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College happens once. Make it count for the rest of your life. Build Faith. BJU will help you strengthen your faith in the absolute truth of God’s Word through opportunities such as a biblically based curriculum, daily chapel, and discipleship and mentoring.
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Contents
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FE AT UR E S
34 Latin persuasion
COVER STORY Republicans hope that a young group of popular Hispanic conservatives, such as Ted Cruz of Texas, will help the party win over Hispanic voters in November. Keen on stopping them, Democrats look to make immigration reform a higher priority
40 Carolina blues
Scandal amid a close contest in North Carolina could foretell swing state headaches for Democrats and Obama heading toward a September convention in the Tar Heel State
44 The eye of the storm
Israelis contemplate a possible war against Iran with little worry but keen knowledge of what’s at stake
48 ‘God’s chickens’
DISPATCHES 5 News 14 Human Race 16 Quotables 18 Quick Takes
Harking back to William Wilberforce, some evangelical leaders are joining efforts to crack down on cockfighting
52 The bloodiest day
The Civil War produced more than 600,000 deaths, including 23,000 killed in one day at Antietam, and led to the first official Memorial Day observance in 1868 at Arlington National Cemetery
23
ON THE COVER: Photo by Ben Sklar/The New York Times/Redux; Humber: Otto Greule Jr./Getty Images; Avengers: Zade Rosenthal/Marvel
40 52
59
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REvIEwS 23 Movies & TV 26 Books 28 Q&A 30 Music noTEbook 59 Sports 62 Lifestyle 63 Technology 64 Science 65 Houses of God 67 Money 68 Religion voICES 3 Joel Belz 20 Janie B. Cheaney 32 Mindy Belz 56 John Albaugh 71 Mailbag 75 Andrée Seu Peterson 76 Marvin Olasky
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What we’ve discovered about real grace for teens.
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KRIEG BARRIE
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Joel Belz
Moving the goal posts
Between a free market economy and a Marxist one, the United States tries to score from midfield
KRIEG BARRIE
>>
W this past week that there is not a single nation, on the whole face of the globe, that operates with a genuinely free market economy, I did a double take. Can’t be, I thought. But he pressed me, offering a free lunch if I could name such a country. Maybe you can help me— but so far, I haven’t claimed the free lunch. The exchange took me back years to a discussion I had in a city park near downtown Havana, Cuba. An elderly and slightly scruffy gentleman had introduced himself as a retired economics professor, unapologetic to call himself a committed Marxist, and eager to practice his English. Indeed, my new friend’s English was good enough to draw a sharp picture of his analysis: “You people think mostly about the individual person, and you put a great emphasis on such a person’s freedom. We think mostly about the common good, and our emphasis tends to be more on the benefits to society as a whole.” Then, because he also wanted to learn a little more about the differences between soccer and American football, I remember our sketching together a football field to illustrate what he had just described. We penciled in individual rights at one end of the field (my American specialty), and community good at the other (his Cuban specialty). But I worried that this was an overly simplistic view of things. So I emphasized to him, pointing to the American end of the field: “Don’t assume that we’re playing anywhere near this goal line. Most of what goes on in the U.S.,” I stressed, “happens out around the or -yard line. The lives individual Americans live take place much closer to midfield than to what you see as the American goal line.” All of which brings us back to the claim that there’s not a nation anywhere on earth serving as an unambiguous picture of the free market at work. Have you thought of one yet? To the extent that Americans see themselves as practitioners and beneficiaries of the so-called “market economy,” both honesty and modesty remind us to admit that the society in which we live has been incredibly shaped by a collectivist mentality.
Email: jbelz@worldmag.com
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Everywhere we turn, through almost every hour of every day, our lives are regulated and shaped by every level of government—and all supposedly for the common good. From this morning’s stop at the gas station, to the labeling on what we picked up at the grocery store, to the interest rate announced by the neighborhood bank, to the words that got bleeped out of this evening’s newscast—in all these and many other situations, someone wasn’t content just to let market forces do their thing. Someone was always jumping in to say: “Let’s give those market forces a little extra help.” Implicit in all those governmental efforts to “help” market forces do their thing is the sense—maybe we could even call it the hubris—that government has enough intelligence and brainpower to do it better than the market would by itself. And maybe that’s why we’re not left with a single notable example of a free market model that we can all sit back and view and then say: “So that’s what such an animal looks like!” Everywhere we go, we always spoil things by jumping in and upsetting the process. In the United States we haven’t been close—for several generations—to creating a test case for a socalled market economy. It’s at best a blend, and more and more, in recent years, it’s been a blend tilting toward collectivism rather than freedom. All of which puts a sharp focus on this year’s elections. At one end of the playing field, Coach Obama persistently calls us to apply the collectivist playbook to more and more aspects of life. We’re getting a pretty vivid example of that experiment. But for better or for worse, the other model simply isn’t there for inspection and review—not in Havana, not in the United States, and apparently nowhere else in the whole wide world. A M AY 1 9 , 2 0 1 2
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Colson
Chuck
UNION UNIVERSITY REMEMBERS
W
hen I was growing up in the 1970s, it seemed as though every Christian household in America had a copy of Born Again, the story of Chuck Colson’s transformation from Nixon’s hatchet man to follower of the Lord Jesus Christ. It was a poignant reminder to the nation that although the White House might fail you, the gospel never will. Gregory A. Thornbury
Dean of the School of Theology and Missions, Union University
huck Colson devoted most of his adult life to a portion of what Jesus called ‘the least of these,’ men and women serving time in prison. I was a prison chaplain in Kentucky in the early days of Prison Fellowship, and I saw firsthand the difference that his ministry made. He played a major role in advancing ideas of prison reform while bringing Christ to people who might never have known him otherwise. He could have had a vastly different life with all the powerful connections he had, but he learned through suffering that the life in Christ is the only life worth living. Harry Lee Poe
Charles Colson Professor of Faith and Culture, Union University
uu.edu EXCELLENCE-DRIVEN
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C
huck Colson was a leader among leaders who helped to shape a generation of evangelicals. His statesmanship served as a model for Christians across denominational lines. His writings taught us how to think christianly, how to engage the culture, how to give a reason for the hope of the Christian faith. His heart, formed by his own life experience and dramatic conversion, touched many who had lost hope through the years. His love for the gospel, demonstrated in his vision for Prison Fellowship and so many other ministries, radiated for all to see. David S. Dockery
President, Union University
Jackson, Tennessee
C H R I S T- C E N T E R E D
PEOPLE-FOCUSED
CREDIT
C
FUTURE-DIRECTED
4/26/12 5:16 PM
Dispatches NEWS HUMAN RACE QUOTABLES QUICK TAKES
KEVIN DIETSCH/UPI/LANDOV
High opinion >> NEWS: More Americans favor tough immigration laws as Supreme Court hears Arizona case
BY EMILY BELZ in Washington, D.C.
A S C weighs Arizona’s immigration law after hearing arguments April , polls show that support for laws like it is growing even though illegal immigration is down and dropping. An April Quinnipiac poll showed that percent of registered voters nationally approved of the Arizona law, while only percent disapproved. That approval number is up by percent from Quinnipiac’s polls in . Quinnipiac’s results have been affirmed elsewhere: A Fox poll in April showed
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percent national approval of the law, too. A Pew Research Center poll in showed percent of the public supported Arizona’s law. Polls have also found interesting complexity in that support within Arizona: percent of Arizonans support Arizona’s immigration law, S.B. , according to a Morrison Institute for Public Policy poll that came out April . But in that poll percent of Arizonans also supported the DREAM Act, which provides a path to citizenship MAJORITY: for children of illegal immiSupporters of grants who go to college or Arizona’s immigration join the military. law rally in Even without Arizona’s law front of the in force—due to courts blocking U.S. Supreme the central portions—illegal Court April . M AY 1 9 , 2 0 1 2
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5/1/12 3:26 PM
Dispatches > News
LOOKING AHEAD Annular eclipse
An annular eclipse will occur on May when the moon passes in front of the sun, leaving only a flaming, bright ring outside the moon’s silhouette. The eclipse will be visible from China, islands in the Pacific Ocean, and across western North America, although NASA warns that it is not safe to look at an annular or partial eclipse without proper equipment.
Olympic 2020 short list
Officials with the International Olympic Committee will announce on May a short list of three or four contenders for the Summer Games. The officials will cut one or two cities off a list of five: Istanbul, Tokyo, Madrid, Baku in Azerbaijan, and Doha, Qatar.
Egyptian elections
On May , Egyptians begin a twoday election to select a new president. The presidential election is Egypt’s first since the revolution that ousted former President Hosni Mubarak.
Mladic trial Bosnian Serb military commander
Ratko Mladic will face trial on May at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTFY) to answer for his alleged role in war crimes that claimed the lives of ,. The ICTFY has charged Mladic with counts of genocide, crimes against humanity, and other war crimes.
Torch Relay
The Olympic Torch Relay for the Summer Games begins on May at Land’s End in Cornwall—the most westerly point in England. When the torch relay ends on July in London for the opening ceremony, it will have traveled nearly , miles.
CHURCH: DAVID COATES/THE DETROIT NEWS/AP • ECLIPSE: MOHAMMAD ABU GHOSH/AP • MADRID: ISTOCK • EGYPT: STR/AFP/GETTYIMAGES • MLADIC: MARTIN MEISSNER/AP • OLYMPIC TORCH: JAMIE MCDONALD/GETTY IMAGES
immigration has dropped. Border Patrol in Arizona reported a percent drop in the number of illegal immigrant arrests last year. And nationally, more Mexicans are leaving the United States than entering for the first time since the Depression, according to a new study by the Pew Hispanic Center. The study estimated that . million Mexicans were living in the United States illegally in , down from million in . Most illegal immigrants in the United States are from Mexico. The causes of the migration reversal are up for debate but the Pew study said it was the result of a poor economy in the United States, increased deportation rates, tighter border security, and low Mexican birthrates. Mexican drug cartels along the border also are targeting migrants attempting to get to the United States. The Pew study expects the lower migration trend to continue—the heavy migration from Mexico to the United States of the s and s is a thing of the past. The April arguments on Arizona’s immigration law were the last of the Supreme Court’s term, and in many ways paralleled the historic healthcare case in March. Arizona v. United States pitted the same two lawyers against each other: Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Jr. and Paul Clement, who was solicitor general during the Bush administration. Dozens of state attorneys general filed briefs in favor and against Arizona’s laws; religious groups took sides, holding vigils; and chanting crowds packed in front of the steps of the court—all similar to the healthcare case. The justices seemed to view it as historic also, granting the lawyers a rare extra half hour to argue their position. Justice Elena Kagan wasn’t present. She recused herself because she served as the former solicitor general in the Obama administration. If the court’s vote ends up tied -, then the th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision to overturn most of the law would remain in force. The court will decide the case sometime in the next two months, and the decision will have a wide impact because over the last two years a number of states—Utah, Alabama, Indiana, Georgia, and South Carolina—have passed similar immigration laws and have faced similar legal challenges. A
Mother’s Day
Don’t be surprised if you can’t find a seat in church on May . After Easter and Christmas, Mother’s Day in the United States is often ranked third in mostattended Sunday services.
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“Covenant provided
the foundation I wanted and needed to set out in the professional marketplace.”
in all things christ preeminent
Tr ip Fa r mer ’ 96 is a CPA a nd a pa r t ner w it h t he publ ic accou nt i ng f i r m Henderson, Hutcherson & McCu l lough, where he super v ises consu lt i ng engagements in the construction, real estate, health care, manufacturing, and service industries.
At Covenant, we equip our students to live out extraordinary callings in ordinary places. We teach students to engage culture and cultures, to examine and unfold creation, and to pursue biblical justice and mercy.
“Covenant helped me learn how to learn, how to assess and be critical of ideas and concepts, how to ask questions and be engaged,” he says. “It provided me the foundation I wanted and needed to set out in the professional marketplace.
Are you eager to grapple with difficult questions in pursuit of God’s calling as He redeems all things through Christ? We invite you to visit us.
CREDIT
“The joke back home is that I left high school as a shy, quiet, studious kid, but I left Covenant as an outgoing, adventurous, active learner who wants to make a difference. I learned that ideas are not neutral— they have consequences. Covenant’s appeal is not just its kingdom-mindedness, which is foundational; it is also its understanding that the kingdom impacts every community, every profession, and every idea.”
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Dispatches > News
Magic magnet President Barack Obama and former President Bill Clinton campaigned together for the first time in on April at a Washington reception (tickets starting at ,) and dinner (tickets starting at ,). Obama has now attended fundraisers this year and since filing for reelection on April , . By contrast, George W. Bush attended a total of fundraisers during his entire reelection campaign, from May to November . Obama, who talked about the “corrosive influence of money in politics” during his State of the Union speech on Jan. , has million cash on hand— times the cash on hand for rival Mitt Romney. As Obama’s schedule gets more crowded with campaign events, the Republican National Committee filed an official complaint on April with the Government Accountability Office over Obama’s use of official resources for campaign travel. “This president and Air Force One seem to have a magic magnet that only seem to land in battleground states in this country,” said RNC Chairman Reince Priebus alluding to Obama’s recent “official event” trips to such key states as Iowa, Colorado, and North Carolina (see story, p. ).
End of the road Newt Gingrich’s long goodbye from the presidential race was set to become official May , one week after he lost five contests by an average of more than points and nearly one year after announcing his White House bid. It was a wild, sometimes bizarre, year for Gingrich, who survived the en masse resignation of of his top aides last June to emerge as the winner of the Jan. South Carolina primary. But Gingrich only won one more state (Georgia) as his campaign racked up over million in debt. Along the way he talked of moon colonies, made
trips to eight zoos, and held numerous book signings for the four books he and his wife Callista published during the campaign. Gingrich told supporters he would “stay very, very active. … I am committed to defeating Obama.”
PRECEDENT
An incumbent president with a percent approval rating just before an election has never lost in his reelection bid—and President Obama’s current Gallup approval rating, based on a survey done April -, is percent. A president with a percent approval rating six months out (May before November elections), according to the polling data, has about a percent likelihood of reelection.
Tom White, for years the head of Voice of the Martyrs (VOM), was discovered dead last month of possible suicide. “Allegations were made to authorities this week that Tom had inappropriate contact with a young girl. Rather than face those allegations, and all of the resulting fallout for his family and this ministry and himself, Tom appears to have chosen to take his own life,” read an April statement from the Bartlesville, Okla.-based organization. But state authorities are investigating the death after police discovered his body at VOM headquarters, according to the Associated Press. White was well known for unflagging support for the persecuted church. In a plane from which he was dropping leaflets over Cuba crashed, and Fidel Castro imprisoned White for over a year.
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GINGRICH: CAROLYN KASTER/AP • OBAMA: DAVID DUPREY/AP • WHITE: HANDOUT CREDIT
Tom White, 1947-2012
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Dispatches > News
Muslim Brotherhood activists in Jordan
Toward secular states? Jordan’s lower house of parliament has voted to ban the Muslim Brotherhood, voting - to prevent the establishment of any political party on a “religious basis.” The move would block Islamist parties from running in upcoming elections. If the measure wins expected upper house approval, it would disqualify the Islamic Action Front (IAF), the Muslim Brotherhood’s political party, from taking part in parliamentary elections. Libya’s National Transitional Council also took steps in April to ban religious parties, ahead of June elections, and Egypt has disqualified some religious candidates in upcoming elections.
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STATE’S RIGHTS The Tennessee legislature passed a bill on April that forces Vanderbilt University to abandon its nondiscrimination policy if it wants to keep million in state funding. The bill also forbids state schools from adopting similar policies (see “Campus divide,” May ). Thirteen Christian groups oppose the policy, saying it restricts their religious freedom. They plan to move off campus next year. School officials say others have complied with the policy but declined to name them all.
Ceasefire that’s not Despite a UN-brokered ceasefire, violence continues to rock Syria, with deadly bombings reaching Damascus, the capital, and other cities. Two suicide bombs on April in Idlib targeted security personnel and killed at least eight—with some estimates that explosions killed more than . By May the head of the UN observer mission, Maj. Gen. Robert Mood, had arrived in Syria along with about observers. Under the peace plan brokered by UN and Arab League envoy Kofi Annan, observers are approved and scheduled to arrive this month. But activists report as many as killed since the ceasefire was agreed to April . The Christian community is suffering “enormous distress” as the conflict rages on between supporters and opponents of President Bashar Assad, church leaders told the Barnabas Fund. Churches throughout the country remain open, a church leader told WORLD, except for the Homs area, where the focus of the fight has left many places of worship destroyed or unable to operate (see p. ). Elsewhere, he said, churches are “more packed with worshipers and getting closer to [the] church and Bible, which is a good sign.”
KIIR: KAZUHIRO IBUKI/AP • JORDAN: MOHAMMAD HANNON/AP • MOOD AND ANNAN: FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP/GETTY IMAGES CREDIT
Less than two months before South Sudan is set to mark its first anniversary of independence on July , the country remains on the brink of war with neighboring Sudan over disputed borderlines and oil fields. It also continues to absorb thousands of refugees fleeing Sudanese bombing in the Nuba Mountains. But South Sudan has another looming crisis: It could run out of money by June. The nation that derives more than percent of its budget from oil fields halted production in January. Officials said that once the oil traveled north to Sudan via the only pipeline in the country, Sudanese officials sold the oil, but sent meager payments back to South Sudan. South Sudanese authorities vowed to build a new pipeline running south to Kenya, predicting such a project would take a year. But that timeline seems deeply unrealistic in a country with only a few paved roads and intermittent services like water and electricity. LONG SHOT: Kiir and Chinese President Hu Jintao. If South Sudanese officials are worried about running out of funds, they aren’t showing it yet. President Salva Kiir traveled to China in late April, seeking investment for the Kenya pipeline. China’s involvement may be a long shot since the country has closer relations with Sudan, but during the trip Kiir had even bigger problems than cash flow: The president cut short his visit after news broke that Sudanese forces had bombed South Sudanese territory again.
Annan (left) and Mood
5/1/12 3:22 PM
MICHAEL APPLETON/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX
Running out
“Churches in Park Slope aren’t willing to work together,” Martin said. “We would call them and they said, ‘No, we aren’t willing to help you.’ That was the end of the conversation.” Martin’s church has settled at a temporary location but it requires a long commute for church members. Church leaders found a building to use long term that’s closer, but health regulations prevent them from using it until they invest $114,000 in repairs and renovations. For a church of just 50 adult members and a few children, that’s a lot of money to raise, but Martin said they’re willing to go through the sacrifice and inconvenience now instead of later. “I’d rather put up with the headaches to be in a place long term rather than face this again in June,” he said. Many church leaders have decried the ban as discriminatory and unnecessary, saying it will force churches out of neighborhoods they have served for years through afterschool programs, family counseling, and aid for the homeless. Proponents of the ban say that allowing churches to use public buildings violates the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. Many add that allowing churches to use the schools will cause youth to believe the state endorses the views presented during the services. But some opponents say that those reasons are cover-ups for ideological opposition. Bishop Joseph Mattera has been a pastor in Brooklyn since 1984 and was involved in the controversy from the beginning. He blames New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, pointing to other positions the mayor has taken, including banning publicly displayed nativity scenes, denying public prayer at last year’s 9/11 memorial service, and complicating the tax-exemption process for churches: “He wants to leave a legacy of being a liberal who is able to put religion in its place [and] out of the public square as much as possible.” A
SCHOOL’S OUT: public school 11, where New Frontier Church rents space, in the Chelsea neighborhood of New york.
