Columnist.
Doctors and hospitals are regularly held accountable for failing to prevent patients from dying. But if the precedent set by an Oregon couple's recent legal victory stands, doctors can now be held accountable for failing to prevent patients from living! Ariel and Deborah Levy of Portland were awarded $2.9 million this month because doctors didn't anticipate their four-year-old daughter's Down syndrome. The Levys said if they had known about the disability while their daughter was still in utero, they would have terminated the pregnancy.
Can it really be just three months ago we gathered with loved ones to celebrate Christmas? What joy we felt as we celebrated the birth of the baby Jesus. Emmanuel. God with us. But today, on Good Friday, we reflect on how that beautiful babe in the manger came to fulfill a mission. A terrible and glorious mission! God invaded planet Earth. He became a human child, to live as one of us, to call us to repent, to love God with our whole heart, minds, and souls, and our neighbors as ourselves.
As we've talked about the last few days on BreakPoint, Christian hope is not wide-eyed optimism or emotions. Christian hope is based on the certainty of God's promises and His character. And it is evidenced by the fruits of joy, sacrificial love, boldness, and endurance. We see no better example of this kind of hope than in the life of our Savior, especially in the days and hours before His death. In the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus certainly had cause to abandon hope. His closest friends fell asleep in the time when, as he said, His soul was "overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death." He pled with His Father to take the cup away from Him if it was possible. But there was no other way.
Yesterday, I talked about a Christian ethic of hope -- a hope not based on wishful thinking, but on the reality of God's promises. It's this Christian hope that gives us the joy, the self-sacrificial love, the boldness, and the endurance to carry on -- even in tough times. You often see these fruits in the lives of devout believers. For example: Justin Martyr, born around 100 AD to pagan parents; he grew up studying philosophy. But while in Ephesus he was impressed by the steadfastness of Christians under persecution and he converted to Christianity. He is known for his "Apologies," defenses of the faith addressed to those in highest power: the Roman Emperor and the Roman Senate.
Part of our worry comes from the fact that most Americans aren't used to it! We've had relatively little to worry about in life. Sure, these are hard times, but this is not the Great Depression. And while the nightly news gives us cause to bemoan the loss of moral absolutes in society, Christians have always found themselves -- and will always find themselves -- living in the midst of a depraved culture. But no matter how dark a place or an age in time, God has never allowed the light of the Church to be extinguished. Plagues, persecutions, poverty -- Christians have lived victoriously in the midst of a depraved culture.
Back in the 1970s, acclaimed psychiatrist Karl Menninger wrote a classic book, Whatever Became of Sin? Menninger said that although our society has dropped the sin category, sin remains, and our failure to identify sin as sin has made dealing with it even more difficult. Well, the great man was only partly right. While some behaviors are no longer called sinful, there's a growing list of behaviors that government officials now consider to be socially destructive, and thus, subject to what are called "sin taxes."
Kirk Cameron was once the most popular teen actor on television as the lovable Mike Seaver on "Growing Pains." But no longer. As most of you know by now, after a recent appearance on "Piers Morgan Tonight," he's been accused of intolerance, hatred, and even of being an "accomplice to murder." His sin? He expressed his personal opinion on homosexual behavior and same-sex marriage.
During World War II, members of the British intelligentsia began to spread the idea that American troops in the country weren't there to fight the Germans. Instead, they were there to put down a possible British revolution. Well, the famous British author George Orwell's response was, "Only an intellectual could believe such stuff -- an ordinary man could not possibly be such a fool."
In his 1985 book, Habits of the Heart, Robert Bellah and Richard Madsen introduced the world to "Sheila Larson." Sheila described her belief system this way: "I believe in God. I'm not a religious fanatic. I can't remember the last time I went to church. My faith has carried me a long way. It's Sheilaism. Just my own little voice ... It's just trying to love yourself and be gentle with yourself ..."
It has been a long time since I've seen crowds this big protesting outside the Supreme Court. They're all there: Tea Partiers and Obamacare supporters marching, praying, chanting, carrying signs. The marching band was an interesting touch! The occasion of course is the three days of oral arguments in the case that may decide the fate of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act -- or at least critical pieces of it. The question is, will the demonstrations matter? The textbook answer is no: The Court consists of judges who have been appointed for life, who are not subject to public opinion; their supreme obligation is to the Constitution of the United States.
Movies that deal with the sanctity of life are suddenly in the news. One of these, the long anticipated independent film Doonby, is scheduled to open in theaters later this year. And another one, October Baby, opens in theaters today, Friday, March 23. Both of these films delve deeply and fearlessly into an issue that the entertainment industry has rarely been brave enough to tackle.
"The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart." These words, penned in 1973 by then-Soviet dissident and Christian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, brilliantly sum up the human condition after the Fall.
The militant atheism behind this month's upcoming "Reason Rally" on the Mall in D.C. isn't the only flavor of skepticism these days. In fact, instead of blaming people of faith for the woes of the world, some atheists now are actually speaking out on behalf of religion. But their reasons for doing so are as different as one could imagine.
"A person's a person, no matter how small," was the refrain from Dr. Seuss' famous children's story, "Horton Hears a Who!" Horton the elephant has to convince his fellow jungle-dwellers that there really are tiny people on a speck of dust. When they find out Horton is right, they're ashamed of their efforts to destroy the microscopic town of Whoville.
The most important talking point used by those who support the HHS contraception mandate is that the Catholic Bishops and their allies are "out-of-touch" and represent a minority view. You have no doubt heard things like "98 percent of Catholic women use contraception" and "most Americans, especially women, support the HHS mandate." Well, it's not true. The first assertion is based on a study by the Guttmacher Institute, which as an affiliate of Planned Parenthood, is hardly an objective observer. Even the Washington Post compared the media to Pinocchio for using these statistics.
When I was going through Watergate, my life was threatened repeatedly. And in the early years of my ministry with Prison Fellowship, the authorities had to monitor various individuals who had made threats against me. In 1983 on my way to Prison Fellowship International's convocation in Belfast, Northern Ireland, I learned at a press conference that I had been placed on the hit list of the Irish Republican Army. The IRA was threatened by the work of Prison Fellowship there, because we were reconciling Catholic and Protestant prisoners in the midst of a very hot war euphemistically called "the Troubles."
Welcoming different viewpoints and beliefs is said to be one of the crowning glories of the modern university. Unless of course, your viewpoints and beliefs happen to be Christian. Sadly, back in 2010, the Supreme Court laid the groundwork for a disturbing trend that is spreading to campuses nationwide. In the case Christian Legal Society vs. Martinez, little noted at the time, the high court ruled that a public college may refuse to recognize a student organization if it restricts membership or leadership to students who share the group's core beliefs.
Last year, Dr. Marcia Angell began a two-part series in the New York Review of Books by writing, "It seems that Americans are in the midst of a raging epidemic of mental illness, at least as judged by the increase in the numbers being treated for it." Her use of the word "seems" told readers that Angell, who teaches at Harvard Medical School, was skeptical.
Vaclav Havel, who helped overcome communist rule in Czechoslovakia once said, "It's not that modern man knows less and less about the meaning of life. It's that it bothers him less and less." He might well have been talking about many teenagers today. As Diana West noted in her book, The Death of the Grownup, many young adults struggle to, well, grow up. It's been called "Failure to Launch," or "Peter Pan Syndrome," or "perpetual adolescence."
