to change his philosophy when he went to school "in the guts of “the monster", at the University of Southern Mississippi. A self-described black Puerto Rican communist, he was surprised when he earned a full scholarship for his grades.

"As a socialist I believed my only value was to be a faithful soldier of revolution . . If I do my duty, my life has value. . What matters is the collective, the group; but America tells me no, you have value as a person. That was a discovery, and I also discovered that what Americans call poverty is a joke compared to what we call poverty in any other context in the world. That was another problem for me, because this was not the America that socialism told me existed."

(cont'd tomorrow)

Uber boss

Uber boss Travis Kalanick made his case for Uber in this interview with Geoff Cutmore. Here are some of his comments:

Regarding opposition - Taxi cabs were insulated from competition. Uber brought competition. Change is sometimes unwelcome. But the results are so positive that Uber is still in all the 400 cities they have rolled out in.

Regarding global reception - "Premier Li here in China has a very good vision for what he calls internet plus, which is take internet technology and cross it with an old industry and magic and progress and big things can happen."

Regarding driverless technology - Uber invests in it, thinks it will be safer than human drivers. "When you can give people their time back, and when you run these cars more efficiently and there's no more traffic, this is magic."

Preserved

(cont'd)

While Christianity was growing in (what is now called) Ireland, the European continent suffered wave upon wave of invasion as the Roman Empire fell apart. By 500 A.D. there were no more emperors, and provincial officials were on their own against invaders. Classic literature was almost destroyed and libraries vanished.

But Ireland, unreached by those invasions, was experiencing spiritual and intellectual explosion. The first Chistians were also the first literates. Monasteries filled with monks who dedicated their lives to teaching the faith to all seekers - and to copying texts.

medievalists.net

Magnificently decorated manuscripts of scripture are priceless artifacts of the period 500-900 A.D., like the page above from the Lindisfarne Gospels. 

In addition to scripture, those monks copied everything they could get their hands on, including the Roman and Greek texts brought by a "never-ending stream of visitors" fleeing invaders. Latin writers Homer and Virgil and the works of many others were saved. 

Irish monasteries fanned out over continental Europe, bringing their books. "Wherever they went they brought their love of learning and their skills in bookmaking. In the bays and valleys of their exile, they re-established literacy and breathed new life into the exhausted literary culture of Europe. 

"And that is how the Irish saved civilization."

From How the Irish Saved Civilization

Transformed

Four hundred years after Jesus Christ, a teenage boy was kidnapped from his home on the island of Britain and began a life of slavery on a pagan island where human sacrifice and slavery were normal. Alone and tending sheep for months, he turned to the God he had learned about in his limited Christian education.

By faith he escaped captivity, returned home, and pursued a holy life of service. Then God called Patrick back to the land where he'd been enslaved, and the Celts were transformed as they received the Christian faith gladly.

They sensed that sacrifice was necessary. But they found out from this missionary that, instead of demanding human sacrifice, the one true God had actually sacrificed His own Son on their behalf:

"Yes, the Irish would have said, here is a story that answers our deepest needs--and answers them in a way so good that we could never even have dared dream of it. We can put away our knives and abandon our altars. These are no longer required. God . . has given us his own Son, and we are washed clean in the blood of this lamb. God does not hate us; he loves us."

In the next few centuries these Celts did something that would change the world . . (cont'd in tomorrow's post)

From "How the Irish Saved Civilization," by Thomas Cahill

Easter 2016

All over the world believers will celebrate Easter this Sunday . . for the same reason believers celebrated the first Easter . . because Jesus Christ "died for our sins according to the Scriptures,  he was buried, [and] he was raised on the third day . . "

Happy Easter to you!

Black & white

(cont'd from yesterday)

Something like 20% of voters in recent presidential elections are evangelicals, but many don't know what an evangelical is. So the NAE (see yesterday's post) has put together four beliefs that constitute a definition.  

"Many pollsters and journalists assume that evangelicals are white, suburban, American, Southern, and Republican, when millions of self-identifying evangelicals fit none of these descriptions."

“You never hear about black evangelicals,” Anthea Butler, associate professor of religion at the University of Pennsylvania, said last year. “Watch the 2016 election. When they talk about evangelicals again, they won’t go to Bible-believing black evangelicals. They’re going to talk to white people.”

"Broken out by ethnicity, 29 percent of whites, 44 percent of African Americans, 30 percent of Hispanics, and 17 percent of people from other ethnicities have evangelical beliefs."