Place holders
Churches face a looming ban on meeting at public schools by TIffany OWenS in new york
KIIR: KazuhIRo IbuKI/ap • JoRDaN: mohammaD haNNoN/ap • mooD aND aNNaN: FabRICE CoFFRINI/aFp/GEtty ImaGEs CREDIT
mIChaEl applEtoN/thE NEw yoRK tImEs/REDux
>>
Sovereign Grace City Church in Brooklyn used to meet for worship every Sunday at P.S. 282, a public school that charged an affordable rent of $1,084 per month for Sunday morning access. But lately Sovereign Grace has changed worship locations nearly every week. The moves were not random: They were a result of a decision by the city to ban religious organizations from renting public school buildings for worship services (see “The battle of New York,” Jan. 28). The ban went into effect on Feb. 12, but an injunction from U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska allowed churches to continue meeting at public schools until June 19. The churches might lose that access again unless New York state House Speaker Sheldon Silver brings a bill to the House floor for a vote before the June 19 deadline. Bill 8800 currently has 74 bipartisan cosponsors out of a possible 146 members. Despite the nearing deadline and the fact that dozens of congregations could be affected, vocal opposition to the ban has been falling. Bad weather, but also dwindling support, kept an April 22 march to about 150 people, the least-attended event to date. Bill Devlin, pastor of Manhattan Bible Church, said that many churches have been focusing
on their congregations and haven’t been as involved as they were when the city first announced the ban. Rallies back then drew crowds of several hundred. Bo Han, a board member for New Frontier Church echoed a similar sentiment. “It’s quite disappointing the big churches not being as actively involved … they’ve been relatively quiet about this,” he said. “It isn’t about the churches being affected, it’s about right and wrong.” Churches facing the deadline have adapted differently. Han’s church meets in P.S. 11 in Midtown Manhattan. His congregation temporarily used a synagogue as a meeting place. After the injunction, New Frontier moved back to P.S. 11 and hopes to stay there. Renting the synagogue cost three times more than renting the school. “We spend a good portion of our budget on community service,” Han said. “If we had to move, that would take a hit.” Other churches like Brooklyn’s Sovereign Grace have moved around. Pastor Zach Martin said that after February’s eviction, the congregation started meeting in homes and church buildings, but ran into discouraging obstacles along the way—this time from local churches.
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Dispatches > News
Great escape
INTENSE DIALOGUE: U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declines to answer specific questions about the blind Chinese human rights lawyer Chen Guangcheng.
Why most tax increases won’t cure federal debt
When the U.S. Senate, on a procedural vote, killed the so-called “Buffett Rule” last month, even some liberal lawmakers and pundits said it was more about politics than economics. The rule would have imposed a percent tax on all income for people making more than million a year, and would have generated about billion a year in additional tax revenue, or about . percent of total tax revenue. The bottom line: A tax increase, even a dramatic one, will not solve the debt problem, and a tax increase brings with it the probability of sending much needed capital to other countries. The following chart looks at the federal budget and then eliminates eight zeros, bringing the problem into sharper focus.
The U.S. federal budget in numbers we can all understand: U.S. annual tax revenue
$2,340,000,000,000
Federal annual spending budget
$3,590,000,000,000
New annual debt from overspending this year
$1,250,000,000,000
National debt
$15,400,000,000,000
Last year’s budget cut by Congress
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$38,500,000,000
Now remove zeros and pretend it’s a household budget: Annual family income
$23,400
Money the family spends annually
$35,900
New debt added to credit cards
$12,500
Outstanding balance on credit cards Total cuts to the family budget
GUANGCHENG: ZENG JINYAN/AP • CLINTON: CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES • MONEY: ISTOCK CREDIT
Chen Guangcheng, a blind human rights lawyer and one of China’s most well-known activists, escaped captivity on April after months of brutal house arrest in Shandong Province. American authorities refused to comment immediately on reports that the activist took refuge in the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. The dramatic escape comes nearly six years after Chinese officials first imprisoned Chen for exposing the official practice of forced abortions and sterilizations of thousands of women in Linyi County. Chen served four years in prison, but has been under house arrest since his release in September . Guards severely beat Chen, , and his wife last year after the couple smuggled out a video describing their plight. A free Chen appeared in a YouTube video on April , describing his abuse and demanding his family’s freedom. The activist reportedly left behind his wife, daughter, and mother, hoping to secure the whole family’s release. In the video, Chen directly challenged Prime Minister Wen Jiabao over his family’s imprisonment: “You owe the people an explanation.” Chen’s escape—coming days before Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was set to visit China— stoked concerns that any U.S. involvement in Chen’s case could strain U.S. relations with the Communist nation. But Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., chairman of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, called on Clinton to press Chinese authorities to release Chen’s family, and “raise the issue of all harassed, arrested, disappeared, and disbarred human rights lawyers and defenders with the Chinese Government on an ongoing basis.”
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Dispatches > Human Race DieD
convicteD The UN Special Court for Sierra Leone in The Hague ruled April 26 that former Liberian president Charles Taylor, 64, committed war crimes and crimes against humanity while aiding and abetting rebels during Sierra Leone’s civil war. But the court stopped short of tying him directly to ordering or planning the list of atrocities, which included murder, conscripting child soldiers, and using young girls as sexual slaves. It marks the first time since World War II that an international court has levied a war crimes conviction on a former head of state. Taylor’s sentencing hearing is set for May 30.
SiGneD Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signed into law last month legislation that allows public and charter high schools the option to offer an elective class about the Bible’s influence
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on history, government, and culture. The law requires the board of education to design the curriculum for schools that wish to offer it. Arizona is the sixth state to pass legislation permitting high schools to offer a Bible related class.
HiReD The Obama administration has hired former Planned Parenthood media director Tait Sye to work in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as the deputy assistant secretary for public affairs. The appointment comes shortly after Sye helped Planned Parenthood defend HHS’s rule requiring most employers’ insurance policies to cover contraception. “Personnel is
policy,” Americans United for Life president Charmaine Yoest told Politico. “This is one more example of how intertwined the Obama administration is with the abortion industry and Planned Parenthood.”
DiScHARGeD The defense department is issuing an “other-thanhonorable” discharge to a nine-year Marine and Iraq War veteran who posted comments critical of President Obama on Facebook and an internal military network. Gary Stein, 26, created the Armed Forces Tea Party Facebook page where he made statements he now acknowledges “were tasteless,” but his lawyers argued that the Marine Corps’ decision violates his 1st Amendment rights. The ruling
demotes Stein, whose enlistment was due to end in July, and leaves him ineligible for most military benefits.
ABSent Church-planting movement leader and pastor Britt Merrick announced last month he is taking a leave of absence from ministry after learning his 7-yearold daughter, Daisy, is fighting a third bout of cancer. In 2003 Merrick left his position as heir of Channel Islands Surfboards—a world-renowned surfboard company—to start Reality, a multi-campus church based in California. He is the author of Big God: What Happens When We Trust Him (Notable Books, July 3, 2010).
CLARK: DonnA SvEnnEvIK/ABC/AP • TAYLoR: ShouLD READ JERRY LAMPEn/AFP/GETTY IMAGES • BREWER: MARK WILSon/GETTY IMAGES • STEIn: CouRTESY GARY STEIn • MERRICK: hAnDouT CREDIT
TV producer Dick Clark, host of the hit song and dance show American Bandstand that influenced generations of teenagers and decisively shaped pop culture, died April 18 at age 82. TV viewers counted on Clark for more than three decades to help them ring in the New Year with his Dec. 31 Rockin’ Eve program aired from New York’s Times Square.
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j u s t i f i e d sanctified g l o r i f i e d CLARK: DONNA SVENNEVIK/ABC/AP • TAYLOR: SHOULD READ JERRY LAMPEN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES • BREWER: MARK WILSON/GETTY IMAGES • STEIN: COURTESY GARY STEIN • MERRICK: HANDOUT CREDIT
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Make sure you know the basics.
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unny how we can spend our lives thinking we know something, but actually we have no clue. Worse, we’ll even argue about it with anyone who disagrees—pride is a powerful ally to our misunderstandings.
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“I’ve been hearing these concepts since boyhood, but it wasn’t until I spent 2 hours with this book that I really understood what they meant. I am richer for it.” —Brad C., Wheaton IL
So, get started on those basics—visit WhatWeBelieveAndWhy.com Enter discount code GJMG7JV3 when checking out and get 20% off the paperback through June 15, 2012. Available in paperback and Kindle versions.
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“Do we have to fight about everything?” House Speaker JOHN BOEHNER, R-Ohio, blaming Democrats for creating a political fight over the extension of student loan interest rates and women’s healthcare. Boehner noted that Democrats had voted previously to raid the same healthcare “slush fund” that Republicans want to use to fund the student loan program.
“We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now.” Environmentalist JAMES LOVELOCK (left) on the earth over the past years not warming as much as environmentalists thought it would. “The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing,” he said. “We thought we knew years ago. That led to some alarmist books—mine included—because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn’t happened.” Time magazine in named Lovelock one of “Heroes of the Environment.”
“It’s like a real Chinese version of The Shawshank Redemption.” Chinese activist HU JIA (left) on the escape from authorities by blind rights activist Chen Guangcheng on April .
“Realistic scenario.”
GOP presidential candidate MITT ROMNEY on President Obama’s claim that Romney would not have ordered the commando raid that killed Osama bin Laden last year.
“I would kiss George W. Bush on the mouth for what he did on PEPFAR.” Actor and liberal activist MATT DAMON (right) on his approval of the former president’s AIDS relief work.
“More than any President we’ve seen, this incumbent is willing to say things that aren’t in the area code of the truth.” Editorial by THE WALL STREET JOURNAL,, on President Obama’s rhetoric regarding tax, green jobs, and other claims.
CREDIT
“Even Jimmy Carter would have given that order.”
MARTIN SCHULZ (left), president of the European Parliament, on the possibility of the European Union collapsing.
ROMNEY: MATTHEW HEALEY/UPI/LANDOV • BOEHNER: JACQUELYN MARTIN/AP • LOVELOCK: JACQUES DEMARTHON/AFP/GETTY • HU: BILL SMITH/EPA/LANDOV • SCHULZ: SEAN GALLUP/GETTY • DAMON: STEPHEN LOVEKIN/GETTY FOR MERCEDES-BENZ FASHION CREDIT WEEK
Dispatches > Quotables
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Dispatches > Quick Takes One Spanish mayor would like the citizens of his community to mind their manners. And to prove he’s serious, he and the city council passed a code of conduct prohibiting a host of behaviors such as slurping soup and passing gas in public. Mayor Julian Atienza Garcia of La Toba, Spain, published the new rules— in all—in the village’s newsletter. But violators will not face penalty. “It is a compendium of basic rules of politeness that are being lost and should not be forgotten,” the United Left party mayor said.
’ There are lemonade stands, and then there’s Drew Cox’s lemonade stand. The -year-old Gladewater, Texas, boy didn’t just turn a profit on April , he raised over , in that one day. The youngster set up the stand with hopes of raising money to help his sick father, Randy Cox, pay for medical bills that have stacked up after being diagnosed with testicular cancer earlier this year. Drew charged the customary cents per cup, but as word spread throughout the East Texas town and surrounding communities of the boy selling lemonade for his father’s medical care, local residents flocked to the stand. Some bought cups of lemonade, while others simply wrote donation checks—including one for ,.
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ILLUSTRATION: KRIEG BARRIE • BAKER: JENKINS POLICE • COX: HANDOUT/KLTV • HALO 4: MICROSOFT/343 INDUSTRIES CREDIT
Republicans may have a secret weapon this fall: Microsoft has planned the much-ballyhooed release of Halo for Nov. —the same day as the U.S. presidential election. The first-person shooter saga is among the best-selling video games of all time, especially with young people. And the GOP nominee can hope that some young voters—who overwhelmingly voted for Barack Obama in —will be too intertwined with their controllers to cast a ballot on Election Day.
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SHIP: SUSAN MUHLHAUSER/TIME LIFE PICTURES/GETTY IMAGES • REES: MEREDITH HEUER • ILLUSTRATION: KRIEG BARRIE • HEART ATTACK GRILL: MATT YORK/AP CREDIT
A -year-old from eastern Kentucky admitted to siphoning gasoline out of a police cruiser on April . He had little choice after police discovered that his girlfriend had posted a picture on Facebook of him in the act of siphoning. The photo went viral across the social networking platform, tipping off police in Letcher County. Once arrested, Michael Baker admitted to the act, but told WYMT that it had been a joke. “I got a little bit of gas. I ain’t gonna lie, but not much. I couldn’t get much. I tried but there wasn’t much in it,” Baker told the TV station. But police didn’t see the humor: They charged Baker with theft and held him overnight in jail.
What could have been a truly awesome spectacle now is cancelled—all because the idea proved too popular. Greece’s government had offered to send a replica of a ,-year-old warship to London to commemorate the Summer Games in July. But in April, officials with London decided that having rowers propel the trireme up the River Thames with the Olympic Flame would prove so popular as to create a security hassle. Olympic officials subsequently dropped the idea. The ornate replica of a warship that participated in the Battle of Salamis had been a centerpiece of the Olympic Games in Athens.
Those who simply cannot abide a machinesharpened pencil can now look to David Rees’ example as a paragon of the sharpened point. Rees, whose new book How to Sharpen Pencils hit bookstores on April , says he hopes to start a trend of hand-sharpening normal No. pencils. And for those who lack the proper tools—or who would rather an expert sharpen pencils for them—Rees has a mail-order sharpening business. In an interview with the San Jose Mercury News, the comic writer says he’s blade-sharpened over pencils for customers at per pencil. “This is not a joke. I have an artisanal pencil sharpening business; it turns a profit,” he told the paper while on a book tour. “One of the goals of my book is to remind folks that, in this age of iPads and digital styluses, the humdrum pencil is still a remarkably efficient and elegant mark-making device.”
ILLUSTRATION: KRIEG BARRIE • BAKER: JENKINS POLICE • COX: HANDOUT/KLTV • HALO 4: MICROSOFT/343 INDUSTRIES CREDIT
SHIP: SUSAN MUHLHAUSER/TIME LIFE PICTURES/GETTY IMAGES • REES: MEREDITH HEUER • ILLUSTRATION: KRIEG BARRIE • HEART ATTACK GRILL: MATT YORK/AP CREDIT
Somewhere in eastern Afghanistan, a man is wondering whether he’ll ever collect on his reward. The man is Mohammad Ashan, and the answer is no. Ashan, described as a mid-level Taliban commander, wandered into a police checkpoint in Paktika Province in April holding a wanted poster and demanding the advertised reward. Problem: The man depicted in the wanted poster was Ashan himself. Police officials and U.S. military officials were perplexed at Ashan’s audacity of turning himself in. But nevertheless, they confirmed his identity and arrested him. “This guy is the Taliban equivalent of the Home Alone burglars,” one U.S. official told The Washington Post.
Customers cannot say they weren’t warned. On April , the second diner in two months collapsed while eating a burger at the Heart Attack Grill in Las Vegas. The woman was reportedly eating a “double bypass burger” lathered in cheese and bacon and smoking cigarettes when she collapsed and had to go to the hospital, where she is currently recovering. The restaurant chain’s brash celebration of unhealthy eating includes “flatliner fries” cooked in pure lard, butterfat shakes, and no filter cigarettes, with waitresses dressed as nurses. Most controversially, the chain offers its super-high calorie meals for free to customers who weigh more than pounds. In February, a male customer had an actual heart attack while eating a “triple bypass burger.” M AY 1 9 , 2 0 1 2
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WORLD
5/1/12 8:00 AM
Janie B. Cheaney
Not for sale Everything has a price at Vanity Fair, but the best thing is free
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attend to her basic needs. Despite the fact that she could barely move at all in her bed, she was not helped into more comfortable positions. Much worse, her food was left inaccessibly out of her reach.” Only family intervention kept the woman from going hungry. Phillips traces this shabby state of affairs to feminists of the s, who claimed that some of the distinctive functions of nursing, such as keeping patients clean and fed, were demeaning to a profession dominated by women. Nursing became an academic rather than a practical subject, and nurses trained as administrators rather than caretakers. Though many British nurses still hold to the Florence Nightingale ideal that attracted them to the profession in the first place, the problem is worrisome enough that Dame Joan Bakewell, advocate for the elderly, has suggested “empathy training” as part of the curriculum. But empathy and caring can’t be factored into a pay scale. Michael J. Sandel, in an Atlantic article called “What Isn’t For Sale?” worries that a market economy has morphed into a market society, in which people rent their foreheads for advertising and children are paid to study. He calls for a public discussion about the overreach of markets, but “public discussion” usually means government action. And that means even more money—a clunky, Rube Goldberg apparatus for robbing Peter to pay Paul. John Bunyan beat him to the punch years ago. Vanity Fair is not defeated by public policy—in fact, markets and politics are so entwined even Appolyon couldn’t pry them apart. Men and women who rate themselves according to tax brackets and pay scales have missed the good news. The best thing in life really is free: “Come everyone who thirsts ... and he who has no money, come, buy and eat!” (Isaiah :). And they themselves are priceless. A
KRIEG BARRIE
N I reread The Pilgrim’s Progress in order to write commentary on it for my book blog. Reading slowly for notes and questions made me wonder if John Bunyan might have eavesdropped on the st century somehow, particularly in his description of Vanity Fair. The thing that struck me most on this reading is that everything at Vanity Fair is for sale: not just property and goods, but intangibles such as honor, pleasure, delight, even religion. People too: husbands, wives, and children. Respectable items are on the market as well as disreputable, but the prices are set by men, not God. And there’s little correlation between price and value. At the beginning of the “women’s liberation” movement, women claimed that the work of homemaking and child rearing should be paid in order to be considered valuable. But the reason there’s no salary for homemaking is because it’s invaluable—as we see now from decades of trying to get by with broken homes and outsourced child care. When a young woman at our church walked out on her family a few years ago, it took at least of us, pitching in as we could, to make up (inadequately) for one wife and mother whose worth was far above rubies. But the world sets prices—like pieces of silver for the Son of God—that inflate the value of some items far above their worth and make priceless commodities look cheap. Business courses seldom teach that an entrepreneur’s greatest asset is a loyal, tight-knit family. Family doesn’t ask for a raise or walk out over a labor dispute or demand overtime for late-night bookkeeping sessions. A brother, daughter, or parent can delay gratification for the promise of future gain, and the gain is counted not only in dollars but also in satisfaction. But where dollars are the chief measure of value, costs become prohibitive. British author Melanie Phillips is dismayed about what’s happened to the nursing profession in her country, especially after first-hand experience with the care of her aged mother. “Not only was she addressed discourteously, there was also precious little attempt to ease her acute discomfort [due to Parkinson’s and MS] or
Email: jcheaney@worldmag.com
4/30/12 11:50 AM
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Reviews MOVIES & TV BOOKS Q&A MUSIC
Heroic struggle
MOVIE: A disparate and fractious group of superhero characters form a compelling story in The Avengers BY EMILY WHITTEN
MARVEL
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F , especially if it depends on a “handful of freaks” with serious ego problems. When villainous god, Loki, arrives through a mysterious power source known as the Tesseract, S.H.I.E.L.D. director Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) calls on a team of superhero misfits known as The Avengers to defend the earth from his nefarious plans. (Insert comic bubble: “Avengers Assemble!”) Back in the real world, that means director Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Cabin in the Woods) had to juggle seven main characters without giving any of them short shrift. After all, many of these characters recently starred in their own prequels to The Avengers—i.e. Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Captain America (Chris Evans), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), and the Hulk (Mark
Ruffalo). And in perhaps the greatest superhuman feat of the film, Whedon actually pulls it off. (Shazam!) He has crafted a compelling storyline, characters with depth, and a PG- action thrill-ride that will satisfy fanboys and general audiences alike. (Beyond violence, one drug reference and mild cursing contribute to the rating.) Each of the characters has some personal challenge to overcome: Thor wrestles with concern for his brother, the villain Loki. The Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) flirt with a romantic subplot and struggle to undo the mistakes they’ve made. The Hulk has to learn to smash people on the other team instead of his own. And Nick Fury maneuvers the minefield of politics, while keeping the Avengers focused on the task at hand.
