Two months after the government began taking over ailing financial companies, the two largest efforts have failed to go as planned, with the firms complaining that federal officials set overly strict terms and took other unhelpful rescue measures.
- Sydney Smith
English essayist (1771 - 1845)
American soldiers prepared last week for a possible Taliban attack at a small castle at their base, Combat Outpost Lowell, which is near Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan and is a frequent target of attacks.
First Lt. Daniel Wright, the executive officer of the American cavalry unit — Apache Troop of the Sixth Battalion, Fourth Cavalry — put things in foxhole terms.
“Basically,” he said, “we’re the bullet sponge.”
Death with dignity is the death of choice for relatively few persons. Before the act was implemented, opponents anticipated a demographic migration of near-terminal patients to Oregon, such that Oregon would become a “suicide center” for the terminally ill, with all sorts of ensuing social catastrophes. The empirical evidence does not bear out these projections. In ten years, 541 Oregon residents have received lethal prescriptions to end their lives; of this number, 341 patients actually ingested the drugs. These figures are not only lower than the substantial numbers predicted by opponents, they are even smaller than the more conservative estimates anticipated by advocates. While those figures have generally risen each year, the deaths under the ODDA still comprise a very low proportion of Oregon’s total deaths.
Given the predictions of both the ODDA’s original supporters and opponents, one might be inclined to ask not why are some terminally ill patients seeking recourse to physician-assisted suicide, but rather why aren’t more of them doing so? In some years, and in some cases, the prospect of federal intervention may have had a kind of “chilling” effect—if not necessarily among patients requesting such assistance, then on willing physician participants. There may also be a general demographic factor at work: younger persons may be more willing to support physician-assisted suicide than elderly persons who may be staring their own mortality, or that of loved ones, in the face.
However, a likelier explanation may be that the ODDA served as a catalyst to improved end-of-life care among Oregon practitioners—including the increased use of hospice and palliative care, and the easing of restrictions on the drugs practitioners could provide to relieve pain. This is a very significant possibility, because it implies that ensuring a dignified death may not be a matter of changing the laws so much as a matter of changing medical practices and professional education. Moreover, it suggests that, for most people, a pharmacologically-induced death is not a precondition of a dignified death, nor that the possession of a right entails its subsequent use.
As evangelicals, we know how to answer the question, "Are you saved?": If we have believed in Jesus Christ, we are saved—right there, right then.
Sometimes, though, the way we talk about salvation makes it sound like little more than a get-out-of-hell-free card. With our emphasis on what sinners like ourselves are saved from, do we know what we are saved for? Is salvation solely about us and our need to be forgiven and born again, or is there a deeper, God-ward purpose?
Tens of thousands of children in foster care nationwide grow older each year waiting to be adopted, yet a government agency has found that there are far more women seeking to adopt children than there are children awaiting adoption. So why aren't the laws of supply and demand working in U.S. adoptions?
Last month, the National Center for Health Statistics held a research conference on its National Survey of Family Growth. The survey, based on more than 12,000 interviews, is the most comprehensive measure available of the demand for adoption in the United States. The latest study, released in August, found that nearly 600,000 women are seeking to adopt children they do not know. Put another way, imagine that every woman in Chicago between the ages of 18 and 44 wanted to adopt. Are there enough American children to meet this demand? Not even close.
Are any other pastors out there a little bit embarrassed at the way a political machine managed to outdo the church on every front - canvassing neighborhoods, embracing people who look and live differently than we do, planting seeds of hope, stirring people to action? People invested huge amounts of time, money and legwork to spread the news of Obama's campaign. People who have never taken part in the political process, who have never voted or even registered to vote, became motivated and became involved. People who have never believed that they mattered or that their voice would even be heard became believers. People who never show emotion cheered aloud and shed tears without shame in public. People who have been beaten down by life time and again let go of their cynicism and dared to hope. People of all races and walks of life, who may not give each other the time of day under different circumstances, stood side by side and accepted that despite their differences they shared a common vision that united them. People believed. They sacrificed. They invested themselves into something greater. They took hold of a hope, a vision, a common goal.