Evangelical

More than ever in this year in the U.S., you hear the term "evangelical" used in terms of politics, and I wonder how many people have any idea what the term means. It doesn't refer to one race, or to one political party, or one nationality, or one ethnicity, or one gender, or one economic class.

It doesn't even refer to a certain denomination or church. Evangelicals can be found in a number of Christian churches or denominations, because the word refers to the beliefs of the individual.

Working with scholars in the field, Leith Anderson (president of the National Association of Evangelicals NAE) and Ed Stetzer (exec director of LifeWay Research) have concluded that four core beliefs (my paraphrase below) have defined this diverse group of Christians over the years:

1) The Bible is the authority for my faith
2) Only Jesus' death atones for my sin
3) Only faith in Him gives eternal life
4) I should encourage others to believe in Christ

This is what evangelical Christians have in common, regardless of their differences. Did I say, "diverse?" Tomorrow - some of those differences, which might surprise you.

Whale oil

Moby Dick was a work of fiction. But the story that inspired it was not. "In  the Heart of the Sea," the movie directed by Ron Howard which came out last year, tells the true story. A huge white whale turned on the whaling ship that hunted it, and a few sailors managed to live through it.

Nineteenth-century risk-takers paid for ships and for sailors' labor, men risked their lives and spent years at sea - all to pay the price to obtain whale oil. But the price climbed higher when whale populations declined around the world, so it was harder and more expensive to bring that oil home.

There's an economic lesson here. The expense to "harvest" whale oil got too high. At that point investors looked for investment opportunities in alternatives to whale oil. Alternatives like petroleum and electricity turned out to be far better for humanity - and for the whales, whose population recovered.

In the final words of the film, “I hear someone’s found oil by drilling into the ground. Who’d have thought!”

Define it

Going back one more time to the subject of last week - exactly what is genocide? If the U.S. government is placing its whole authority into this accusation against Islamic State, then we need clarity about what it is.

It was a new term in the 1940's to describe the coordinated effort to exterminate a group by murder and may include violence to their art, historical record, language. Think of IS destroying ancient sculpture, churches - the goal is to wipe non-Islamic groups off the map and out of history.

Jewish/Polish lawyer and scholar Raphael Lemkin's definition of the new term was adopted by the United Nations in 1948. He had in mind the examples of Simele, Iraq, where Assyrian Christians were targeted in 1933 by the Iraqi government, and Ukraine, where the Soviet Union starved 5 million in order to stamp out political resistance.

America has united politically to denounce genocide. In this time of extreme disagreement on so many things, I'm glad my country can unite on this.

Call it

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, the highest American official for foreign policy, answered the genocide question Thursday for the Obama administration: Islamic State is committing genocide. Congress had urged the administration to do just that by March 17, yesterday.

This does not legally obligate the U.S. militarily, so it doesn't mean we will apply more force. But plain words are still important because there should be no confusion about what IS has done.

Here are bits of the Secretary's statement:

"[Islamic State] is responsible for genocide against groups in areas under its control including Yazidis, Christians and Shia Muslims . . genocidal by self-proclamation, by ideology and by actions in what it says, what it believes and what it does.

"One element of genocide is the intent to destroy an ethnic or religious group in whole or in part. Its entire world view is based on eliminating those who do not subscribe to its perverse ideology.

"The fact is that [IS] kills Christians because they are Christians, the Yazidis because they are Yazidis, [and] Shia because they are Shia."

IS crimes

Just in case you've missed the stories about IS targeting religious minorities - or if the media you follow haven't reported it - here's an NBC news clip about the notorious slaughter last year of 21 Egyptian Christian men.

Other ones can be found under the label "Islamic State" or here


.

Resolved

The United States Congress, one of the three branches of federal government, is made up of two assemblies, the House of Representatives (often just called the "House") and the Senate. On Monday, March 14, the House voted on the question of whether Islamic State (IS) is committing genocide.

They voted unanimously, every Democrat and Republican in attendance at the vote, to declare that IS is indeed committing genocide against religious minorities including Christians. Given today's party polarization, it's remarkable - they united on something.

Why isn't this given headlines by media?? CNN.com lists eleven top stories (Tuesday), where this amazing bi-partisan resolution isn't even mentioned.