Perhaps the strongest conflict is between Captain America and Iron Man. (Egads!) Theirs isn’t just a clash of personalities but generations. Captain America is a golden boy of the World War II era. Despite having been frozen for years, he was brought back to consciousness by Fury and his gang, and now appears little worse for the wear. Clean-cut and patriotic, Captain America represents the self-effacing, hard-working ideal of the Greatest Generation. When his no-tech, starsand-stripes costume is called oldfashioned, an agent assures him, “In a time ASSEMBLY like this, people might REQUIRED: Thor (left) just need a little and Captain old-fashioned.” America In stark contrast (Boo, working hiss!), Iron Man Tony together. M AY 1 9 , 2 0 1 2
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Reviews > Movies & TV Stark is about as far from a patriotic dreamboat as you can get. He’s a bad boy from the computer age in a black Sabbath T-shirt, spouting put-downs and techno jargon like he’s still in junior high. And what is he really, apart from his fancy metal suit? In his own words, “genius, millionaire, playboy philanthropist.” He is today’s American ideal—witty, wealthy, and worldly wise; unafraid to question anyone or anything. And really funny. Their tension takes shape early when Iron Man upstages Captain America in an early fight with Loki. Thor intervenes, and Stark’s volatile personality leads to an all out brawl with Thor, whom Stark calls “Shakespeare in the Park.” Captain America—seemingly the only adult in the group—eventually manages to rein them both in. But it’s that kind of petty, dishonorable conduct that leaves
Captain America with a bad taste in his mouth for Stark. As the battles play out, Stark has to prove whether “hanDfuL Of fREaks”: he’s worth his Hawkeye; mettle. Does he loki; the Hulk have a moral com(clockwise pass as strong as from left). Captain America’s? Can freedom survive this new kind of hero? Here’s a hint: Back in battle scene one, Loki tells a group of innocent civilians, “In the end, you [humans] will always kneel.” An older gentleman, presumably a survivor of the Holocaust, slowly stands, and says, “Not to men like you.” Loki indignantly replies, “There are no men like
me.” To which the older man quips, “There are always men like you.” Attacking freedom may be a timeless pursuit, but The Avengers offers hope that the current generation isn’t ready to kneel just yet. (Take that!) A
damsels in distress by Stephanie perrault
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What happens when you throw straight man humor, serious coeds, and an idealistic college campus into a blender? You get Damsels in Distress, director Whit Stillman’s quirky, selfdeprecating comedy that winks at its own goofiness while addressing cultural issues head-on. The curtain opens at Seven Oaks College where a trio of coeds is examining the newbies at student orientation. Led by Violet (Greta Gerwig), the girls select Lily—a young woman in need of friends—as their newest recruit. A Converse-shoed transfer student, Lily discovers her new friends—Rose, Heather, and Violet—are slightly outside of normal.
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avengerS: Marvel • daMSelS: Kerry Brown/Sony PictureS claSSicS
MOVIE
Clad in vintage Vogue attire, they are a serious bunch of girls who believe God gave them abilities and talents and expects them to be used for His glory. Their personal mission is to elevate campus life by helping the moronic frat boys realize their full potential. The girls believe their gracious influence will have a civilizing effect on the hapless goons. The more Lily learns about Violet and her quirky ways, the less attracted she is to her. A self-described “normal” college student, Lily dresses in jeans and T-shirts and sleeps with her grad student boyfriend. But being “normal” doesn’t do Lily any favors. Being normal leaves her sexually scarred when she goes along with her boyfriend Xavier’s conviction that sex should be non-procreative—a backward and distorted view as far as everyone else in the movie is concerned. Though there are no sex scenes in this PG-13 movie, there is a fairly open discussion of sex. There is also some bad language, though no more than you’d hear during a normal day on campus. The winners in this movie are not those like Lily who are trying to be “normal.” The winners are those like Violet who ascribe to a Judeo-Christian worldview, know their purpose in life, and know that the world needs more individual thinkers, not more sheep. Violet and company realize the world runs according to the rules of its Maker. Though a little quirky and oddly intellectual, Violet is the real McCoy and through her character Stillman reveals his worldview. Thanks to his good-natured humor and self-deprecating wit, Stillman is able to serve a portion of scathing cultural critique without coming off as pedantic or bizarre. Laughing their way out the door, viewers come away challenged to think beyond “normal” and aspire to a more refined and gracious way of life. See all our movie reviews at worldmag.com/movies
5/1/12 2:56 PM
aardMan aniMation/Sony PictureS
nORMaL? gerwig as violet (left) and analeigh tipton as lily.
MOVIE
The Pirates! Band of Misfits BY MEGAN BASHAM
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BOX OFFICE TOP 10 CAUTIONS: Quantity of sexual (S), violent (V), and foul-language (L) content on a - scale, with high, from kids-in-mind.com
1̀ 2̀ AARDMAN ANIMATION/SONY PICTURES
AVENGERS: MARVEL • DAMSELS: KERRY BROWN/SONY PICTURES CLASSICS
- according to Box Office Mojo
3̀ 4̀ 5̀ 6̀ 7̀ 8̀ 9̀ 10 `
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Think Like a Man PG-13 ....... The Pirates! Band of Misfits* PG ............... The Hunger Games* PG-13... The Lucky One PG-13 ............ The Five-Year Engagement R ........................ Safe R ........................................... The Raven R .............................. Chimpanzee G........................ The Three Stooges* PG ........ The Cabin in the Woods R .............................
*Reviewed by WORLD
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P are common enough in the children’s genre, but a pirate movie featuring Charles Darwin, Jane Austen, and the Royal Society of London? That’s something that could only be the work of Aardman, the British studio that brought audiences other painstakingly-wrought claymation features like Wallace and Gromit and Chicken Run. The swashbucklers in The Pirates! Band of Misfits, whose names are limited to such descriptions as “Albino Pirate” and “Pirate Who Likes Sunsets and Kittens” (Al Roker), are too busy singing shanties and celebrating ham night to get down to the serious work of amassing booty. So when the annual pirate-of-the-year awards roll around, once again the Pirate Captain (Hugh Grant) has no hope of competing with his more cut-throat colleagues like Black Bellamy (Jeremy Piven) and Cutlass Liz (Salma Hayek). Determined to show they can plunder with the best of them, the Pirate Captain and his loyal crew begin to capture every vessel they run across, including a plague ship, a school field trip ship, and a ship of “naturalists, ” (the natural parts are, thankfully, concealed by nautical gear). At last they stumble upon Charles Darwin’s HMS Beagle and a plan to win enough gold to prove they’re the scurviest salty-dogs on the high seas. While the presence of the father of natural selection might make some wary,
this Darwin is more interested in impressing girls than on advancing his theories on origins of species. There are a few jokes of the evolutionary persuasion such as when the Pirate Captain notes the similarities between Darwin and his monkey servant, but none seem intentionally indoctrinating. Indeed, some quips run the other way, like the motto on the Royal Society’s seal that notes the group has been “Playing God since .” As evidenced from the above, the humor here is dry, cheeky, and very, very British. The hilariously off-beat Gideon Defoe novel the movie is based on wasn’t written for children (though bright, older kids could certainly enjoy it), and at times these adult origins show. One gag involves the “surprisingly curvaceous pirate” whose pirate breeches and fake beard barely conceal her infatuation with the Pirate Captain. Though most of it is likely to fly over kids’ heads, they will probably pick up the
FEAT OF CLAY: Animator Richard Haynes preparing a shot on the set of The Pirates!
one or two instances of bad language, including “arse,” that earns the movie a PG rating. Overall though, The Pirates! relies more on wit than on double-entendres, and for parents who appreciate quirk, it offers a clever respite from the bathroom gags that populate many family films these days. M AY 1 9 , 2 0 1 2
WORLD
5/1/12 3:13 PM
Reviews > Books
Treadmill roundup Worthwhile reads on topics from marriage to public policy BY MARVIN OLASKY
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MEMORIAL DAY REFLECTION The photo on the cover of David Nelson and Randolph Schiffer’s David and Lee Roy: A Vietnam Story (Texas Tech University Press, ) shows Lee Roy Herron, a young Marine, at a church service in Vietnam on Jan. , . He made it there by flagging down a helicopter going from his Fire Support Base Shiloh to Fire Support Base Razor, where the service was held. After flying over miles of enemy territory to attend that service, on subsequent Sundays—since Fire Support Base Shiloh was short a Protestant chaplain—he helped conduct services there for his fellow Marines. Herron died on Feb. , , after taking a wounded officer’s place and destroying an enemy machine gun bunker. He was trying to take out a second machine gun bunker when a heavy mist and rain clouds suddenly lifted. Spotted immediately and gunned down, he received posthumously the Navy Cross, second only to the Medal of Honor. —M.O.
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government spending under control can be popular, but to pass them Americans need to throw out the political class of big spenders. Gilbert Garcia’s Reagan’s Comeback (Trinity University) shows how the future president almost retired after Gerald Ford beat him in primary after primary early in , but Reagan’s big victory in the Texas primary that year restored him politically and personally. No Enemies, No Hatred (Harvard) is a collection of essays and poems by Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize winner now serving an -year prison sentence for what Beijing terms “incite-
Email: molasky@worldmag.com
4/25/12 3:39 PM
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H’ ’ second bimonthly roundup of books— these are all from —that I’m not able to review at length. Justin Buzzard’s Date Your Wife (Crossway) provides practical tips for husbands who want to love their wives and save their marriages. Pascal Bruckner’s The Paradox of Love (Princeton) shows that even a secular French philosopher can recognize that marriage has virtues and free love is “the oxymoron par excellence. … How can love, which attaches, be compatible with freedom, which separates?” Mitch Stokes’ A Shot of Faith (to the Head) (Thomas Nelson) vigorously and rightly criticizes evidentialism by showing that facts of any kind assume a certain faith. Anthony Selvaggio’s Toxic Ideas Polluting Your Mind (P&R) provides succinct critiques from a Christian perspective of ideologies such as egalitarianism, consumerism, and relativism. James Palmer’s Heaven Cracks, Earth Shakes (Basic) is a well-written history focused on , the year Mao Zedong died after killing tens of millions, the Tangshin earthquake killed tens of thousands, and China began emerging from a political nightmare into its current grey dawn (or dusk). Jay Nordlinger’s Peace, They Say (Encounter) shows how politicized the Nobel Peace Prize has become. Douglas Wissing’s Funding the Enemy (Prometheus) provides evidence that U.S. officials have mismanaged billions of dollars meant for developing Afghanistan, and have ended up bolstering the drug trade and dumping money into Taliban hands. Quintus Tullius Cicero’s short How to Win an Election, written in .. and translated by Philip Freeman (Princeton), shows us how demagogues in .. and .. get elected. Scott Rasmussen’s The People’s Money (Simon & Schuster) shows through public opinion polling that programs to get
ment to subvert state power.” Liu in his writing comes close to Christ at times but, unlike millions of his countrymen, has so far backed away. John M. Barry’s Roger Williams and The Creation of the American Soul (Viking) is a lively history that goes less into Williams’ theology than his emphasis on liberty and the way that eventually fed into the American Revolution. For those especially interested in the youth of Christianity, Peter Schafer’s The Jewish Jesus: How Judaism and Christianity Shaped Each Other (Princeton), is a scholarly look at how Jews and Christians, during the first centuries after Christ, opposed but learned from each ot her. Those who hope to tackle one of the biggest public policy issues over the next decade should imbibe Sylvester Schieber’s The Predictable Surprise: The Unraveling of the U.S. Retirement System (Oxford).
NOTABLE BOOKS Four children’s books > reviewed by
Woodrow for President: A Tail of Voting, Campaigns, and Elections
Peter W. and Cheryl Shaw Barnes With Richard Scarry-like illustrations and words set in verse, the authors explain political campaigns and elections. Readers follow Woodrow G. Washingtail from birth to boyhood, college to marriage. “With your heart and your brains, we agree you’d be great,” say his friends as they urge him to run for office. When Woodrow serves well, the mice elect him to ever higher positions until he’s ready to run for president. The authors explain the meaning of volunteers, campaigns and political parties, primaries, debates, and party conventions. For added interest, children can search each page for the tiny mouse Secret Service agent hiding in the illustrations. This book is part of a series that includes a book about the Declaration of Independence.
Demolition Sally Sutton Demolition is a noisy book, sure to delight little people who love trucks and destruction. Its pages are filled with wrecking balls, bulldozers, and hydraulic shears. It’s written with short, punchy sentences and vivid action words that fit the subject: “Work the jaws. Work the jaws. Bite and tear and slash. Dinosaurs had teeth like this! Rip! Roar! Crash!” At the story’s beginning, the construction workers pull on their boots and put on their hardhats. A decrepit building with broken windows stands behind them. Stepby-step the book shows how the workers tear down the building, then sort, grind up, and recycle the materials, and build a playground in its place. When You’re a Pirate Dog and Other Pirate Poems Eric Ode The poems in this captivating collection will turn even the most reluctant child into a lover of doggerel. The book features rollicking rhymes like this one from the title poem: “When you’re a pirate dog, your life is free from troubles. They never put you in a tub with smelly soap and bubbles.” Or this, from “Pirate Stew”: “When told to feed a pirate crew, a pot of pirate stew will do. You’ll need a kettle, big and rusty, thick with grime and rather dusty. Add a dozen buzzard eggs; sixty-seven spider legs; thick, congealing spotted eel; piles of spoiled banana peel.” Illustrations of bulbous-nosed pirates with gaptoothed smiles accompany the poems.
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The Flint Heart Katherine and John Paterson The Patersons abridge Eden Phillpott’s fantasy into a story appropriate as a read-aloud for younger children, or for upper elementary readers to read on their own. It begins thousands of years ago when a warrior wants to be a chief. A magician tells him he is too soft: To be chief you have to be “hardhearted as a wolf.” So the warrior asks the magician to make him a charm to give him a hard heart—and he does. The rest of the fairy tale describes the evil wrought by the flint heart and how a young boy and his sister overcome it. Email: solasky@worldmag.com; see all our reviews at WORLDmag.com/books mag.com/books
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SPOTLIGHT John Stott Stott: The Humble Leader by Julia Cameron (Christian Focus, ) is lively and full of specific detail meant to appeal to young people who might not be familiar with Stott, the well-known pastor/ theologian who died last year. The book includes stories of the theologian as a mischievous child, an avid birdwatcher, and a curate whose concern for poor people led him to spend several days in the s as a homeless person so he could experience London from that perspective. Many of the stories come from long-time friends, who shared their recollections with Cameron. The biography shows Stott to be a visionary whose commitment to Scripture and the global church led him to disciple international students studying in London, train African pastors, and help begin the Lausanne Movement.
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4/25/12 3:39 PM
Reviews > Q&A
The
cheer of the crowd Politicians and pastors, says former Congressman J.C. Watts, should beware of the intoxication of praise By Marvin Olasky
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Julius Caesar “J. C.” Watts Jr., born in 1957, was a football star in high school, college, and the Canadian Football League. He became a youth pastor and then a Republican member of the House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. Over the past nine years he has been a businessman and corporate board member. You’ve had four careers of seven to 10 years each: football, pastor, Congress, business. Any commonalities in those? A common thread in all of those is that the cheer of the crowd is so intoxicating. So seductive. Wait … you’re saying pastors also like praise? It’s intoxicating in the back of the church when you’re shaking hands and people say “Thank you for coming” and “That was such a wonderful message” if you’re not fighting that and keeping the focus where it should be—on God’s word. Glad to be out of politics? Politics is worse than any arena I’ve ever been in. You’re called “the honorable” and you wear those little pins that get you through security and you don’t have to stand in line and you’ve got staff that come at your beck and call. You came to Washington in 1995 as part of the Republican Revolution. That revolution fizzled. What killed it? Seduction? All the things we accused Democrats of doing for 40 years when they were in the majority: We became the majority and started doing the same things. Our guys went to jail. Our guys were in cahoots with lobbyists and concocting deals. Missed opportunity? We had an opportunity in 1995-1996 to push the envelope and be transformational—but many go to Washington thinking it’s a cesspool, stay for six months, and think it’s a Jacuzzi. The cheer of the crowd is just as seductive for Republicans as it is for Democrats. Did you like being a Republican in Congress? I often felt like the outsider looking in with Republicans. Maybe I spend too much time thinking about it, but next time you turn to Christian television, watch T.D. Jakes or Tony Evans or other black pastors: You can’t get to the right of those pastors theologically, on life, on marriage, on economics, but 90 percent of their population votes for the other guy. They Caitlin O’DOnnell/the penDuluM
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don’t vote for the conservative Republican candidate. Why? Why do we not work as Republicans to have a deeper relationship with those constituencies? Why? When my wife and I were looking for a church home in northern Virginia I told her, “I’m not looking for a church that looks like me. I’m looking for a church that looks like heaven: red, yellow, brown, black, and white.” We found one. I’m not looking for a party that looks like me. I’m looking for a party that looks like us. I can give you Scriptural arguments for diversity, for inclusion, but when we talk like that as conservatives we think that’s liberal code language for big government or progressiveness. No! I feel that way because of what Scripture encourages me to believe. Welfare reform is often looked at as the one major success of the Republican Revolution. Very few things were right with welfare. Penalize moms for saving money. Penalize moms for marrying the father of the children. We’re going to keep you right below the poverty level. Our federal government advocated that for many years. We reformed that in 1996. And we’ve lost ground on some of those reforms. Are we losing ground because the left has a different understanding of compassion? The left measures compassion by how many people you can have on food stamps and AFDC and public housing. I define compassion by how few people are on food stamps and AFDC and public housing because we’ve helped them climb the ladder to economic opportunity! How do those who are poorly educated climb that ladder? We need to make sure that every child in America goes to a school every day that is safe and will teach them how to read and write and do arithmetic and gain the computer skills necessary to allow them to compete in the global marketplace. If we can get that through the public schools, fine. If we can’t, I’m all for parental choice in education to allow that parent to take his/her/their child to a school that is safe and teaches them, even if it is a faith-based school! The big GOP initiative a decade ago was No Child Left Behind, but it clearly doesn’t seem to have worked. What would you propose as the alternative?
In some school systems around the country you have better odds of winning the lottery, if you choose to play it, than you do of getting rid of bad teachers. When I was a quarterback, I was graded on every play. I got a score on my performance. Sundays after the game we’d watch film and I’d get a grade sheet. I usually got some sense of how well I was doing, and whether I was going to start the next Saturday, based on that grade sheet. And coaches had no problem saying “Olasky, you’re not getting the job done, buddy.” A lot of coaches said that. Or, “Watts, you’re not getting the job done. We’re going to look at a new quarterback.” We want our athletes to be held accountable like that ... but with the school teachers we say nuh-uh. Education and the judicial system ... two last bastions of liberalism. The left will go to the max to protect their turf. And now you’re in business and creating jobs. I’ve never gone into business to create a job ... I’ve gone into business to create a profit. If I create a profit there will be a job. If there is no profit there is no job. Jobs are byproducts of profits. Your dad was a small businessman, wasn’t he? Daddy always had a big truck, and he used it to haul watermelon. We hauled hay, we hauled brick, we hauled rock, we moved people. When you were 7 you went to work in the hayfield? You had these big old long— seemed like 10-mile long—hay rows. These rows had square bales of hay, about 75 pounds each. Daddy would direct the truck down these hay rows and I’d be in there at age 7 just making sure the truck stayed between the two bales of hay. You’re driving? Could you reach the gas pedal? Could not! The gear that Daddy would put it in was called compound. You’d pull this thing up in the stick shift and it would just automatically go down the hay row and accelerate on its own. All I had to do was guide it. I’d get to the end of the row and somebody would get it going another direction, and there I was at 7 years old. Ever haul hay as an adult? When I left home in 1976 I made a vow: I would never haul hay again in my life unless it was for me. Now I’m in the John Deere business. A M ay 1 9 , 2 0 1 2
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Reviews > Music
The anxious queen
MADONNA strives to maintain a facade in her vulgar MDNA BY ARSENIO ORTEZA
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“T ,” Taki Theodoracopulos has written in summarizing The Great Gatsby, “is that we can never really be someone else. We are who we are.” That is also the point of Madonna’s latest album, MDNA (Interscope). Like James Gatz, the nom de womb of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s greatest protagonist, Madonna Louise Ciccone has spent her adult life trying to be perceived as anyone but who she is—a good Catholic girl from Michigan whose sense of security was threatened by the early death of her mother and subsequent remarriage of her father. Also like Gatz, Madonna is fascinating mainly to the extent that she hasn’t succeeded. If she had, MDNA would’ve been a quite different album, one characterized by Gatsby-like cool. Instead, driven by the pop zeitgeist’s manic, electronic pulse,
it’s her most desperately vigorous attempt in years to convince the world that no matter how many headlines her legatees and peers make by dressing weirdly (Lady Gaga) or dying under mysterious circumstances (Whitney Houston), no one can touch her when it comes to the music. “There’s only one queen,” Nicki Minaj guest raps in MDNA’s “I Don’t Give A,” “and that’s Madonna.” There are enough third-person references to the “queen” throughout MDNA to signal anxiety over being forgotten. A group of what sounds like cheerleaders even chants “Madonna” in the refrain of the album’s first single, “Give Me All Your Luvin’.” She also name checks some of her greatest hits by working their titles into her lyrics (“You can be my lucky star,” “Like a virgin sweet and clean”) and co-opts phrases or titles hitherto identified with Cyndi Lauper (“Girls, they just wanna have some fun”), Sonny and Cher (“and the beat goes on”), and the Rolling Stones (“Some Girls”). From beginning to end, “girl” and “girls” are how she refers to herself and/or her competition for affection, terms that coming from a -year-old smack of denial. So much for keeping her insecure inner child under wraps. Her inner Catholic keeps emerging too. She begins the album by reciting an act of contrition and in “I’m a Sinner” says part of the “Hail Mary” after imploring the aid of the Saints Christopher, Sebastian, Anthony, and Aquinas—all on an album that, linguistically, is her most vulgar. It’s as if, despite her onstage raunch and her real-life hedonism and Kabbalah obsession, she knows that it’s only a matter of time before everyone sees through her Gatsby act and it’s as Gatz that she’ll have to face the music.