It would be an exaggeration to say people are happier now that we have less money, but accurate to say there’s a surfacing of shame about the extent of our spend-spend-spend excesses.
The check on this shopping spree stands at $2.6 trillion in American personal debt. That’s a staggering sum.
You can’t wish away debt with a magic wand. The toll for all those home-equity paid Disney vacations will be heavy. Yet I would resist the temptation to say that economic crisis defines our times. No, as Bill Clinton might have said, “It’s the culture, stupid.”
The culture that said the most patriotic act was to shop. The culture that sent the best and the brightest to Wall Street to concoct toxic securities. The culture that said there was no need to balance individual rights and community needs. The culture that replaced thrift with thrills and hope with hype. The culture that said a country at war is not a country that needs to pull together in sacrifice.
Goodbye to all that.
But climbing back to the moral high ground will require qualities that the United States has allowed to atrophy, starting with self-discipline. With tight funds needed for a new generation of priorities, Obama should be thinking about transforming two huge, related kingdoms: defense and intelligence. That'll set the table, institutionally, for the restoration of American moral power.
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This is the thorniest part of the equation. The new president will have to lead the country through a process that people may know from their own lives: getting out of the doghouse. Large errors demand large responses, and not just for show. You have to mean it.
The American list of sins is long -- from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo Bay, from human rights abuses to actual legal violations.This sort of cleansing -- of confronting the truth and taking the consequences -- is the only way to move forward on a moral arc. It is the sign of a mature country -- steady, prudent, ready to re-chart its course when needed. One worth following.
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What Obama's election means, above all, is that brains are back. Sense and pragmatism and the idea of considering-all-the-options are back. Studying one's enemies and thinking through strategic problems are back. Cultural understanding is back. Yahooism and jingoism and junk science about global warming and shabby legal reasoning about torture are out. The national culture of flag-pin shallowness that guided our foreign policy is gone with the wind.
From the very start of his campaign, Obama has given notice that whatever you might think about his policies, they will be well thought out and soberly considered, and that as president he will not be a slave to passion or impulse.
Long ago there was a great king. He was a good king - just, honorable, righteous, and loved by all his people. Within this king’s service was a servant. Each day the servant would wake up and work hard at whatever task he was given. He knew the king was good and just and was always concerned that if the things he did were not good enough, the king might cast him out from the kingdom. There was another man who lived in the same kingdom. He was one of the king’s sons. Each day the son would wake up and work hard at whatever task he was given. He knew the king was good and just and loved all that the king stood for, so he worked with all his strength to help the king in every way he was asked. He loved to hear the words, “Well done my son.” He also knew that, as the king’s son, he would never be in danger of being cast out of the kingdom. Why did the servant work hard? Why did the son work hard? Which would you rather be?
This story demonstrates our love for God and desire to serve him not out of fear, but out of love for all that He is and stands for. And, it also points out the deeper relationship that exists between a king and his son than the relationship between a king and his servant. Further, it hints at inheritance, authority and other privileges belonging to a son.
One of the features of the modern world was "reductionism": the belief that complex things can always be reduced to simpler or more fundamental things. To reduce something is to take it out of context and to take it apart. Church leaders have become experts at reductionism. Ministries that are successful in one context are reduced to "models" that we try to duplicate in other contexts. Sometimes such reductionism is effective. But when we use reductionism indiscriminately, we end up in a world so simplified it is barely recognizable.
So in a modern world, we tend to reduce the complexity and diversity of the Scriptures to simple systems, even when our systems flatten the diversity and integrity of the biblical witness. We reduce our sermons to consumer messages that reduce God to a resource that helps the individual secure a reduced version of the "abundant life" Jesus promised (John 10:10).
And the gospel itself gets reduced to a simplified framework of a few easily memorized steps.
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People are not asking the traditional gospel question much anymore. Asking, "If I died tomorrow, where would I end up?" does not generate much life. But asking people, "If you had just a few years left, what kind of life would you want to live?" generates enormous energy.