“What is happening in Iraq and Syria is a deliberate, systematic targeting of religious and ethnic minorities. Today, the House unanimously voted to call ISIS's atrocities what they are: a genocide. We also will continue to offer our prayers for the persecuted," says the Speaker of the House.

Crony-ism

Free trade happens when a buyer and a supplier freely trade money for a product because each sees the transaction as good for him or her. The buyer will go to some other supplier if their product pleases him better or if that supplier can afford to sell it at a lower price. That supplier will change the product if people don't want it at the price he needs to get for it.

It's a good system and it works most of the time. But if some government worker (or dept.) makes a deal to buy an inferior product or an unreasonably expensive product with taxpayer money - because the supplier will do him a favor - then that is corrupt. That's crony capitalism. (Crony=chum)

Singular

Not long ago it was thought that our galaxy must have many other planets like Earth. Planets that are the right distance from their star, with the right temperature range and liquid water, were thought able to support life. Based on the number of stars, the Milky Way was estimated to have ~50 billion such planets.

As more is being learned, that estimated number of earth-like planets is going down - way down.

A Swedish astrophysicist has submitted a new study to The Astrophysical Journal that suggests ". . that there are around 700 quintillion planets in the universe, but only one like Earth. It’s a revelation that’s both beautiful and terrifying at the same time."

Hero dad

In case you haven't seen it or read the story yet, here's that dad who maybe saved his son's life just by instantly doing the only thing he could do:

photo: sports.yahoo.com

The "Today Show" interviewed father and son, here's the video.

And how about that perfect photo? Photographer Christopher Horner nailed it.

Downton

"I didn’t want it too tidy, but I did want a sense of warmth,” says Sir Julian Fellowes, writer of "Downton Abbey." 

Well then, that explains why the series' very last episode was a lovely gift to its fans. Thomas and Mary actually moved beyond their self-centered, even malicious, behavior to "character growth," that element of story telling that gives depth to the story. Two doomed lovers took matters into their own hands for a happy destiny.

If you've been a fan, you will enjoy this review.

Writer Fellowes said, "I wanted a sense of generosity towards these people we’d come to know so well," people like Carson, Lord and Lady Grantham, Mrs. Patmore, Anna Bates, Granny. I'll miss them on Sunday nights.

Preserver

Back in June of 2014, the city of Mosul, Iraq, fell to Islamic State. Refugee families ran for their lives, many landing 20 miles away in the town of Qaraqosh, where "Father Najeeb" lived. He's a native Iraqi and a Catholic Dominican priest.

Says this journalist, "By the time I met the Dominican friar in 2015, he was a legend—gathering his own resources to rescue hundreds of priceless Christian manuscripts from the hands of ISIS, ferrying scores of leather-bound editions to safety in northern Iraq and beyond, then turning his attention to what he calls the “live leather,” the people made homeless by ISIS."

photo: npr.org

Christianity has a much deeper history in Iraq than most of us knew - til we started to hear of Christians' troubles at the hands of IS. Father Najeeb was born to a Christian family in Mosul, earned his PhD. in Switzerland. He's been digitizing and preserving ancient church documents since before 2007, for a total of 55,000 volumes tucked away in a monastery.

If IS ever finds them, they'll probably go the way of ancient sculpture, art, and books that have been destroyed by those savages in the other cities they've taken.

"Oh boy"

The flow of immigrants into Europe over the last several decades has been changing Europe. It raises a new concern that reminds me of China.

China's situation rises from years of one-child policy - it's the imbalance between the genders. Many couples prefer a boy if they can only have one child. So there's a generation growing up with considerably more males than females.

Immigrants now coming to Europe from the Middle East are trending heavily toward more males and younger age. Asylum applicants in the lasts 12 months were 73% male, up from 68% in 2012. That's a big imbalance.

According to this article at The Economist, immigration will actually shift some nations' balance between the sexes for their age group. Germany is not expected to see this kind of shift, but Sweden, Hungary, Austria and Norway very well may. 

If Sweden accepts all applicants, the current wave of immigration will produce a national ratio of 116 men to every 100 women. "This is worrisome. Skewed sex ratios would mean lots of sexually frustrated young men, which is a recipe for trouble."

Escaping

Imagine bringing your kids to hide with you in a cattle truck, then walking 189 miles at night with them to get across the border, knowing you all will be killed if caught by the government. Ibrahim and Turkiye with their ten kids did this just five weeks ago to escape oppression in Raqqa, Syria.