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Serengeti
Son Lux
Email: aorteza@worldmag.com
4/27/12 9:38 AM
RICHIE: ETHAN MILLER/GETTY IMAGES
Stevens
MADONNA: EVAN AGOSTINI/AP • S/S/S: HANDOUT
On the other end of the publicity-seeking spectrum is Sufjan Stevens, a Christian musician-composer so indifferent to what his audience might think of his work that he sometimes seems oblivious to its very existence. The latest case in point is Beak & Claw (Anticon), an -minute EP that Stevens recorded with the Chicago rapper Serengeti and the Christian soundscape artist Son Lux under the name s/s/s. Combining Lux’s electronic beats, Stevens’ Auto-Tuned singing, and Serengeti’s clever (and mostly clean) rhymes, the project has received predominantly negative reviews. The common complaint: Its four songs feel like discrete and failed experiments intended to alienate each participant’s following. In a sense, though, missed connections and dreams deferred are what the EP is about. Even its most-derided track, “Octomom,” makes sense within this context. And on “Beyond Any Doubt,” when Stevens sings, “If I could figure out what it was all about, I’d work it out,” the mixed media and mixed messages are one. —A.O.
NOTABLE CDs
Five new pop-rock CDs > reviewed by
Heart Audrey Assad This homeschooled, Protestant-reared, convert to Catholicism obviously takes her craft seriously. Her lyrics are thoughtful, her melodies pretty without suggesting chick-flick soundtracks, and her singing indicative that although she’s tempted to over-sing, she’s disciplined enough not to. She could be more disciplined. Seven songs over four minutes are too many. And, as tasteful as “Wherever You Go” is, lyrics sung from God’s point of view strain credulity. What doesn’t: her transformation of “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” into a st-century anthem. Birdy Birdy Knowing that Birdy (née Jasmine van den Bogaerde) will turn in May isn’t necessary to appreciate her debut, but it adds to the impressiveness. Besides not sounding , she doesn’t sound as if she’s trying not to. “But what does a -year-old, even a precocious one, have to tell me?” you ask. Nothing, hence her sticking mainly to songs written by older people. And although she probably hasn’t “seen fire and rain,” she performs a social service by universalizing the sentiment away from James Taylor.
Leaving Eden
Carolina Chocolate Drops The media hook this time around is that by recording these self-consciously retro North Carolinians live in the studio, Buddy Miller (wearing his producer’s hat) has captured why they’re such a hit at folk festivals and other live gatherings. Well, maybe, except that live gatherings also have crowds—a factor that adds greatly to the overall effect—and this album doesn’t. On the instrumentals, the absence of a communal vibe doesn’t matter and would probably just get in the way. Most of these songs, however, feature singing.
MADONNA: EVAN AGOSTINI/AP • S/S/S: HANDOUT
RICHIE: ETHAN MILLER/GETTY IMAGES
Sonik Kicks Paul Weller Twenty years after going solo, this former Jam and Style Council leader finally makes a good album. The simplest explanation for why it succeeds where its forerunners failed is that it lives up to its title. Not Jam punky, Style Council jazzy, or solo blue-eyed-soulful dull, it delivers one “sonik” kick after another, shifting deftly from electronica to acoustic folk with strings to quite a bit in between. The lyrics, meanwhile, give him something to sing (which he does rather well) if not necessarily to say. See all our reviews at WORLDmag.com/music
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SPOTLIGHT If, as Roger Friedman has argued, Richie’s Tuskegee (Mercury Lionel Richie Nashville) missed debuting at No. on Billboard’s Top because of artificially inflated sales figures for Madonna’s MDNA, it has also benefitted from the controversy. Without it, there’d be nothing remotely newsworthy about the album, as it’s merely the latest example of an over-the-hill performer squeezing a million or two more dollars (enough, in Richie’s case, to cover his IRS debt) from his back catalogue. Does Tuskegee sound good? Of course: It’s Richie’s biggest solo and Commodores hits. Does it sound as good as other Richie best-ofs? Of course not—not with Richie splitting vocal duties with country duet partners ill-suited to pop-soul balladry. Could anything have saved the project? Yes, a rendition of the Commodores’ single “Jesus Is Love.” But it only hit No. on Billboard’s R&B chart and missed the pop charts altogether. So, really, what were the chances?
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WORLD
4/27/12 9:39 AM
Mindy Belz
A tale of two friendships Iraqis face an ominous political crisis—and greater hope for unity amid diversity
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ALLIES? Barzani (right) greets Sadr upon his arrival in Irbil.
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at the region’s northern border and long distrustful, is unlikely to tolerate a breakaway republic between it and Baghdad. And in the south, a secessionist enclave led by Sadr is likely to bring Iran ever closer to Baghdad. Though Sadr and Maliki both are Shiites, Maliki’s government has been largely secular (and increasingly dictatorial), while Sadr would embrace an Iranian style theocracy. The partitioning of the country along sectarian lines—a Kurdish north, a Sunni center, and a Shiite south—was touted by then Sen. Joe Biden as far back as . It’s hard to see such an outcome as anything other than what it likely is: a precursor to a regional conflict that could make the second Gulf War seem like a skirmish. And such a plan leaves out Iraq’s many minority groups, including Christians. Often we hear only bad news about Christians in Iraq, but there is good news too, as they are testing friendships amid adversity also. Women from churches across the country gathered in March for a second annual women’s conference in Irbil. “It was a success in every way we hoped, and also in ways we hadn’t planned on,” the organizers recently reported. Seventy women registered for the conference, and came—from Baghdad and Mosul as well as Kurdish cities in the north. Forty-five women came from Baghdad by bus, enduring repeated checkpoints and stops en route. The women represented some of the country’s oldest churches—dating back more than a millennia—and some of its newest evangelical house churches. As the women met for several days of teaching and fellowship, violence trailed them—providing what one leader called “a backdrop of sadness that we were burdened to share and lift.” Word came early on that a church leader many of the women knew had been found killed in Mosul. Only days before, a student had shot an American teacher working in nearby Sulaymaniah, Jeremiah Small, and then killed himself. The daughter of the conference’s main speaker, psychologist Sahar Tawfiq, had been present as a student in the classroom when the shootings took place. Yet Tawfiq gave practical advice on the daily disciplines of faith and family, organizers reported, “and so it continued, our sisterhood bonded by both the fellowship of suffering and the triumphant truth of who we are in Christ.” In Irbil, time may tell which friendships sown in adversity survive. A
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I and adversity tries them, then friendship is persistently on trial in Iraq. While car bombings, targeted killings, and kidnappings continue to be a daily feature of life, what’s becoming equally ominous is what former Kurdish Prime Minister Barham Salih last week called “Iraq’s deepening political crisis.” Disputes over oil receipts, power sharing, and security threaten to tear apart the coalition government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. In late April the two leading parties that helped form the government with Maliki two years ago threatened to pull out. For the first time since the U.S. invasion to oust Saddam Hussein in , the prospect of secession is real. And out of that adversity come strange friends. Lesser circumstances would not prompt Kurdish President Massoud Barzani—a northerner, a Sunni Kurd, and longstanding U.S. ally—to roll out the red carpet in northern Iraq for Muqtadr al-Sadr—the Iranian-backed Shiite cleric and political leader from the south who has long declared himself an enemy of the United States. But that’s exactly what happened on April as Barzani welcomed Sadr to Irbil, capital of the region known as Kurdistan. The two met to discuss whether they should withdraw their support of the government in Baghdad, which would lead not only to its downfall but a potential breakup. Barzani has promised that if the political impasse isn’t resolved by September, he may put secession to a vote in Kurdistan. Asked after the meeting whether he would try to broker a new coalition or force Maliki from power, Sadr told reporters, “I will answer later.” The Kurds with their own security force, oil reserves, language, and culture have long wanted independence. But Turkey, perched
Email: mbelz@worldmag.com
5/1/12 8:07 AM
CREDIT
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POINTING THE WAY:
Jesus Ramos places a sign outside near Laredo, Texas.
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rr r CAMPAIGN
Republicans hope that a young group of popular Hispanic conservatives, such as Ted Cruz of Texas, will help the party win over Hispanic voters in November. Keen on stopping them, Democrats look to make immigration reform a higher priority BY EDWARD LEE PITTS IN HOUSTON
2012 r rr
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C ’ . But his journey to becoming a candidate for the U.S. Senate began in . That’s the year his then -year-old father, Rafael, fled Cuba. He had spent the previous four years fighting against the reign of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. Rafael endured imprisonment and torture that left him without his front teeth. Arriving in Austin, Texas, Rafael couldn’t speak English and carried only sewn into his underwear. But he found a job washing dishes seven days a week, earning cents an hour. He used the money to help pay for his education in mathematics at the University of Texas and eventually started his own business. Now, years later, his son, Ted, is trying to join Marco Rubio in Washington as a Hispanic Republican senator. “When I was a kid, my dad used to say to me, ‘When we faced oppression in Cuba, I had a place to flee to. If we lose our freedom here, where do we go?’ There is no question that better explains why I am running for the Senate.” The Texas Republican primary to replace retiring Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison is a crowded field: Ten candidates have filed and four are serious contenders. That’s not surprising since the winner of the May GOP primary will likely win the seat: It has been years since a Democrat won a statewide office in Texas. Cruz, consistently running second in the polls behind current Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, has never run for elected office before. But he has garnered a long list of endorsements from national conservative leaders including James Dobson and Tea Party Sens. Jim DeMint, Mike Lee, Rand Paul, and Pat Toomey. National organizations such as FreedomWorks have spent nearly . million in independent expenditures either to promote Cruz or attack his Republican rivals. Supporters point to the conservative credentials Cruz displayed as solicitor general of Texas. From to Cruz authored Supreme Court briefs and argued before the Supreme Court nine M AY 1 9 , 2 0 1 2
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5/1/12 12:06 PM
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times. He backed the right to display the Ten Commandments on state capitol grounds and defended the Pledge of Allegiance after a federal appeals court struck it down for containing the words “under God.” But the national attention and money being devoted to Cruz—in a state that will likely remain Republican no matter who wins the primary—also is due to the desire among conservatives to attract more Hispanic voters.
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for the Greater Houston Pachyderm Club about people prayed and recited two pledges: one to the U.S. flag and the other, of course, to the Texas state flag. They met candidates vying for education boards and district courts while enjoying a meal of salad, chicken, and cheesecake. That’s all typical fare for a Texas political gathering during election season. But then Ted Cruz stood up, grabbed the microphone, stepped in front of the lectern, and started talking about the Greek origins of the word politics. The Pachyderm members may not have realized it yet, but they were about to get a lesson on politics delivered without notes. Cruz, , fell in love with the Constitution as a teenager with a devotion rarely found among adults. As a -year-old high school freshman, he joined a program sponsored by the Free Enterprise Institute that focused on the principles of liberty and the Constitution. He learned about the “pillars of economic wisdom” by reading Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek among others. Then he would write -minute speeches. For each of his four years in high school, Cruz was a citywide speech contest winner. He delivered roughly speeches to civic clubs around the state. Spending his teenage years speaking about economics and government to business and community leaders didn’t satisfy Cruz’s political fixation. He joined a group that spent hundreds of hours debating and memorizing the
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CRUZ (THIS PAGE): WBEN SKLAR/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX
CRUZ CONTROL: Ted Cruz meets with a Tea Party group at an IHop in San Antonio.
CRUZ (PREVIOUS PAGE): MARK GRAHAM/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX
W. B received between and percent of the Hispanic vote in winning the presidential election. But John McCain barely earned percent four years later. Polls for this year’s election show this downward trend could continue: a Fox News survey in March revealed that just percent of Hispanic voters would support Mitt Romney against Barack Obama. That’s an ominous sign with the Hispanic population, now at million, making up percent of the U.S. population. The fastest growing segment of the electorate, the Hispanic population jumped by at least percent over the last decade in states. “Today I do not believe that any Republican candidate … can win the White House without Hispanic support,” said Alberto Gonzales, who served as the nation’s first Hispanic U.S. attorney general under the Bush administration, during a March speech in Wisconsin. Right now Texas helps Republicans counter the advantage Democrats enjoy in California. But if Republicans get percent or less of the Hispanic vote going forward, then even Republican strongholds like Texas could be at risk as the Hispanic population grows. And if Texas, and its significant electoral votes, turns Democratic, then Republicans may face an insurmountable hurdle when it comes to winning the White House. “Most Republicans are lousy at reaching out to Hispanics,” Cruz said. “We hang up a piñata and throw a Cinco de Mayo party. We are patronizing and condescending, and it doesn’t work.” Cruz believes that the Hispanic community is profoundly conservative. Most of its members believe in faith, family, and patriotism. Their core vales of hard work and independence seem ideally suited to a Republican philosophy instead of a party promoting a big government entitlement mindset, Cruz argues. “When is the last time you saw a Hispanic panhandler,” Cruz asks. “They work their fingers to the bone to provide for their children. There is no value that resonates more within the Hispanic community than [that] people who start out with nothing can achieve their American dreams.” Cruz grew up in a Houston–area Baptist church, making a profession of faith in Christ when he was eight years old. Today his father pastors a Spanish language church near Dallas. His father has translated dozens of Christian books into Spanish, including the Bible. During long drives Cruz likes to listen to the voice of his father reading the New Testament on CD. There is another written document that has captured Cruz’s passion: the U.S. Constitution. At a recent luncheon
cruz (this page): wBen sklar/the new york tiMes/redux
cruz (previous page): Mark grahaM/the new york tiMes/redux
Constitution. The group toured the state, writing out the entire Constitution from memory on easels as a form of entertainment and inspiration during business luncheons. “I don’t really ever remember a time I wasn’t interested in politics,” Cruz said. “There is a passion that comes from having seen liberty stripped away, and I was raised with that passion from infancy. Having principled men and women in office is how you protect yourself from tyranny.” Cruz carried his constitutional fervor to Princeton where he won a national debate championship award his senior year and wrote his thesis on the Ninth and Tenth Amendments. Cruz next earned a Harvard law degree, where he was a founding editor of the Latino Law Review. In 1996, he began clerking for then Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist (a Rehnquist bobblehead doll sits in Cruz’s current office at a Houston law firm). Today he tells Texas audiences that he wants to return to Washington as a U.S. senator because the Constitution is under assault by a president Cruz calls the most radical the county has ever seen.
C
ruz admits that Obama’s 2008 agenda of hope and change appealed to young people and Hispanics. But Cruz, like other Republicans, sees an opening in the 2012 fight over Hispanic voters. After Obama the candidate
promised immigration reform, Obama the president ignored the issue. “The president delivered a fat goose egg,” said Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus. Now in campaign mode, Obama is promising to tackle immigration reform in the first year of a second term. Obama’s administration angered many Hispanics by deporting about 1.06 million illegal immigrants as of last September. That is about 30 percent more than the deportations under the Bush administration. Obama announced last fall an effort to ease deportation rules, but not before his approval rating among Hispanic voters dropped more than 10 percentage points to under 50 percent in 2011. Nelson Reyes, 47, came to Florida from Puerto Rico when he was two months old. He now lives outside of Houston where he is trying to start a small business. Most of his relatives in Florida are Democrats, but he says “they don’t know which way to go” for this presidential election. “A lot of people are saying, ‘Obama promised so much but delivered so little,’” said Reyes, who came to hear Cruz speak and is frustrated with all the regulatory hurdles he faces in his new business. “The left can’t seem to figure out that low taxes and low regulation work.” An unemployment rate stuck at 11 percent among Hispanics also threatens Obama’s reelection. That’s three percentage points above the national average. The Republican Party in April unveiled a Hispanic outreach effort in six battleground states that will focus on the economy, government spending, and the national debt. “We are going to engage Hispanics and Latinos like we never have before,” pledged RNC Chairman Priebus. The GOP will dispatch field operatives aiming to capture 40 percent of the Hispanic vote in Colorado, Florida, New Mexico, Nevada, North Carolina, and Virginia. Democrats still enjoy a sizeable lead among Hispanic registered voters. But disappointment over high unemployment and unfulfilled promises is taking its toll. Since 2008 the share of Hispanic registered voters who say the Democratic Party has more concern for Hispanics has declined 10 percentage points from 55 percent to 45 percent. Meanwhile the share of Hispanic registered voters who say the Republican Party has more concern for Hispanics doubled from 6 percent to 12 percent, according to
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WHICH WAY TO GO? ann and Mitt romney campaign at The hispanic leadership network’s lunch in Miami, Fla.; raquel Contreras, 19, a Mexican-american student at arizona state university, supports the reelection of obama (left).
A growing number of supporters are suggesting that one way Romney can overcome the immigration issue is by selecting a Hispanic as his running mate. Nearly one third of Hispanic voters in a recent poll said they would consider voting for a Republican candidate for president if the running mate was Hispanic. Feeding speculation that he might be the pick, Rubio joined Romney on the campaign trial for the first time on April 23 in Aston, Pa. Like Cruz often does in Houston, Rubio discussed his family’s modest upbringing. He then used that narrative to attack Obama’s push for wealth redistribution: “I don’t ever remember my parents saying to me, ‘You know what, if only we took something away from them and they gave it to us, things would be better.’” Democrats will be reluctant to stop using the immigration issue as a weapon to score political points. On April 19, several House Democrats, backed by a handful of illegal immigrants, held a press conference just steps from the U.S. Capitol. They took turns bashing Republicans’ stance on immigration. Trying to convince Hispanics that their identity should be tied to the Democratic Party, Rep. Nydia Velázquez, D-N.Y., declared that “as long as Republican candidates cling to radical anti-immigrant ideology they will lose another generation of Hispanic vot ers.” Democrats trying to keep control of the Senate likely will fan the flames of immigration conflict this fall by pushing for a vote on some controversial immigration bill before November. The immigration debate will get more scrutiny this summer when the Supreme Court rules on the Obama administration’s challenge to an Arizona immigration law that gives state police expanded authority to challenge the immigration status of individuals they stop. Oral arguments
roMney: Charles Dharapak/ap • Contreras: Joshua lott/the new york tiMes/reDux
a report by the Pew Hispanic Center. Another Pew study also showed that immigrants become more Republican the longer they have been in the country. Currently nine Hispanic Republicans serve in the U.S. Congress, compared with 22 Democrats. But the six Hispanics elected to Congress in 2010 were all Republicans as were the two Hispanic governors elected in 2010: Nevada’s Brian Sandoval and New Mexico’s Susana Martinez. The National Republican Congressional Committee has identified more than two dozen non-incumbent Hispanics running as Republicans for congressional office this fall (though some are running for the same seat). While the Republican Party focuses on joblessness among Hispanics, other Republicans are working to soften the party’s immigration image. “We must admit that there are those among us who have used rhetoric that is harsh and intolerable,” Sen. Rubio, a CubanAmerican, said at an event earlier this year in Miami. “We must admit, myself included, that sometimes we’ve been too slow in condemning that language for what it is.” Included among Obama’s failed promises was the passage of the DREAM Act, which would create a path to citizenship for children brought here illegally by their parents if they go to college or serve in the military. The bill remains highly popular among Hispanics but is opposed by most Republicans as a form of amnesty. Rubio is preparing to introduce his own version of the DREAM Act. It would give legal status but not citizenship to college-bound students brought here illegally by their parents. They would be eligible for a nonimmigrant visa that would allow them to go to college. After graduation they could remain in the country legally while working, and they could apply for residency and ultimately citizenship like other visa holders. Rubio argues that it is unrealistic to expect the government to deport the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants. To him the key question is “how can we deal with this issue in a way that both honors our legacy as a nation of immigrants but also honors our legacy as a nation of laws?” Romney refused to state on April 23 whether he supports Rubio’s version of the DREAM Act. “It has many features to commend it, but it’s something that we’re studying,” he said. Romney said he would veto the Democratic version of the DREAM Act and stated throughout the primary season that his first priority is border security. But he admitted during an April fundraiser that if Republicans can’t attract more Hispanic voters it “spells doom for us.”
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19.5
20
21.7
16.1 13.2
15
11.2
8.3 10
7.7
5 0
1988
1992
1996
2000
2004
2008
2011
*NUMBERS IN MILLIONS • SOURCE: PEW RESEARCH CENTER
Hispanic views on cultural issues: Work: percent of Hispanics say most people can get ahead if they work hard. By contrast, just percent of the general public says the same.
Religion: percent of immigrant Hispanics say religion is very important in their lives, compared with percent of U.S.-born Hispanics and % of the general public.
Abortion: percent of Hispanics say it should be illegal in most or all cases, compared with percent of the general public.
Top issues* for Hispanic voters in : ISSUE
HISPANIC REGISTERED VOTERS
Jobs............................ % Education ................... % Healthcare.................. % Taxes.......................... % Federal budget ........... % Immigration ................ %
ALL HISPANICS
ISSUE
Education ................... % Jobs............................ % Healthcare.................. % Immigration ................ % Taxes.......................... % Federal budget ........... %
*PERCENT WHO SAY ISSUE IS “EXTREMELY IMPORTANT” • SOURCE: PEW HISPANIC CENTER
1996
2000
2004
2008
ROMNEY: 14%
OBAMA: 70%
McCAIN: 31%
OBAMA: 67%
BUSH: 40%
KERRY: 55%
BUSH: 35%
Hispanic votes for the last four presidential elections:
GORE: 59%
ROMNEY: CHARLES DHARAPAK/AP • CONTRERAS: JOSHUA LOTT/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX
Email: lpitts@worldmag.com
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DOLE: 21%
B
H, Cruz continues to work -hour days so he can join the debate in Washington. Asked why he is going for a coveted U.S. Senate seat in his first bid for elected office, Cruz said, “If you want to dramatically shrink the size and power of the federal government and address the debt, the Senate is the battlefield. Today there are six or seven strong free market conservatives in the Senate. I think what is absolutely critical is that we grow those numbers.” What stands out about Cruz is not so much his Cuban heritage but his love of America. A Pew Hispanic Center survey showed that while just percent of immigrant Hispanics describe themselves as “American” (as opposed to “Hispanic/Latino” or their country of origin), percent of second generation and percent of third generation Hispanics describe themselves as Americans. The fact that Cruz identifies himself more with his family’s adopted country than with Cuba is clearly reflected in the American history relics that decorate his Houston office. Small statues of Martin Luther King Jr. and Ronald Reagan, posing with a cowboy hat and saddle, sit on a windowsill. (“I will go to my grave with Ronald Reagan defining what it means to be president of the United States,” Cruz says.) A replica of a Texas flag that flew over the Alamo and a framed letter that Lt. Col. William Barret Travis wrote from the besieged Alamo hang on the wall. Cruz likes to quote from the letter at Tea Party rallies: “I am determined to sustain myself as long as possible and die like a soldier who never forgets what is due to his own honor and that of his country.” There is even a framed “chad” from the Florida presidential recount in . (Cruz met his wife while they both worked on the Bush election.) Cruz worked for the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission under Bush. But, as Texas solicitor general, Cruz went against his former boss during a case in which the Bush administration tried to force Texas to submit to an international court’s ruling. Cruz, who opposes amnesty and wants to triple the number of U.S. border control agents, ended his long day by driving an hour outside of Houston to address about people inside Timber Lakes Baptist Church in The Woodlands, Texas. Flanked by an American flag and a Texas flag with two wooden crosses on the wall behind him, Cruz fired up the crowd by joking that politicians disprove the biology lesson that invertebrates can’t walk upright. “It took Jimmy Carter to give us Ronald Reagan,” he said, turning serious. “And I am convinced the most long-lasting legacy of Barack Obama is going to be a new generation of the Republican Party standing up and fighting for liberty.” A
Number of Hispanic eligible voters* (-):
CLINTON: 72%
conducted on April suggested that justices are skeptical of the federal government’s claims against the Arizona law (see p. ).
2012*
*PROJECTIONS BASED ON A FOX NEWS POLL CONDUCTED IN MARCH
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Carolina b Scandal amid a close contest in North Carolina could foretell swing state headaches for Democrats and Obama heading toward a September convention in the Tar Heel State by Jamie Dean in Chapel Hill, N.C.
F
or a visitor to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), at least one distinctive is difficult to miss: the school’s famed color scheme. Shades of “Carolina blue” appear everywhere—stadium seats, pavement on athletic tracks, T-shirts, shoes, sweatpants, and scarves. But just six months ahead of the nation’s presidential elections, it’s less clear what political shade the state of North Carolina will turn in November: Republican red or Democratic blue. That’s because North Carolina represents one of at least seven swing states that could go either way in choosing a presidential candidate. President Barack Obama was the first Democrat to win the state since Jimmy Carter’s election in 1976, and Democrats are eager for a repeat. Yet 2010 elections saw Republicans retake the state legislature, and the state’s embattled Democratic governor made a belated decision earlier this year to leave office after just one term. Obama has visited the state five times in the last six months—including an appearance at a UNC basketball arena on April 24—yet what standing Democrats will have when the party holds its national convention in Charlotte in September is an open question. For Obama, North Carolina isn’t a political slam dunk. With the president headed to Chapel Hill, the state’s Democratic Party landed itself in a sexual harassment scandal that raised questions about a cover-up at the highest levels—an
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embarrassment for the Democrats ahead of the state’s national spotlight. Also in Greensboro, former Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards is on trial, facing six criminal counts for allegedly using campaign funds to cover up an adulterous affair and the child he fathered with his mistress. At the same time, activists are in a pitched battle over a state constitutional amendment to define marriage as a union between one man and one woman that’s front and center on the state’s May 8 primary ballot. It’s a vote with national implications: Democratic Party leaders are debating whether to add support for gay marriage to the party’s platform during the national convention in Charlotte. Democratic leaders in North Carolina—and the president himself—publicly oppose the amendment that defends traditional marriage. But polls showed a narrow majority of North Carolina voters supporting it just weeks ahead of the primary. The same polls showed black voters—who largely support Obama— overwhelmingly in favor of the marriage amendment. All the while, Republicans are drafting their own game plan: Less than a week before Obama landed in Chapel Hill, likely GOP nominee Mitt Romney visited Charlotte, staking out a spot with a view of the stadium where the president will speak at the fall convention. Romney hit hard on the issue most important to most voters in a state that he needs to win: North Carolina’s stillstruggling economy.
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a blues NO SLAM DUNK: Obama speaks at UNC’s Carmichael Arena. Chuck Liddy/MCT/Landov
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Atheist Todd STiefel is the pot of gold at the end of North Carolina’s gay rainbow by Warren Cole Smith
If Amendment One is defeated in North Carolina, much of the credit will have to go to Todd Stiefel. Stiefel and his wife Diana gave a $100,000 matching grant to Protect North Carolina Families, the group fighting the proposed state constitutional amendment to protect legal marriage “as between one woman and one man.” The grant “was fully matched, and then some,” Stiefel told me, and came at a critical time, helping to pay for highly effective— and some say highly misleading—TV ads. The Stiefels gave two $10,000 grants to Equality NC and the ACLU to aid email, social media, and other activities designed to defeat Amendment One. Stiefel, 37, made his money the old-fashioned way: He inherited it. His great-great-grandfather started a candle and soap company in 1847 in Germany that became Stiefel Laboratories, which the Stiefel family sold to GlaxoSmithKline in 2009 for a reported $2.9 billion. That’s not to say Stiefel isn’t a hard worker and a strategic thinker. Raised nominally Roman Catholic, he graduated from Duke University, where he says he lost his faith, then worked in the family business for a dozen years. With his share of the windfall, Stiefel became a “freethought activist,” serving on the board of—and in 2010 giving $500,000 to—the Secular Coalition for America, a lobbying group that Stiefel told me is committed to “ending religious privilege.” Stiefel has also given major grants to American Atheists ($100,000) and the Secular Student Alliance ($50,000). In 2010 he gave $20,000 to the ACLU of Mississippi, which used the money to host a high school prom after a school district canceled its prom when a lesbian tried to bring her girlfriend as a date. Whether he wins or loses the Amendment One battle, Stiefel’s money and his affable style—“Ask me anything; I’m an open book,” he said—are winning him access and influence. In 2010 he and other leaders of the Secular Coalition for America had a meeting with White House officials to try to “get the government out of faith-based activities.” Stiefel’s donations to defeat Amendment One are a fraction of the $3 million opponents hope to raise, but his money primed the pump—attracting donations from around the nation and moving public opinion. Six months ago, 61 percent of North Carolina voters favored Amendment One. Today, that number has dropped to 54 percent. “This campaign is winnable,” Stiefel said. “And we hope to win.”
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The political maneuvering makes for a contentious pre-game show with serious implications: How the swing states will swing come November, and what happens to legal protections for traditional marriage—across the country for years to come.
A
n outsider visiting Chapel Hill might be tempted to think Obama has already won. More than 8,000 students and visitors waited hours in a cold wind to pack into the school’s Carmichael Arena on April 24 to hear Obama deliver remarks about interest rates on student loans. The appearance—dubbed “an official visit” by the White House—was at least equal parts campaign rally with a crucial voting bloc of young voters who overwhelmingly supported Obama during the last election. The scene was reminiscent of the president’s electric campaign appearances in 2008: blaring music, roaring cheers, and Obama’s preacher-like cadence as he invited “amens” from the crowd then led a charismatic call for support that promised better days ahead and this assurance from the president: “I believe in you.” It’s a crowd that wants to believe in Obama. Indeed, during the final moments of the president’s speech, it didn’t seem to matter what he was saying. His enthusiasm and charisma generated enough excitement to elicit roaring cheers that drowned out his last remarks. (I was standing less than 100 feet from the president but had to look up the transcript to find out how his speech ended.) But the enthusiasm isn’t unanimous. UNC senior Tom Shane said he voted for Obama in 2008 but doubts he’ll vote for anyone this year: “I don’t think it really matters.” The business major PRO-MARRIAGE: is disappointed with Obama’s first amendment supporters term and apathetic. “I was excited pray during an april 20 last time,” he said. “ I felt like he rally at the state came in and had some good ideas capitol in raleigh.
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stiefel: handout • marriage amendment: allen Breed/ap • perdue: ted richardson/ap • parmley: ap • parker: chris seward/the news and oBserver/ap
Straight and FluSh
says the sweeping contention that the marriage amendment “harms children” is “simply untrue.” Officials at NCFPC have engaged churches about the amendment and published information answering opponents’ objections. A proamendment rally in Raleigh days before Obama’s visit drew about , people, according to police estimates. Brooks believes voter turnout during the primary will be key to the amendment’s passage. Obama didn’t mention the amendment during his UNC speech, but he expressed public opposition to the measure in March—a move Bev Perdue some see as an incremental approach to endorsing gay marriage. (The president in said his views on gay marriage “are constantly evolving.”) The president also didn’t mention the sexual harassment scandal engulfing North Carolina’s Democratic Party. The News and Observer in and visitors at the Raleigh obtained emails revealing that David Obama event came to promote their Parker, the state party’s chairman, negotiated a opposition to North Carolina’s marfinancial settlement with a former male riage amendment. The amendment on employee who accused executive director Jay the state’s May primary ballot reads: “Marriage Parmley of sexual harassment. between one man and one woman is the only Jay Parmley Parmley denied the accusations but resigned domestic legal union that shall be valid or recogfrom his post. The male accuser, Adriadn Ortega, nized in this State.” Twenty-nine other states was fired in November and claims he lost his job have constitutional amendments that prohibit because he complained about lurid advances by gay marriage. Parmley. Handfuls of students at Obama’s appearance It’s unclear how much money Parker paid wore T-shirts with the message: “Vote No On Ortega in the settlement, or where the money Amendment One.” Billboards leading into came from. Parker has defended his actions and Chapel Hill carried the same message. The UNC Parmley. He’s also refused to resign from his post Association of Student Governments—an organias chairman, but says he’ll step down after a zation representing student governments from special election in May. all schools in the University of North Carolina David Parker The cover-up could extend to the governor’s system—voted to oppose the amendment. mansion. When reporters pressed Gov. Bev A front-page story in The Carrboro Citizen, a Perdue to disclose when she learned about the state party newspaper from a nearby town, carried the headline: “Biz scandal, she snapped at a journalist who reminded her she owners: Amendment One could harm businesses.” The came into office as “the transparency governor,” saying, Coalition to Protect North Carolina Families, the primary “Get over it.” Hours later, Perdue—who is not running for organization raising funds to oppose the marriage amendment, reelection—issued a statement saying she had heard rumors announced it had raised . million by March (see sidebar). about the allegations in December, but referred the matter Anti-amendment yard signs carried the message: “Protect to Parker. all NC Families—Vote Against Amendment One”—a message Andrew Taylor, a political science professor at N.C. State sure to confuse both sides of the debate. Other signs read: University, said the scandal likely wouldn’t affect Obama’s race “Amendment One Harms Children.” A fact sheet from the in November, but said it is a “distraction” ahead of the convengroup contends that the amendment would harm children tion and other events for the Democratic Party in North because they “could lose their healthcare and prescription Carolina. drug coverage.” But if the scandal widens, national party leaders may feel That’s a message Bill Brooks of the North Carolina Family pressure to speak out, especially if it casts doubts on the Policy Council (NCFPC) and other amendment supporters party’s management and paints a lurid picture of the sexual find particularly disingenuous. Brooks says the amendment conduct of those supporting the gay activists’ agenda. In wouldn’t affect private employers that offer same-sex beneRaleigh, state Auditor Beth Wood joined four other top state fits, though it would prevent the government from forcing officials in calling for Parker’s resignation, and told the local employers to offer such benefits. He does say the amendment newspaper she wasn’t satisfied with how the party handled the could prevent local governments from offering benefits to scandal from the start: “If we want [voters] to believe in us and homosexual couples: Currently nine county or city governfollow our lead we need to do a better job.” A ments offer domestic partner benefits. Either way, Brooks
STIEFEL: HANDOUT • MARRIAGE AMENDMENT: ALLEN BREED/AP • PERDUE: TED RICHARDSON/AP • PARMLEY: AP • PARKER: CHRIS SEWARD/THE NEWS AND OBSERVER/AP
and was going to make some good changes. I don’t feel that way anymore.” Fellow senior Charlie Carrigan isn’t enthusiastic either: “Out of the two frontrunners, I’m not really a fan of either.” Carrigan, a Ron Paul supporter, said he’s most concerned about the economy and finding a job when he graduates. When asked which frontrunner resonates more on fiscal policy, he said: “Honestly, I really don’t know.” Beneath the rally roa r, both students’ comments would suggest that independent voters aren’t necessarily in Obama’s camp as they were four years ago. And online coverage of the president’s visit in The Daily Tar Heel, the student paper, seemed as enthusiastic about the same-day visit of late-night talk show host Jimmy Fallon. (Obama appeared on Fallon’s show during a taping on campus.)
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Email: jdean@worldmag.com
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The eye
of the
STOR
Israelis contemplate a possible war against Iran with little worry but keen knowledge of what’s at stake
CREDIT
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JIM HOLLaNDER/EPa/NEwsCOM
by JILL NELSON
ORM iran’s nuclear ambitions
are an international dilemma, but nowhere is the threat more urgent than in neighboring Israel. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that April negotiations in Istanbul gave a “freebie” to Iran of another five weeks—the timeframe until the next round of talks. This only increased speculation about when Israel will decide Iran’s nuclear program is too close to the “point of no return” and launch an attack: This summer? Early fall? After the U.S. presidential election in November? No one knows the plans being drafted behind closed doors, but this much remains certain: An attack on Iran—American or Israeli—would create a level of chaos and upheaval in the Middle East not seen in decades, and would lead to countless retaliatory attacks against Israel. With rockets in Syria, Lebanon, Iran, and Gaza pointed at Israeli population centers plus increasing threats from Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, one assumes the average Israeli citizen is frantically preparing for war, anxious about both the present and the future. But according to the people I spoke with in Israel, the picture is markedly different. This is “life as usual” for many Israelis. They are looking to their own political and military leaders, hoping they’re prepared to defend the country and protect its citizens should the need arise.
CREDIT
JIM HOLLaNDER/EPa/NEwsCOM
local preparedness: Rebekah Harvey is an American
citizen who has lived in Tel Aviv with her husband and four children for more than a year. She says it is primarily her or other Americans who bring up the topic of the Iranian threat: “My Israeli friends often comment how Israel has been at war or threat of war their entire lives.” One Israeli neighbor told her that is was pointless to buy a house because it “could be destroyed at any time since none of our neighboring countries like us.” Guy Faigenboim, an accountant and lawyer from Tel Aviv, concurs with this assessment. “Every year it’s quite regular that we are prepared for war,” he told me, citing countless rocket attacks from Gaza into southern Israel. “Maybe on TV they say, ‘do this and do that,’ but people are not worried.” People are also not prepared, according to Meir Litvak, director of the Center for Iranian Studies at Tel Aviv University. “When people speak of problems, they might speak of a war in the summer. But you don’t see any preparations, at least publicly,” he said. Ze’ev Bielski, the chairman of the CURRICULUM OF Knesset subcommittee on Israel’s home READINESS: Israeli defense, agrees that the Israeli home school boys wear gas front is not ready for a war. He told the masks during a drill.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) that although they’ve made improvements since the Lebanon War of 2006, “the situation is not good.” Iran has hundreds of Shahab-3 missiles, and analysts estimate that Iranian proxies Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza have at least 60,000 rockets and missiles aimed at Israel. In 1996, Israel passed a law requiring new homes and apartments to include a reinforced room that could withstand missile and rocket attacks, but many contractors have found ways around the law. The last missile assault on Tel Aviv was during the Iraq War in 1991, when Saddam Hussein launched Scud missiles at Israel in retaliation for the U.S. invasion, and Bielski said close to 1.7 million Israelis—out of a population of about 7.5 million—do not currently have access to a bomb shelter or fortified room. Given their history, Israelis are more prepared than most. Harvey’s home has its own bomb shelter but Faigenboim’s does not. He plans to take his wife and four kids to his neighbor’s bomb shelter should missiles rain down on Tel Aviv, home for two-thirds of Israel’s population. Another option is the bomb shelter four stories underneath the plaza of the Habima national theater. The recently completed shelter has space and supplies for 2,000 people, but a report by the state controller concludes that many of the country’s shelters are not war-ready. Gas masks are also on the country’s preparedness checklist. Israel has only enough gas masks—considered a necessity in the event of a chemical or biological attack—for 60 percent of its citizens. A news report detailed the process for picking up your gas mask at one of Israel’s distribution centers. A side note highlighted the unique world Israelis live in: If you have a gas mask that you received from the Home Front Command within the past two years, you do not need a new one.
military preparedness: Faigenboim explains that he is
only a little worried because he trusts his leaders, his government, and his military to handle the situation with Tehran and its proxies. A major television news station in Israel aired a lengthy report in April about the preparedness of the Israel Air Force (IAF) for a possible strike against Iran. The reporter, Alon Ben-David, spent weeks with pilots and military personnel, concluding that “the coming summer will not only be hot but tense.” The IAF has about 100 frontline planes waiting for orders to depart. The most powerful are the two-dozen F-15I warplanes, U.S.-made aircraft that can carry “bunker busting bombs” necessary for an airstrike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. An attack of this proportion would likely result in counterattacks against Israel. Israel has three layers of defense in the event of counterstrikes: the Iron Dome, the Arrow, and David’s Sling. The first of the three earned high praise after its life-saving performance in March when Palestinian militants fired nearly 300 rockets from Gaza into southern Israel. A U.S. State Department spokesman said the system intercepted more than 80 percent of the rockets it encountered, “saving many lives.” Israel says it needs at least 12 operating units of the Iron Dome system (it currently has three) in order to sufficiently intercept incoming short-range rockets. U.S. House M ay 1 9 , 2 0 1 2
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“Every year it’s quite regular that we are prepared for war.”