Terrifying, but you might really do it - if your own city government used stoning, beheading, and mutilating to enforce their laws.

Maybe we're a bit de-sensitized to this sort of chaos. It seems bizarre to us in the West. To get perspective, I imagine what America would do if 19,000 of its citizens were killed in the last two years. It happened in Iraq - and for Iraq that's a much higher proportion of its people.

This author has been reporting from the area for years. She says, "Over and over again I hear from long-term Christian workers that . .  there is an openness to the gospel like they have never seen before.” 

Some Middle Easterners have become willing to re-consider their historic assumptions.

Free at last

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Resistance to communism/socialism in Poland was grass-roots and organized. Their vision was to exercise free commerce, communication, education and more - outside of government-controlled markets, media, and schools.

"Thirty-eight million Poles were thumbing their noses at the state. They knew from painful experience that, as dissident Stefan Kisielewski put it (and was arrested and beaten for saying), “Socialism is stupidism.”

"Poland’s communist leader, Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, struck an agreement  . .  to legalize suppressed political groups and schedule elections. He had little choice. Poland, he declared, had become “ungovernable.”

"On June 4, 1989 . . Poland electrified the world by holding the first free elections in communist Europe. Opponents of communism and its kissing cousin, socialism . . won 99 of 100 seats in the Senate and every single one of the 161 seats in the lower house of Parliament (the Sejm) that the regime allowed to be contested. "

(from "Blinking Lights for Freedom - Real Heroes: the People of Poland")

Blinking

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

The author was in country, observing Poland in 1986. He saw the Polish people's creative coping inventions to get what they needed, to exercise freedom and creativity in the underground, out of sight of their rulers. He was impressed by their "defiant spirit."

After the harsh government crackdown of 1981, they were "dodging and weaving around the restrictions in ways that almost defied imagination. Shortages of basic foodstuffs, double-digit inflation, and a powerful secret police did not deter them from creating thriving black markets and flourishing private institutions from radio to theaters to publishing houses and schools."

They independently and secretly published forbidden books, up to 200 per year in editions of up to 10,000. Underground universities operated in major cities, meeting in warehouses and churches.

The author shares a memory of that visit:

"My favorite story from my 1986 visit involves a very brave couple, Zbigniew and Sofia Romaszewski, who had only months before been released from prison for running an underground radio station. “How did you know when you were broadcasting if people were listening?” I asked. Sofia answered, “We could only broadcast 8 to 10 minutes at a time before going to another place to stay ahead of the police. One night we asked people to blink their lights if they believed in freedom for Poland. We then went to the window and for hours, all of Warsaw was blinking.”

(cont'd tomorrow)

Addition

In a side note to today's post:

My son tells me that his work supervisor emigrated to the U.S. from Russia about 20 years ago. She confirms that the waiting time to get an apartment there, too, was years long. When he asked her how she feels about the socialist movement in America, she says she is "terrified" of it.

Oppressed

You've heard of the "French resistance" who resisted their Nazi overlords in World War II for about five years. Not as well known is the story of the people of Poland who did that for decades under their Communist overlords, from 1946 to 1989.

"By the 1980s, the communists’ promise of a better life under socialism had given way to appalling safety conditions in workplaces, sooty air that posed a major health threat, frequent shortages of everything from gasoline to toilet paper, and luxury living for party officials while the masses lived at two-thirds the world standard for 1980. A national housing shortage was so pronounced that the average waiting time to get an apartment was 15–20 years."

Tomorrow's post - how the Poles invented ways to get around their Communist restrictions. 

(cont'd tomorrow)

Gratitude

Sometimes you will hear about someone who narrowly missed dying, or whose loved one narrowly survived, and they will urge us to be grateful for every day of life because "tomorrow is not guaranteed." It's a bit of a cliche, but probably only if you haven't been there.

Prof. Robert "Robby" P. George of Princeton was suddenly hospitalized two months ago with a life threatening condition. On his fb page he credits his doctors and the prayers of thousands for his recovery, overwhelmed with gratitude to God and to them:

"Beloved Friends: Please accept these brief but heartfelt words of thanks from the most fortunate, most richly blessed man in the world. . .  There is no way I can claim to be worthy of such an extraordinary outpouring of love; but with all my heart I thank you for it, and I thank God for you—each and every one of you."

"Every morning when I brush my teeth and look at the guy in the mirror, I see someone who was radicalized by gratitude. For which, I must say, I am radically grateful.”