—Guy Faigenboim
a boy watches soldiers during a drill near Tel aviv to test Israel's preparedness in dealing with a chemical, gas, or nuclear attack.
diplomatic preparedness: Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu has signaled he won’t be taking orders from President Barack Obama, but Litvak says Israel shouldn’t do anything against America’s expressed will: “It would be a disaster for Israel if the United States believes that American boys were killed because of an Israeli action carried out against
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American will. A long-term strategic alliance will be jeopardized if such things happen.” Both sides agree on one thing: Israel cannot go up against Iran alone. Israel has enough firepower to set back Iran’s nuclear ambitions several years if a strike is successful, but the fallout from an attack would require American backup on several fronts. “For Israel, relations with the U.S are always of the utmost importance. It’s a vital, strategic link for us," Litvak told me. “It’s a matter of our survival—today, yesterday, and tomorrow.” Relations with Arab and Turkish neighbors are also important in a region where the Sunni-Shiite divide can work in Israel’s favor. The timing and notable absence of Western powers from April’s Palestinian-Israeli peace talks in Jerusalem may have seemed unusual unless viewed in light of Israel’s dire need for allies in the region. “It’s very difficult for any of the Gulf states to do anything with Israel because of the Palestinian problem,” Litvak said. “So some measure of progress—and I don’t think we can reach this wonderful ‘peace’ people talk about—will make it easier to do things tacitly, under the table.” Faigenboim also stresses the importance of shoring up alliances with countries such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia, the region’s main Sunni-led powers, pointing out that nobody in the neighborhood wants a nuclear Iran, which is majority Shiite. “The Sunni-Shiite divide has become the most important divide in the Middle East—much more than the Arab-Israeli divide—because of Iran,” Litvak said. Israelis may not be overly anxious or entirely prepared for attacks and counterattacks, but they do understand what’s at stake. During Holocaust Remembrance ceremonies on April 18, six survivors lit torches in remembrance of the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust. “We used to be a question mark; today we are a strong country,” Israeli President Shimon Peres said to the crowd. “Humanity has no choice but to learn from the lessons of the Holocaust and stand strong in the face of existential threats, before it is too late. Iran is at the center of this threat.” A
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Republicans drafted a plan that would allocate $680 million through 2015 for additional Iron Dome batteries and interceptors in Israel. The second layer of defense, David’s Sling, isn’t scheduled for the frontlines until 2013. The system is designed to destroy incoming medium-range and long-range missiles (Katyusha rockets from southern Lebanon and ballistic missiles from Iran). The Arrow, a final layer of defense, is operational but has never been tested in real-life combat. It is designed specifically to intercept Iran’s Shahab missiles, with one unit deployed in the north and one in the south. A third unit is expected to be operational in the coming months. The defense systems are not impenetrable, though. “Some of those missiles will make it to Israeli population centers,” Yifta Shapir, director of the military balance project at Tel Aviv University, told Jewish & Israel News. “Israel should be ready for a long period of attacks, perhaps even months, and this may bring commerce and other aspects of civilian life to a halt.” Israel’s intelligence community is already activated. On April 21, Israel’s Counterterrorism Bureau urged tourists to leave the Sinai Peninsula immediately, citing new information that terrorist organizations in the Gaza Strip were planning imminent attacks against Israelis on Sinai’s beaches. Harvey describes the increased hum of army helicopters in recent months and the buzz of drones flying over her house during the barrage of rocket attacks from Gaza in March. She says her neighbors feel safer when they hear the sounds of their military in action. They trust their leaders, and ultimately they trust their allies and Iran’s enemies to join forces against their common foes.
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John PartiPilo, the tennessean/aP
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‘God’s chickens’ Harking back to William Wilberforce, some evangelical leaders are joining efforts to crack down on cockfighting
by emily belz in cocke county, tenn.
Tom Farrow, a former FBI agent, is driving through the hollows, hillocks, and cow ponds of Cocke County, on the Appalachian side of Tennessee. Cell phone service blinks in and out between the hills. It’s a beautiful place, an interplay of mountains and farmland, but several years ago it teemed with corruption. Back in 2005, Farrow led an undercover team that busted a large cockfighting operation in the aptly named county. Several cockfighting pits in Cocke County hosted hundreds of gambling spectators. The owners of what Farrow calls the “white collar pit” told the FBI they paid off law enforcement—after all, Farrow explains, a pit that big can’t exist for 60 years without law enforcement knowing about it. A few miles away, at what Farrow calls “the blue collar pit,” the owners stacked bleachers to the ceiling of a large metal shed for the fights. Farrow remembers, “The [body odor] would be so thick you could cut it with a knife.” We pass a small cemetery outside a church where Farrow would meet informants at night—because “there’s not, like, a 7/11,” he explained. Farrow said the FBI found that local law enforcement was involved in prostitution, illegal liquor stores, stolen cars, and drugs. The FBI and the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation eventually charged more than 200 people connected to the corruption case, including some members of the law enforcement. “The animal fighting side of it—it starts at such a low level,” said Farrow, adding that people think to themselves, “It’s illegal, but it’s not really illegal.” That thinking, he said, “is like rust—a slow, insidious eating away of ethics and law enforcement.”
John PartiPilo, the tennessean/aP
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The eating away of ethics is what has drawn some Southern Christians into joining efforts to crack down on cockfighting. They evoke British statesman and devout Christian William Wilberforce, who is known for his work abolishing the slave trade but who also supported laws against bullbaiting, another animal fighting sport. Wilberforce was one of the founders of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and he saw animal cruelty as an example of a violent society that would be cruel to humans. Today, top members of the Southern Baptist Convention as well as family values groups like South Carolina’s Palmetto Family have put together ad campaigns explaining the nastiness of cockfighting and outlining a biblical perspective on caring for animals. Cockfighting is a “pornography of violence,” and “needless pain for frivolous reasons” said Richard Land, the head of the Southern Baptists’ Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, in a recent ad. He said he would dare anyone who defends cockfighting as a cultural tradition to say he would take Jesus to a cockfight. Land calls the cocks “God’s chickens.” Cockfighting isn’t two roosters wrestling in a farmyard, but two roosters fighting to the death. American cockfighters cut off the nub on the back of the rooster’s leg and attach a sharp curved blade, called a gaff. The cockfighters sometimes drug the birds to make them more aggressive. The lingo of cockfights reveals its grotesque side: “blinkers” are roosters whose eyes have been punctured. “Rattlers” are roosters
NOT REALLY ILLEGAL: Hilary Hood and one of his gamecocks near Nashville, Tenn.
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with punctured lungs, which fill with blood and make their breath rattle. John Goodwin, the Humane Society’s point man on animal fighting, went along with law enforcement to raid a cockfighting operation in Virginia. He remembered going up to one pit and finding one rooster dead, and the winner with a punctured chest. “I could see his internal organs move every time he took a breath,” Goodwin said. At another pit in central Tennessee Goodwin recalled finding a rooster with its intestines hanging out, tangled around its opponent’s foot. Farrow said on his undercover operations at cockfights, he’s seen his fellow “tough guy” FBI agents become physically sick watching. Aside from the animal cruelty concerns, Christian groups are worried about the high-stakes gambling that goes on and the regular presence of children at cockfights. The sport is illegal in all 50 states and under federal law, but federal law enforcement can only bust cockfighters that cross state lines. In Southern states especially, cockfighting remains a strong tradition with few legal penalties. (Dog fighting, by contrast, is a felony in all 50 states.) In Tennessee, for example, cockfighting is a misdemeanor punishable by a $50 fine. Efforts to up the fines or make this type of animal fighting a felony (as it is in 39 states) have failed over the last few years. “I don’t go to rooster fights and I don’t have fighting roosters but I have friends that do. They pay their taxes. They’re not bothering anybody,” explained Tennessee state Rep. Frank Niceley to the Chattanooga Times Free Press last year, after his subcommittee voted down the heavier penalties.
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PORNOGRAPHY OF VIOLENCE: Two birds fighting in Nashville (left); a gaff is tied onto the leg of a fighting rooster (above); a cockfighting arena in Louisiana (inset).
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LEFT: JOHN PARTIPILO/THE TENNESSEAN/AP • RIGHT & BOTTOM: LORI WASELCHUK/THE NEW YORK TIMES
The Cocke County case was an extreme example, but it’s not exceptional that cockfighting goes hand-in-hand with other criminal activity and violence. Last fall in southern California, deputies raided a cockfighting pit where they discovered roosters, million in methamphetamine, firearms, and seven children ages to living in dilapidated buildings. In March, a man was beaten to death at a cockfight. In April, masked gunmen killed three people and wounded eight at a cockfighting pit. On online cockfighting forums, users commented on the April attack, with one Kentuckian writing it would “only help the activist groups with their portrayal of all us cockfighters being drug dealing, gun toting, low life human beings!!” Another user lamented that cockfighting wasn’t legal so the fighters could have had police protection. The online forums are peppered with threads on how the harsher laws would trample on a cultural tradition. Some state legislators have also opposed attempts to turn cockfighting into a felony on the grounds that prisons are already bursting. Some agriculture lobbies also oppose these state laws. “They don’t want the Humane Society to win on anything because if they win on
cockfighting, maybe they’ll win on cage-free poultry farms,” Farrow said. Jim Akin, regional vice president of the Alabama Cattlemen’s Association, alluded to that in a February letter on cockfighting to Alabama’s TimesDaily. He wrote that he did “not condone animal cruelty,” but “… when you see the Humane Society or some other animal rights group is trying to get some law passed, just remember there is always much more there than meets the eye, and it is almost never good for the people in the agricultural community and the public.” The Humane Society’s Goodwin said the agriculture lobby has supported measures against cockfighting in the past because of how the bloody sport tends to spread diseases among chicken populations. The Humane Society began a faith outreach office about five years ago, and the Clapham Group’s Mark Rodgers, who was most recently a top adviser in Rick Santorum’s presidential campaign, has been working with the organization to connect with Christian leaders. For evangelicals wary of animal welfare taking over other pressing matters like human rights, the Humane Society acknowledges there is more to life than animals. “I know it’s one issue among many, many, many serious
issues,” said Christine Gutleben, a Lutheran who heads up the Humane Society’s faith outreach. “My hope is that people within the [Christian] community will see the animal issue as just part of their daily choices. That it doesn’t take away from these other issues.” Palmetto Family, a South Carolina group affiliated with Focus on the Family, is primarily focused on pro-life and religious liberty issues, but the group has worked on educating its constituency about cockfighting and supports higher penalties for cockfighters. In South Carolina cockfighting is a misdemeanor punishable by up to , in fines, though state legislators have introduced bills recently to make the sport a felony. In a state where the University of South Carolina’s mascot is a gamecock, depicted with gaffs on his legs, the bills haven’t found success. “There are some that think anything that has the odor of animal rights is bad,” said Oran Smith, Palmetto Family’s president. Smith said he perceived two views on animal issues: that humans and animals all evolved together and “one is not above the other” or, on the other side, that “animals are here for us to do with however we pleased.” “We didn’t feel like there was any middle ground, a biblical approach to it,” Smith said. So his group put out a short book four years ago on the biblical relationship between humans and animals. “Mankind is here as stewards of the earth,” Smith summarized. “We stand in place of God himself. … [T]hat means no wanton cruelty.” A
Email: ebelz@worldmag.com
4/30/12 1:24 PM
LEFT: JOHN PARTIPILO/THE TENNESSEAN/AP • RIGHT & BOTTOM: LORI WASELCHUK/THE NEW YORK TIMES
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The bloodIesT day by marvin olasky near sharpsburg, md.
The Civil War produced more than 600,000 deaths: Ten percent of all males 20-45 years old in the North, and 30 percent of all white males 1840 years old in the South. That horror included 23,000 killed in one day at Antietam, and led to the first official Memorial Day observance in 1868 at Arlington National Cemetery
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f you’re looking for a summer trip during which children can learn some history and adults can honor the military dead, keep in mind that this year is the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Antietam. When 12 hours of battle ended on Sept. 17, 1862, about 23,000 men were dead, wounded, or missing. That day remains the bloodiest one in American military history (including even D-Day in 1944). Antietam is a Native American word that means “the swift current,” but the Union and Confederate armies met there—on good corn-growing land owned by strictly pacifistic German Baptists—because a Southern officer was slow to destroy a copy of Special Order 191, Gen. Robert E. Lee’s plan of operations for invading Maryland. A Northern soldier found the order wrapped around cigars, and Union commander George McClellan realized he had an opportunity to destroy a divided Confederate army. Lee had headed north out of a desire to protect the Shenandoah Valley harvest, give Maryland border state UNCIVIL: Confederate dead gathered for burial in antietam, Md., September 1862. Library of CongreSS/KrT/newSCoM M ay 1 9 , 2 0 1 2
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toP: enCyCloPedIa BRItannICa/UIG/Getty IMaGes BottoM: tIMothy JaCoBsen/aP
PLaces Of hOnOR: found it hard to make it through the tourists visit the field without having their horses step “Bloody lane” at the on bodies or disembodied heads and antietam battlefield limbs. The land, watered by blood, (above); President lincoln (center) with still yields good corn: If you visit McClellan (right) and close to harvest time, you can readily Pinkerton (left) at imagine what shooting amid the corn antietam in october was like 150 years ago. 1862; the limestone bridge, now called Slugfest No. 2 also lasted about Burnside’s Bridge. four and a half hours, from 9:30 a.m. to 2 p.m., with the fighting centered on a road sunken through years of erosion and thereafter named Bloody Lane. Walk on the Northern side and you’ll see that, because of a ridge crest, Northern soldiers could not see what would face them until they were about 100 yards away. Then they advanced and died: Gen. Max Weber’s brigade of German-speaking New Yorkers suffered 450 casualties in five minutes.
Joe Raedle/Getty IMaGes
residents “an opportunity of throwing off the oppression to which she is now subject,” and influence both voters in the upcoming congressional elections and British leaders who might recognize the Confederacy. British Prime Minister Henry John Temple, known as Lord Palmerston and nicknamed “The Mongoose,” was asking whether it was time for England and France to “address the contending parties and recommend an arrangement upon the basis of separation.” Divisions and timidity among Northern leaders also encouraged Lee. Union commander George McClellan characterized President Abraham Lincoln as “an idiot … a well-meaning baboon.” McClellan himself was idiotic when it came to discerning the extent of Confederate power. Although many people told him otherwise, McClellan trusted Chicago private detective Allan Pinkerton, who regularly overestimated Confederate numbers: McClellan told Washington officials that the Confederate army numbered 110,000, more than twice its actual strength. McClellan also did not recognize the wretched state of Lee’s army: His soldiers were “poorly provided with clothes and in thousands of instances are destitute of shoes,” Lee complained to Confederate president Jefferson Davis on Sept. 3. Many Southern soldiers were either hungry or sick: They called the invasion of Maryland the “green corn and green apple” campaign because they mostly ate unripened vegetables and fruit, which left many hampered by diarrhea. If opponents could be slain by smell, though, the Southern soldiers were unbeatable: One Marylander who almost joined them later wrote, “I have never seen a mass of such filthy, strong-smelling men. Three of them in a room would make it unbearable.” The appearance of Lee’s soldiers was also fierce. One Northern reporter wrote, “They were the roughest set of creatures I ever saw,” with “hair and clothing matted with dirt and filth. ... The scratching they kept up gave warrant of vermin in abundance.” The visitors on the day I walked the battlefield all seemed clean and scrubbed, and the pristine grounds can give students of military history a good sense of what happened when neither side succeeded in flanking the ot her, and the soldiers slugged it out like boxers unwilling to yield. The big battle was really three, rolling (from the visitor center) left to right. Slugfest No. 1 began with musketry and cannon fire at 5:30 a.m. It ran to 10 a.m. within a 24-acre cornfield and adjacent woods. Neither side was content to play defense: One side would cut to pieces its attackers, advance whooping into the cornfield, and be shot up itself. One regiment, the First Texas Infantry, lost 186 of its 226 men in 30 minutes of cornfield shooting that, as Union Gen. Joe Hooker wrote, left “every stalk … cut as closely as could have been done with a knife.” The post-battle roll call showed the toll: One soldier from Company A reporting, two in Company C, none in Company F. The regimental flag was on the ground with 13 dead men surrounding it. Dead and wounded lay so thickly that riders
top: encyclopedIa BRItannIca/UIG/Getty ImaGes Bottom: tImothy JacoBsen/ap
Joe Raedle/Getty ImaGes
The Irish Brigade, made up mostly of New Yorkers, rushed to the field behind its brigade flag: gold harp and shamrock on an emerald background. A priest offered unconditional absolution for all who would die in the battle, as long as they did not display cowardice. The brigade was 30 paces from the Confederate line when the rebels opened fire and cut down more than half of the soldiers in two regiments. When McClellan sent Gen. Edwin Sumner an order that he press the attack with his command, Sumner—at 66 the oldest Civil War field commander—responded with the booming voice that gave him the nickname “Bull,” “Go back, young man, and tell Gen. McClellan that I have no command.” Then momentum shifted as some New York soldiers saw a weak point in the Confederate position and seized a knoll from which they sent flanking fire into the Southern line. New
Hampshire lieutenant Thomas Livermore wrote that one stretch of Bloody Lane had “so many dead rebels that they formed a line which one may have walked upon as far as I could see.” Five bullets hit Southern Col. John B. Gordon, who fell forward unconscious, his face in his cap. He would have suffocated in his own blood but “for the act of some Yankee who, as if to save my life, had at a previous hour during the battle shot a hole through the cap, which let the blood out.” Slugfest No. 3 came in the afternoon along the Union left and the Confederate right. Northern soldiers tried to advance by grabbing a 125-foot arched limestone bridge across the creek that was no more than 50 feet wide and not deep. Historian Shelby Foote writes that it could have been waded “without wetting the armpits of the shortest man” in Gen. Ambrose Burnside’s corps. Seizing that bridge and advancing beyond it, though, was like conquering a castle, with the creek acting as a moat. High bluffs over the creek’s west bank serving as turrets for 550 Georgian sharpshooters facing more than 20 times as many Northerners. Burnside was unusually modest among army officers: Lincoln had twice offered Burnside command of the entire Army of the Potomac, but Burnside had pleaded that he “was not competent to command such a large army as this.” Foote and others have agreed, but Burnside’s deadly emphasis on the bridge wasn’t totally dumb. A Connecticut company’s attempt to ford the stream failed, with Company A commander John Griswold making it to the west bank but dying there from his wounds. Finally, Col. Edward Ferrero, who before the war taught West Point cadets how to dance, waltz, and fence, ordered two Union regiments to charge across the bridge. One corporal, Lewis Patterson of Company I, First Pennsylvania, called out, “Will you give us whiskey, colonel, if we take it?” Ferrero yelled back, “You shall have as much as you want, if you take the bridge.” With that, 670 men sprung to the attack, and one out of three died or was wounded in the process—but the Union army was finally across and advancing. The chance for a decisive Northern victory, though, ended when 3,000 additional Confederate soldiers arrived after a 17-mile march from Harper’s Ferry: As twilight came they drove the Union troops back to the heights near the creek. Robert E. Lee expected a Northern attack the next day, but it never came. He withdrew his army across the Potomac. The Union celebrated a victory, and Abraham Lincoln used the opportunity to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. Historian James McPherson argues, “No other campaign and battle in the war had such momentous, multiple consequences as Antietam.” Had the South won, foreign recognition and Northern despair could have ended the war, and slavery would have continued. As it was, many more Americans died, and Lincoln noted at Gettysburg the following year, “We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.” By 1890 all Northern states recognized Memorial Day as a time to honor those who did die, and to renew the resolution not to have those deaths be in vain. Southern states came aboard after World War I when Memorial Day began honoring all the Americans who died fighting in any war. Antietam is good ground on which to remember and resolve. A m ay 1 9 , 2 0 1 2
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John Albaugh
God’s foolishness vs. worldly wisdom Charles Colson: -
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COURTESY OF PRISON FELLOWSHIP
“B foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the GRACE: Colson talking with a prisoner. strong.” ( Corinthians :). It became clear after his April Jesus Christ and those who don’t. God is not a death that Chuck Colson’s life doesn’t make sense respecter of persons, neither was Colson, and to a lot of people. Why would a man with his neither should we be. The worship arising behind experience, education, and connections devote his prison walls sounds just as sweet to God as the life to working with prisoners? He was a lawyer, a prayers from the church pews. Marine, a leader of men, a political savant, a Like most of us, Colson wouldn’t have chosen talented writer and gifted speaker with a story to this path for himself. But being a follower of tell and the best contacts in the world. He was Christ means we don’t choose our own path. God disgraced and hated by some for his connections to has a different value system than we do. He values President Richard Nixon and Watergate, but he was the life and soul of every individual, from the a hero and loved by others. He could have had any president of the United States to the hardened number of lucrative careers even after his seven murderer on death row. And He prizes most our months in prison. dependence on and trust in Him. Colson’s life As someone who has recently made a similar testified to his realization of those truths long after journey, perhaps I can offer some insight. Working his seven months in prison were a distant with prisoners doesn’t sound glamorous to begin memory. with, but the reality is even less so. Filthy mouths, The ministry Colson founded, Prison Fellowship, questionable morals, hardened hearts, abused and has extended the love of Christ and the good news of addicted bodies and minds—this is humanity at its His forgiveness and grace to prisoners in thousands most raw. of prisons across the country and around the world. But prison strips away the trappings of this life, Reaching out to “the least of these,” yielding his life revealing some basic truths hard to see from the to Christ, and demonstrating true Christianity in a outside. Prisoners aren’t so different from the rest way that is as rare as it is powerful, Colson was a of us. They are human. They make mistakes. They hero for our generation. need grace. Actually, the biggest distinction I saw While many have criticized his achievements in during my time with prisoners is that they recent days and questioned his ministry, let’s take invariably recognize their need of grace while most up his mantle, follow his example, and let God lead others live under the illusion that we are “good us to greatness not as the world measures, but as it enough.” Many prisoners I speak with instinctively will matter in eternity—where Colson now receives understand their separation from God, the total his greatest reward. A inadequacy of their works to correct it, and their need for a redeemer. —John Albaugh, former chief of staff to Rep. Ernest Istook, What prison makes especially clear, and what R-Oklahoma, pled guilty to felony charges in the Jack Colson devoted his life to proclaiming, is that there Abramoff lobbying scandal, served four months in a are only two distinctions among people that really halfway house, and has now started a ministry to help matter: those who know and seek relationship with ex-cons re-entering society in Colorado Springs, Colo.
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“It’s like NPR from a Christian worldview.”
What you can expect
Trevin Wax, blogger, Kingdom People (The Gospel Coalition)
News review: Top stories of the week, in the United States and around the world
The World and Everything in It
Special features like “The Olasky Interview,” “Let the Candidates Speak,” and “The History Book” Commentary: Original reflections by Joel Belz, Andrée Seu, and Janie Cheaney, and other biblical worldview thinkers In-depth audio treatments of feature stories from the print magazine Culture: Film and television reviews by Megan Basham, books by Susan Olasky, and music by Arsenio Orteza Political roundup: Analysis of the candidates and the issues — plus key state and local initiatives Thorough coverage of life issues, education, the economy, and the law News of the church and God’s people working in the world
A weekly radio program from World News Group
“The World and Everything in It” debuted August 6 on two dozen radio affiliates. Since then, TW&E has grown to 180 stations, and airs network-wide Sunday nights at 6 (central) on Bott Radio Network. This thoughtful and enjoyable week-in-review program features news and analysis from the WORLD editorial team and interviews with top newsmakers—with the journalistic depth you’ve come to expect from WORLD.
Check radio listings, listen online, and share favorite segments via Facebook and Twitter at worldandeverything.com. Listen anytime, anywhere with free podcast subscriptions on iTunes.
Courtesy of Prison fellowshiP
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4/26/12 5:32 PM
Growing your Business
Wisely
The C12 Group provides a valuable forum for Christian CEOs and business owners who want to lead by applying proven “best in class” methods consistent with Biblical principles. One day each month, members enjoy the enormous benefits of a peer advisory group of 10-15 engaging in the following structured segments.
Working “On” Your Business
A “best practice” topic focused on leadership, management, team development, and profitable growth.
Working “On” Your Business as a Ministry
A segment focused on ministering through business as God’s steward and ambassador.
Core Presentation
One member “goes deep” in a structured presentation of their business and life, receiving valuable peer feedback and counsel.
Open Table
Members share specific timely issues, gaining feedback and perspective from the group.
Group Accountability
Create “To-Do” items from the lessons learned; report on last month’s list. Close in prayer.
Personal Counsel
Monthly one-on-one session with your C12 Area Chair focused on your needs and opportunities.
www.c12group.com
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Priorities are what we do. Everything else is just talk!
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4/27/12 10:54 AM
OTTO GREULE JR/GETTIM IMAGES
Start the day with a focus on spiritual values.
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SPORTS LIFESTYLE TECHNOLOGY SCIENCE HOUSES OF GOD MONEY RELIGION
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Victory in the ninth SPORTS: After nearly a decade of setbacks, PHILIP HUMBER stopped worrying and pitched a perfect game BY J.C. DERRICK
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W C W S pitcher Philip Humber joined Twitter this past offseason, Tim Tebow was the first person he followed. Humber twice tweeted at Tebow, then the Denver Broncos’ quarterback, but never received a response. Last month, though, Humber was at the center of the sports world. On April in Seattle, the -year-old right-hander tossed the st perfect game in the history of baseball—and Tebow tweeted him. “I guess you’ve got to throw a perfect game to get a tweet from Tim Tebow,” Humber laughed.
Humber, like Tebow an outspoken Christian, threw just pitches— were strikes—to retire all Mariners. He said early in the game his mind was only on securing a win, but after breezing through the middle innings on only pitches, his thoughts shifted: “After about the sixth, seventh inning, I thought, ‘Hey, God, if it’s your will for this to happen, make it happen—just use me for your purpose.’” Humber’s road to that moment was long and winding. He was the Texas state player of the year in high school and led the Rice Owls M AY 1 9 , 2 0 1 2
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to the 2003 College World Series title. He was the No. 3 overall pick in the 2004 draft. Then came surgery on his elbow and six years of failure. Three major league teams gave up on him as Humber moved from prospect to suspect. Last year the White Sox took a chance on him. In his first appearance, he threw only two pitches and both of them were hits. “Both runners scored,” he said, “so I started the year with an infinite ERA.” He cried out: “Why did you put me here, God? You just want to embarrass me some more?” But Humber’s praying and questioning led him finally to the belief that “God has my best interest in heart because I’m a child of His.” He started worrying less and pitching better.
Humber figured Saunders was unlikely to swing at a 3-0 pitch, so he threw a down-the-middle fastball. Strike one. Saunders then swung through a high fastball and struck out on a sharp slider. One out. That’s when Humber noticed the electricity at Safeco Field: “I could feel the crowd. I could feel their anticipation.” The second Mariner batter hit a lazy fly ball. One out away: “The fans were going nuts. Even though we’re on the road, you could tell the fans wanted to see it.”
VICTORY STACK: teammates mob humber after he pitched a perfect baseball game against the seattle Mariners.
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—J.C. Derrick is a World Journalism Institute student
left: OttO Greule Jr/Getty iMaGes • riGht: elaine thOMpsOn/ap
After his mid-perfect-game prayer last month, Humber said his stuff got better in the seventh and eighth innings. Humber reached the ninth inning on only 80 pitches, and had not even gone to a three-ball count on any Mariner. Starting the ninth, he immediately fell behind the leadoff hitter, Michael Saunders, with two four-seam fastballs. Humber knew he was overthrowing, so he stepped off the mound to gather himself. “Even after that, I threw ball three,” he said. “None of those pitches was close.”
Pinch hitter Brendan Ryan strode to the plate and patiently worked the count to three balls and two strikes. Catcher A.J. Pierzynski called for a slider, and Humber agreed: Since he could not control that pitch as well as his fast ball, Ryan would probably be looking for the fastball and would have a greater chance of hitting it. Humber’s thinking at the moment: If he couldn’t have a perfect game, he wanted to at least preserve the no-hitter. As soon as the ball left Humber’s hand, his heart sank: “When I threw it, I thought, ‘Well, that’s ball four.’” He was right: The pitch was a foot outside and low—but Ryan, fooled, could not
stop his swing. Strike three. The ball skipped away from Pierzynski, but he had time to retrieve it and throw to first to complete the strikeout. Humber dropped to his knees to thank God, then found himself on the bottom of a dogpile for the first time since he was the winning pitcher for the Rice Owls in the 2003 College World Series. What was it like under there? “Not really any thoughts, I was just laughing,” Humber told me. “The coolest part was watching the reaction of everybody else. Some of my teammates had tears in their eyes. They had just as much joy and excitement as I did.” During the first two days after the perfect game Humber received countless congratulatory texts and phone calls, including one from President Barack Obama. Humber sat through dozens of interviews and even delivered the Top Ten on the Late Show with David Letterman, before cutting off interviews to prepare for his next start. Throughout the media blitz, Humber consistently gave credit to God for his success: “The cool thing about live interviews is they can’t censor you. … I get to say what’s on my heart.” One of the common themes in the coverage of Humber has been his humility. He says God developed his character through the years of struggling, dropping him so low that he wanted to give up baseball in 2009: “Sometimes God takes us into the desert and works on us a little bit. He used that time to work on me.” Humber experienced a five-fold increase in his Twitter following within three days of his historic game. With his first post-perfect game tweet, he once again pointed a watching world to the source of his strength: “Throwing a perfect game is an awesome moment in a ballplayer’s life. But it pales in comparison to knowing a truly perfect God. Jer 9:23-24.” (“Thus says the Lord: ‘Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, let not the mighty man boast in his might, let not the rich man boast in his riches, but let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me.’”) A
Read more about Philip Humber on the iPad version of WORLD
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Notebook > Sports
Here’s a look at other athletes with comparable age records: In , Arthur Gore was the Wimbledon men’s singles champion at age , still the oldest player ever to win a major tennis tournament.
LEFT: OTTO GREULE JR/GETTY IMAGES • RIGHT: ELAINE THOMPSON/AP
MOYER: DOUG PENSINGER/GETTY IMAGES • GORE: PA PHOTOS/LANDOV • SWAHN: OC/OLYMPIC MUSEUM COLLECTIONS • QUINN: U.S. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS • PAIGE: BETTMANN/CORBIS/AP SNEAD: AP • HOWE: NHLI VIA GETTY IMAGES • PARISH: BRIAN BAHR/ALLSPORT/GETTY IMAGES • NAVRATILOVA: GABRIEL BOUYS/AFP/GETTY IMAGES • TESTAVERDE: DAVID DRAPKIN/AP
In , Oscar Swahn won an Olympic gold medal at age as a member of Sweden’s running deer single-shot team. He won a silver medal eight years later in a similar team event at age . In , pitcher Jack Quinn won a major league game just two months after his th birthday, a record before Moyer motored past it this spring.
Slow pitches, big wins JAMIE MOYER joins the annals of aged athletes who can still get it done BY MARK BERGIN
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O J , , J M took to the mound in a Chicago Cubs uniform for his major league debut against future Hall-of-Famer Steve Carlton. And the -year-old left-hander collected his first win. More than a quarter century later on April of this year, now with the Colorado Rockies, Moyer earned victory No. of his career at age , becoming the oldest pitcher in major league history to register a win. Moyer shows little sign of stopping anytime soon. Despite undergoing Tommy John surgery on his throwing arm after the season, he has emerged this year as a dependable cog in Colorado’s starting rotation. His ERA is among the best in baseball, even though his velocity is the worst. Moyer was never known for a blistering fastball, but age and surgery have relegated his top speed to just miles per hour. A minor league team in Ft. Myers, Fla., runs a promotion that gives fans the chance to win free tickets if they can best Moyer on the radar gun. So how does the aging veteran get it done? Moyer uses five distinct pitches, locating each precisely and using a variety of speeds—slow, slower, and slowest. He stays one step ahead of hitters, knowing that a miles per hour fastball feels like pure heat in the wake of a miles per hour changeup. He is a testament to the power of guile and an inspiration to aging athletes everywhere. The No. that has long adorned the back of his uniform might soon serve as a badge of longevity. Moyer’s birthday is Nov. . Email: mbergin@worldmag.com
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In , Satchel Paige became the oldest rookie in major league baseball at age .
In , Sam Snead won the Greater Greensboro Open at age years and months, becoming the oldest player ever to win a PGA Tour event. In , Gordie Howe scored the final goal of his storied NHL career at age for the Hartford Whalers, a stunning years after his NHL debut in . In , longtime Boston Celtics center Robert Parish played a reserve role for the Chicago Bulls and managed to crack the starting lineup on three occasions. His final start set the record for age at years and days. In , Martina Navratilova became the oldest player to win a professional singles tennis match when she cruised to a straight sets victory in the first round at Wimbledon at age years and eight months. In , Vinny Testaverde led the Carolina Panthers to a - victory over the San Francisco ers, becoming the oldest starting quarterback to win an NFL game at years and days.
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Rock bottom
Special Sunday abortions in Florida, nursing home junkies in The Hague BY SUSAN OLASKY
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“ . //. You must present this page to the receptionist at the time of the abortion. . credit towards cost of abortion. No cash value.” That’s the wording of an online ad: The day of worship and rest for Christians is now a discount day for abortion. The Orlando Women’s Center is offering off coupons for abortions performed on Sundays throughout the month of May. That center performs both medical and surgical abortions through the th week of pregnancy. Its ads brag that doctors there have more than combined years experience doing early and late-term abortions. Also bragging: “Woodstock,” a nursing home in The Hague that is unique (according to the German magazine Der Spiegel) in catering to hard drug users who have been addicted for at least years. The residents finance their habits with
welfare payments and the money they earn by working three hours per day, three times a week. Those who can’t afford drugs can buy beer for cents a can (with a limit of per day). Three house rules govern behavior at the nursing home: no violence, no drug dealing, and no prostitution. Der Spiegel notes the Woodstock model has drawn interest from other countries, but some of the specific detail in the article doesn’t sound wonderful: “a limping man with an emaciated, birdlike face; a man whose face is all but hidden underneath his hooded sweatshirt.”
WEB SUPPORT Our April story about autism highlighted the difficulties families face. My Autism Team (myautismteam.com) promotes itself as “the social network for parents of children with autism.” It is a free online place where parents can connect with other parents, ask for advice, and learn about local doctors, therapists, and other resources. Parents post updates on their day, describe problems and successes, and get feedback from others going through similar things. Technology can be a great help for people with disabilities, including autism. The Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism (thinkingautismguide.blogspot. com/p/resources.html) gathers in one place links to information and resources about autism, including technology. One helpful link is to a spreadsheet of app reviews written by a mother of a -year-old autistic son (squidalicious.com/p/on-ipads.html). Another use of technology: Children in one New York City kindergarten class use Twitter during the week to inform their parents about what they did in school. Using a private account, teacher Jennifer Aaron helps her students at P.S. in Tribeca sum up their day in characters or less. She told The New York Times, “Twitter is like the ideal thing for -year-olds because it is so short. ... It makes them think about their day and kind of summarize what they’ve done during the day.” —S.O.
Cut-and-paste history
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BIBLE: TOM WILLIAMS/CQ ROLL CALL/NEWSCOM
“This is the place where you can see what makes America … America,” says Marc Pachter, director of the National Museum of American History. The museum on the National Mall exhibits Abraham Lincoln’s top hat, Michelle Obama’s inaugural gown, Edison’s light bulb, Dorothy’s ruby slippers, and—until July —Th — omas Jefferson’s abridged version of the New Testament. Since last November the museum has dedicated an entire gallery—more space than it devotes to World War I—to the exhibit entitled “Jefferson’s Bible: The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth.” The exhibit includes video screens and storyboards venerating Jeffersonian ethics. The original abridged Bible on display looks like a scrapbook of Jefferson’s cut-and-paste theology. The exhibit begins with notes explaining to visitors that Jefferson’s Bible excludes miracles and other aspects that Jefferson thought “contrary to reason.” Through his edited version, Jefferson believed he provided “the most sublime and benevolent code of morals that has ever been offered to man.” The exhibit declares that Jefferson’s Bible united Enlightenment ideals, Christian tradition, and American Revolutionary thought, and was emblematic of the spirit of the age, improving on backward and superstitious Christianity. And yet, Jefferson’s skeptical deism was not the major part of the Revolution. Revolutionary leaders quoted Deuteronomy more than any other book, and signers of the Declaration of Independence held seminary degrees. The colonial Great Awakening, not the European Enlightenment, most formed American mindsets. Jefferson’s statement that “I am a sect of my own,” displayed prominently in the exhibit, is no longer true. Skeptical deism is now the established religion, and his miracle-less Bible speaks more to today’s dominant beliefs than to the worldview of his day. —Kira Clark Email: solasky@worldmag.com
4/30/12 2:33 PM
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Notebook > Lifestyle
Notebook > Technology
Byte-sized Bibles special microchips are invaluable resources to Christians in hostile nations By daniEl jamEs dEvinE
bible: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/neWsCom
sD memoRy CaRD: ulRiCh niehoff/neWsCom • Chinese TReasuRes 5.0 CD: hanDouT • TRypaiR.Com: hanDouT
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Over a decade ago a Chinese missionary enlightened Ken Allen, a Texas pastor and computer programmer, to the need for Bible study materials in a digital format. Allen had asked the missionary why he was trying to scan English pages of Matthew Henry’s commentaries onto a compact disc, and the answer was, “Anything is better than nothing. And that’s all that we have in China—nothing.” Knowing that Bibles and commentaries already translated to Mandarin would be more helpful to the missionary, Allen enlisted the help of his three young sons and founded the Digital Bible Society (dbsbible.org) in his home in 2001. They spent the next 10 years creating and revising a copyright-free data CD containing hundreds of Chinese-language hymns and books (including The Pilgrim’s Progress) along with an 80-minute evangelistic film called The Hope. Allen, now 51, told me millions of Chinese people have copies of the CD. Since then, DBS has finished similar digital projects in Arabic and Farsi, the language of Iran and Afghanistan. Today the organization’s 10 full-time employees are working to produce another 10 language libraries (Spanish, Russian, Turkish, Vietnamese, and others). Rather than
translating books themselves, the team mainly collects content from dozens of partner organizations, which have agreed to allow DBS to digitize their books and Bible translations, and give copies away. DBS can crunch those Bibles—along with 400 hours of video, 900 hours of worship music and audio Bibles, and hundreds of books— onto a 32-gigabyte micro SD chip that is smaller than a dime. “The micro SD chip is the floppy disk of the Middle East,” Allen said. The chips are popular in developing nations because they fit in computers, pocket projectors, tablets, and mobile phones, making it easy to exchange files between the devices. Allen, who asked me not to use his real surname because of his work in closed countries, said DBS’s content operates on computers and mobiles without the need to download software. That protects believers who might get into trouble if government officials confiscated their laptops and found a Bible program installed.
DIGITAL TRACKS: The Chinese Treasures 5.0 CD presents the combined work of some 30 organizations that have contributed literature, media, and tools; a micro sD chip (at top left).
Michael Wood works for one of DBS’s partners, Open Doors USA. Wood told me Open Doors helps ministry leaders in the field put together a “shopping basket” of digital materials they’d like to own, then works with DBS to format the content and distribute it in the field on SD chips or USB flash drives. He said the digital libraries are great for house church leaders, who often don’t have access to many Christian books.
Network built for two Facebook lets us interact with friends and family, but we sometimes forfeit privacy: Acquaintances may read flirty comments we’ve posted to photos of our spouse or special someone. A password-protected app called Pair (trypair.com) has a solution. It allows two—and only two—people to stay in touch by exchanging notes, photos, and location updates. A couple can play tic-tac-toe or draw sketches. Or “thumbkiss”: Placing their thumbs on the screens of their respective phones will cause them to vibrate simultaneously. That’s silly, maybe, but who’s going to know? —D.J.D.
Email: ddevine@worldmag.com
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Notebook > Science
March cookout What’s behind the warmest spring on record? BY DANIEL JAMES DEVINE
SPRUNG: People rollerblade along Lake Erie in Buffalo, N.Y., on March .
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A new set of vehicle fuel economy standards the Obama administration announced last November—and billed as a money-saving measure—could actually price millions of Americans out of the new car market. The National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA) recently analyzed the corporate average fuel economy standards, which apply to vehicles made between and , and found that higher price tags on cars and trucks could remove up to . “million licensed drivers from the new motor vehicle market by .” Those are drivers who would be unable to qualify for a loan for higher priced vehicles because of debt or low income. The NADA analysis assumed the average price of new vehicles would rise nearly , by because of the technology needed to increase fuel efficiency. The Obama administration argues the fuel savings will save car buyers money in the long run, and reduce American oil consumption by billion barrels. —D.J.D.
Q UAKING
Scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey are reporting an increase in the number of earthquakes of magnitude or greater in the U.S. midcontinent, including in Colorado, Texas, and Arkansas. There were such quakes in the region last year— six times the th century average. The geologists say the new earthquakes are “almost certainly man-made,” and possibly a result of pumping wastewater from oil and gas operations into underground disposal wells. There was no evidence suggesting hydraulic fracturing, a gas extraction technique, was to blame. —D.J.D.
ILLUSTRATION: KRIEG BARRIE • PHOTO: DAVID DUPREY/AP
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T A , an unusual winter heat wave this year produced the warmest January to March stretch in the contiguous United States since records began in . It was the warmest March on the books, too, and scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that temperature stations across the nation had broken an unprecedented , records during the month. March weather, combined with last year’s warm summer and severe drought in Texas and Oklahoma, led many Americans to blame global warming. A Yale and George Mason University poll conducted in March found more than two-thirds believe “global warming is affecting the weather in the United States.” But while some climate scientists called the March barbecue weather “weird” and “beyond unbelievable,” others pointed out that normal weather patterns like La Niña were responsible. “We see hot and cold spots over the globe every month, and this was just our turn,” explained climatologist John Christy, from the University of Alabama in Huntsville. “Weather systems aligned in March in a way that changed normal circulation patterns and brought more warm air than usual to the continental U.S.” Zooming outward gives a cooler perspective: While March was warm for the lower states, it was cool for Alaska, Australia, and parts of Russia. Globally, it was the coolest March in years (though still warmer than the th century average). And according to years of satellite measurements of the earth’s surface air temperature, Christy calculated the month was only one-fifth of degree Fahrenheit warmer than usual.
illustration: krieg barrie • photo: DaviD Duprey/ap
shaaM neWs netWork/aFp/neWscoM
Notebook > Houses of God
The damaged entrance to the Saint Mary Church of the Holy Belt in the old city of Homs, Syria. Shelling by Syrian forces against rebel strongholds forced most churches—but not all— to close in this central city, which has become the hub for the country’s protest movement.
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4/27/12 9:45 AM
Notebook > Money UNREST CONTINUES: protesters take part in a general strike against austerity measures and high unemployment in Madrid.
French connection The economic problems in spain have crossed over the pyrenees By WaRRen COLe Smith
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Spain has been the most recent problem child in the European family. Unemployment is almost 25 percent, and Spaniards have rioted over the new center-right government’s austerity measures. A Spanish bond offering in early April was a disaster, with so few buyers that Spanish officials had to offer high interest rates
to sell what few bonds they did. A few days later, a second Spanish bond auction yielded slightly better results, but Spain’s 10-year bonds still remain around 6 percent, near record-high levels. By comparison, the yield on a 10-year U.S. bond is less than 2 percent. But the rain in Spain has now spread over the Pyrenees Mountains to
France, and beyond. On April 19, rumors flew that Moody’s would review France’s AAA credit rating. The rumor was a shock, as France is supposed to be part of the solution to Europe’s debt crisis. France, though, is also Spain’s largest trading partner, and whither one goes, the other follows. The downgrade rumor may have had a role in French elections, which took place the following Sunday and pushed center-right French President Nicolas Sarkozy into a runoff with a Socialist candidate. The next day, April 23, the Dutch government, one of the most vocal critics of European countries failing to rein in their budgets, resigned after failing to agree on a plan to bring its own spending under control. Global stock markets immediately plunged. Given that reaction, and the increasing frustration Europeans are showing with their leaders, the outcome of France’s May 6 run-off could determine whether the rain in Spain was an April shower or the beginning of tornado season.
EARNINGS BONANZA spain: agencia estado via ap iMages • alcoa: gene J. puskar/ap
Every month, scores of economic reports come out that can, if they say the right things on the right days, move the stock markets dramatically up or down. But four times a year, quarterly corporate earnings trump all of these reports. Earnings season kicks off with Alcoa, famous in finance circles for being the first major company to report its results each earnings season, usually in the second week after the end of the quarter. It’s also a bellwether company, as aluminum consumption is highly sensitive to global economic forces. On April 11, Alcoa reported a surprising 9 cent profit for the first quarter. Analysts expected a 4 cent loss. The markets moved sharply upward on the news, and Alcoa has indeed proven to be a bellwether. As the earnings season nears its end, corporate results have been substantially stronger than expected. Through the end of April, more than 70 percent of S&P 500 companies have beat expectations, according to Thomson Reuters data. Citigroup, Home Depot, Procter & Gamble, and Coca Cola all issued strong earnings reports. But not all was well. The technology sector has been jittery. IBM missed its revenue forecast. Investors are also nervous about Apple, whose stock price was up as much as 40 percent since the beginning of the year. However, IBM’s weak revenue and increasing competition for the iPhone and iPad cause analysts to wonder if Apple can maintain its growth. Nonetheless, most analysts say the first quarter reports are good news and could lead to hiring and expansion by these companies in the months ahead. —W.C.S.
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Notebook > Religion
Cursing and cursing Anti-Christian activist Mikey Weinstein strikes (out) again BY THOMAS KIDD
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... Let their days be few.” District Court Judge Martin Hoffman dismissed Weinstein’s lawsuit, but Weinstein, a former Air Force lawyer who served in the Reagan White House, said that “a very aggressive appeal” of the decision was “highly likely.” In Weinstein sued the Air Force Academy for allowing Christian “proselytization,” and in charged the Pentagon for allowing lunchtime Bible studies to take place on its premises (see “Oneman offensive,” Aug. , )—with little result.
Grad grab New York churches have been fighting to use school facilities for Sunday morning worship, but such use also cuts the other way: Schools across the country routinely hold commencement exercises in church buildings. Now
KLINGENSCHMITT: MANUEL BALCE CENETA/AP • LOUISIANA COLLEGE: HANDOUT • NEW BIRTH MISSIONARY BAPTIST CHURCH: RIC FELD/AP
A T has ruled that “imprecatory” prayers, or prayers for another person’s harm, are legal so long as they don’t result in direct threats or personal damage. Mikey Weinstein, a Jewish agnostic and founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, sued Gordon Klingenschmitt, a former Navy chaplain, whose website allegedly called on supporters to claim Psalm in prayers for Weinstein’s demise. A prayer posted on Klingenschmitt’s website (prayinjesusname.org) and on YouTube that cites Weinstein and antiChristian activist Barry Lynn reads in part, “We bless them but they curse us.
an Atlanta-area high school student has declared she will not attend her graduation because it
O UTSIDE CALL
Louisiana College, a Southern Baptist affiliate, prevailed in a lawsuit filed by four former professors who claimed that the school violated their academic freedom, and that the school and its supporters inflicted emotional distress on them. Backers of the college allege that the professors’ courses included material and views contrary to the school’s Christian mission, from using M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled to raising questions about the Bible’s historicity. The state court ruled that it could not legitimately decide whether the professors’ teaching actually violated Southern Baptist theology, and that the theological nature of the case put it beyond the court’s jurisdiction. The college called the ruling a landmark decision for “Louisiana Baptists who have proudly supported their only biblically based higher education institution.”
will take place at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church, a megachurch led by controversial pastor Eddie Long. Sixteen-yearold Nahkoura Mahnassi says she is not a Christian, and that Southwest DeKalb High School should not hold commencement at the church because it violates the separation of church and state. Secularist advocacy groups such as Americans United for Separation of Church and State have repeatedly sued to stop church use of schools and school use of churches. The U.S. th Circuit Court of Appeals heard a case in February regarding the constitutionality of a Brookfield, Wis., high school holding graduation at a church. A decision is pending.
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Mailbag
“Finding the strike zone”
(April ) Thank you so much for your uplifting article about major league baseball players Justin Masterson and Jeremy Affeldt. It seems as though every few weeks newspaper headlines are screaming about an athlete caught abusing drugs or assaulting teammates, so it is very refreshing to hear of their Christ-like attitudes on and off the field.
I have a postgraduate degree and struggle to make ends meet. My daughter, a senior, attends a local tech center for cosmotology. When I tell people who ask about her college plans that she really likes doing hair, the conversation often drops as though I have somehow failed as a mother. However, I suspect that she and her classmates will still be “doing hair” and other trades long after my grant-based position at a nonprofit fizzles out.
Putnam Valley, N.Y.
, , San Diego, Calif. “Viral crusaders” Positive role models in teens’ lives are often missing and we know many teens idolize the sports world, so this was a refreshing article. Johnson Creek, Wis.
“Into the depths of the sea” (April ) This column lifted my heart to Christ and reminded me of the gospel’s power. Every point is encouraging but the one that grabbed my heart was, “he remembers the cost, not the debt.” How true, and how extraordinary! Richmond, Va.
“The trades alternative” (April ) As you pointed out, there are plenty of jobs available, just not enough skilled workers to fill them. I often ask service providers, such as appliance repairmen, what sort of training they needed. I want my children to include vocational career possibilities in their dreams for the future. Anchor Point, Alaska
(April ) To understand the events surrounding Joseph Kony’s downfall, I recommend a documentary called The Unconventional War. It shows how radical forgiveness, reconciliation, and the power of Jesus Christ are the real weapons that chased him off and transformed afflicted communities in Uganda. I was in tears watching an old lady throw her ancestral charms into a fire while she renounced her spiritism. Umatilla, Fla.
CHIN STATE, ZAUTAL VILLAGE, MYANMAR / submitted by David Servant around the world
About years ago someone hurt me very badly. Forgiveness felt genuine only after I approached and was kind to him, instead of avoiding him. Thank you for helping me to see something deeper. Rose Hill, Kan.
Like a large filing cabinet, the brain records and sorts and retrieves information when needed (except during history tests). The memories of my sins or the sins of others never go away. Only with God’s help can we ever hope to live with them. Fishers, Ind.
Send photos and letters to: mailbag@worldmag.com
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For the last four years I have lived as a missionary in areas of Africa that Kony affected. Yes, he has left Uganda but he is still terrorizing other countries. As someone who has witnessed firsthand the agony of men, women, and children whose lives are being destroyed, I support the efforts of the various organizations trying to end these atrocities. Without an internationally backed effort to capture him, thousands more will be affected. Harrisburg, Pa.
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(April ) Thank you for your insightful review of The Hunger Games. As a teenager, I am accustomed to hearing peers rave over the books and movie, but most don’t seem to think about the violent premise at all. They say that when they watch movies with questionable content they “kind of block it out” so they can enjoy the rest of the movie. That’s scary, because it shows exactly what you pointed out: That movies have uncanny power to desensitize undiscerning people to issues that have enormous effects on society. Arkadelphia, Ark.
“The gardener” (April ) I love Andrée Seu’s column, but she is mistaken when she said that the woman who anointed Jesus’ feet did not know she was preparing His body for burial. Mark quotes Jesus saying that in anointing Him, “she has done what she could,” even while the disciples were oblivious to His message that He was going to die. That is why Jesus memorialized her—let’s not take that away from her.
Wheaton, Ill.
“Law and orders” (April ) It was right for us to protect our borders and ban companies from hiring undocumented workers, but this is only the beginning of our task. We need to address glitches in the system and we need a clear idea of the demand for skills that cannot be met from within our borders. For a multitude of reasons, we are producing too many people for jobs that don’t exist and too few for jobs that do. We should also assess the degree to which employers are attracting illegal workers because they want to pay lower wages and avoid having to provide a safe workplace and accident insurance. Houston, Texas
“Tax time humor” (April ) Once again, Marvin Olasky’s pre-Tax Day rib-tickling humor brightened my day. While my newspaper background likely helped me appreciate the jokes, I think anyone with a sense of humor can enjoy this column.
Huntington, W.Va.
“Chasing down truth” (April ) I loved this column. It is forthright, humble, and a tribute to the sovereignty of God. Mishawaka, Ind.
Council Bluffs, Iowa
“Faith-based farce” (April ) This article illustrates two dangers of relying on government programs and funding, even for good purposes. First, President Obama’s misuse of the Bush-era Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives shows us that no matter how noble the ends or how good the design of a government program, there is no guarantee the program will
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stay true to its original purposes once others are in power. Second, Jim Towey’s fear that Obama may “move to end the religious hiring protections of faithbased groups receiving federal funds,” should remind us that government funds come with strings attached.
Notable Books (April ) There is sadly much truth to the charge, from The Next Generation, that the older generation of Christians is “judgmental, separationist, culture warring, and damaging to the Christian brand.” For too long the church has not done enough to address ills such as orphans, sex trafficking, and dirty water, according to the author. But when Christians try to address the root
4/26/12 6:03 PM
causes of these ills, such as a culture with few sexual restraints, they are accused of being judgmental, divisive, and unloving. Is it more loving just to pick up the pieces after the fact or be controversial and confrontational in attempting to prevent these ills?
Owosso, Mich.
“Animals as idols” (March ) I too have noticed how our culture increasingly glamorizes owning a “rescue dog.” We now couch pet ownership in “adoption” terminology, which used to be reserved for human relationships. I have stunned many friends who encourage us to have a dog by responding, “Frankly, I would rather have another child than a dog.” The energy, attention, and resources that I would pour into a child would make them a productive member of society (and prayerfully) of the Lord’s kingdom. A dog never grows up and leaves home.
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“Nowhere to run” (March ) Mindy Belz, reporting from Kano, did a fantastic job describing the horrific situation in Nigeria where Muslims continue to kill and persecute Christians. When will this killing of Christians stop? . Palatine, Ill.
Corrections Central Community College is in Columbus, Neb. (“The trades alternative,” April , p. ). The actor who cut his hand during the filming of Shaken was Kevin Sizemore (“Whirlwind production,” April , p. ).
LETTERS AND PHOTOS Email: mailbag@worldmag.com Write: WORLD Mailbag, P.O. Box , Asheville, - Please include full name and address. Letters may be edited to yield brevity and clarity.
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KRIEG BARRIE
our students grow into the leaders of tomorrow by offering the same classical liberal arts curriculum that shaped many of our country’s Founding Fathers. With an emphasis on timeless academic disciplines and a campus environment that fosters spiritual growth, Patrick Henry College is equipping future leaders to shape the culture and serve the nation.
Andrée Seu Peterson
Altar calling A name change is God’s gift for the remains of the day
KRIEG BARRIE
>>
W was working my true love said to me, “Andrée, ultimately I’m not that important to you.” It was the last resort in a drawn out drama and it did the trick. Stunned like a wailing child by a well-placed swat, I straightened up and surveyed the new terrain. The corollary was immediately apparent, of course—that I was not ultimately that important to him either. This partnership we were embarking on was for a little while. Steve Jobs gave death its grudging due at Stanford’s graduation day in : “Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. ... You are already naked.” Here is wisdom: “The appointed time has grown very short. From now on, let those who have wives live as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing” ( Corinthians :-). David takes me by the hand and says that we can have a thing much better. Sick dependency is darkness that appears as light. Come into the truth with me, he says; the first step is the hardest one, but no one who has ventured into the land of light wants to return from whence he came. You will love me better when you love God more. Choose God over me and you will have us both; choose me over God and you’ll be left with neither. That’s how David talks. C.S. Lewis writes of the hours before his wife’s death: “How long, how tranquilly, how nourishingly, we talked together that last night! And yet, not quite together. There’s a limit to the ‘one flesh.’ You can’t really share someone else’s weakness, or fear or pain. … We were setting out on different roads. This cold truth, this terrible traffic regulation (‘You, Madam, to the right—you, Sir, to the left’)” (A Grief Observed). Left, right. My love and I will each go to our own reward. Assigned seating, you know. Perspective: I am not the mother of his children. I am not his springtime romance. I am not his summer fantasy. Lord willing, I will be the friend of
Email: aseupeterson@worldmag.com
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his old age. We will close this earthly chapter side by side. He is counselor, lover, companion, and friend. But not Counselor, Lover, Companion, and Friend. There will be two in a field; one will be taken and the other left. Two will be grinding at the mill; one will be taken and the other left. In our case, both will be taken (Hooray!), whether separately or together, and that’s sweet. What a motley crew we will be then—David, Y, M, me, and others, all greeting one another like old pals. David said if he goes second he will say to God upon arrival, “Hey, where you got Andrée?” Well, maybe not first thing upon arrival. Our choir teacher in elementary school said that if you want to hit a high note, you must aim just a shade higher than the note. The Lord saw the secret desires of my heart, that all I ever wanted was a man to pull my faith upward, to stretch it just a little more. Call me Hagar: “She called the name of the Lord who spoke to her, ‘You are a God of seeing,’ for she said, ‘Truly here I have seen him who looks after me’” (Genesis :). So now I am changing my last name to Peterson for the remains of the day. And I consider myself the most blessed of women. There is a time and a season for all things, and this is my season to rejoice. We have our instructions about that: “Is anyone cheerful? Let him sing praise” (James :). Lewis ends his quite short book about his quite short marriage with the anecdote of Joy Davidman’s last words. He writes: “She said not to me but to the chaplain, ‘I am at peace with God.’ She smiled, but not at me.” A M AY 1 9 , 2 0 1 2
WORLD
4/26/12 5:51 PM
Marvin Olasky
Row upon row
A trip to Arlington National Cemetery is a fitting way to spend Memorial Day
>>
W O R L D M AY 1 9 , 2 0 1 2
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pay any price, bear any burden, and meet any hardship to assure the survival and the success of liberty. But the little stories are also important. The succession of names on one row of white tombstones—Weincek, Fredette, O’Boyle, Tagudino, McBroom—shows the melting-pot genius of America. Most of the tombstones display a cross or a Star of David, showing how generations of aging Americans prepared to meet their Maker by putting their trust in Christ or in God’s covenant with Abraham. Tombstones in newer sections of the cemetery can show any one of at least symbols, ranging from Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim, to Soka Gakkai, Konkokyo, and the Church of World Messianity. Atheist and Wiccan engravings are hard to find but also present. The location of the graves tells one further story. One section, Chaplains Hill, includes monuments to Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish military chaplains. Section is the nurses’ section. Another part is full of the remains of rear admirals. One grave a little removed from others is that of Medgar Evers of Mississippi, the World War II veteran and civil rights fighter assassinated on June , . Ten rocks sit atop the cross-engraved tombstone. The rocks themselves are a story of America. Under one magnolia tree sits the grave of Marvin Ollendorff, an ordinary Jewish soldier from New York. Several small “stones of remembrance” sit atop his tombstone, and some date the origin of the Jewish custom—leave an ebenezer, a stone of help— to the prophet Samuel. But the next tombstone is the cross-engraved one of Frank Spear of Kansas, and it also has several rocks on top. Americans borrow customs from each other the way neighbors borrow cups of sugar. I saw the eighth graders leaving the cemetery. They were still paying attention, honoring the dedicated dead. Rows of white tombstones do that to you. A
JASON EDWARDS/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC/GETTY IMAGES
“W A N Cemetery, our nation’s most sacred shrine. Please conduct yourselves with dignity and respect at all times.” Meditating on the upcoming Memorial Day, I entered the cemetery just as a legion of eighth graders invaded as well. Kids that age conducting themselves with dignity and respect at all times? That seemed as likely as having all -year-olds show perseverance throughout the marshmallow test: Eat one now, or sit for minutes and you’ll get two. But, surprise! The eighth graders walked along quietly, even reverently. The rows of white tombstones marching up the hills do that to you. One of the main tourist attractions, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, announces in engraved words, “Here rests in honored glory an American soldier known but to God.” Two hundred persons, including a platoon of blue-shirted elementary schoolers, sat and stood quietly as a soldier from the rd Infantry marched back and forth by the tomb, steps each time, symbolizing a -gun salute. At the other main attraction, the grave of John F. Kennedy with its “eternal flame,” the words from Kennedy’s inaugural address leap out from a curved wall: “In the long history of the world only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom. In the hour of maximum danger I do not shrink from this responsibility. I welcome it.” And further up, past flowering dogwoods and azaleas, stands Arlington House, once the home of Robert E. Lee. Union soldiers occupied it in and started burying their dead right by it in , deliberately making it a place that the Lees could never again make their home. Lee was ambivalent about slavery, calling it a “moral and political evil” but believing its future would depend on “Merciful Providence”—and God did decide. Now, the scent of white and purple lilacs wafts over the graves in what was Mary Lee’s garden. Today, pink heart-shaped flowers—bleeding hearts— bloom by one of the first graves, that of Frederick Howard, nd New York Artillery, Aug. , . Those standing nearby have a magnificent view of the Washington Monument and the Capitol—both half-finished in —and the Lincoln Memorial. The gravesite inscriptions tell a big story of heroism, of Americans over the centuries willing to
Email: molasky@worldmag.com
4/26/12 5:54 PM
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