Baby, it’s hot outside

A few days ago, my family and I left the relatively cool climes of Scotland, although it was hotter and drier there than it ever was during our many previous visits, and we returned to the scorching heat of the Midwest.

We will be be back home here for a few days before going on another trip, this one to the northwest, where we hope to enjoy a respite from heat and drought.

I heard climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe—who is the subject of the Washington Post article below—speak at the Trinity (Episcopal Church, Wall Street ) Institute a few years ago about the earth’s increasingly “weird “ weather. Weird was her word.

She spoke then and now as a data-driven scientist and as a person of deep faith in God. She demonstrates that Christians, including evangelical Protestant ones, do care, can care and must care about God’s creation.

I hope more people will listen to Katherine and to the many other experts who warn us about global warming. I also hope that all of us will do all we can to care for this earth and will strive to persuade our political leaders to do the same, while we still have time to save our planet.

Here is the link to the article:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/one-of-americas-top-climate-scientists-is-an-evangelical-christian-shes-on-a-mission-to-convert-skeptics/2019/07/12/9018094c-8d2a-11e9-adf3-f70f78c156e8_story.html

Freedom costs

During my copywriting days ages ago, I remember writing a newspaper advertisement for the Louisville branch of the American Civil Liberties Union. I thought my headline was clever and even unique: “Freedom isn’t free.” My copy went on to say, “It cost to win it. It costs to keep it.” The other day I saw that same headline on someone’s shirt at the fitness center. So much for my supposed cleverness and uniqueness. I was reminded of that ancient ad of mine today as I read the column below from the New York Times. Freedom in America and in many other countries is under attack. Autocrats seek absolute power and control of people. They think they know better than we do. As I prepare to celebrate Independence Day, I remember my direct forebear John Chumbley. He was a farm boy from Virginia who joined the Continental Army and fought the authoritarianism of George III and the British Government during the American Revolution. This long-ago grandfather of mine lived to see the formation of this great Republic, this experiment in ”government of, by and for the people,” as Lincoln said. May we, the people, remember on July 4 and every day the patriots who fought, bled and died for democracy; they paid that price, because they preferred liberty to slavery, self-government to one-man rule. Freedom is never free. Perhaps that headline was neither clever nor unique when I wrote it in 1985, but it was true. It was true in 1776, and it is certainly true in 2019.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/02/opinion/a-revolution-in-happiness.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Sri Lankan attacks require response from moderate Islam

I am outraged and saddened that the greatest day of the Christian year, the Sunday of the Resurrection, was desecrated by the terrorist attacks in Sri Lanka. Nearly 300 people were killed, with 500 wounded in bombings of churches and hotels.

The evidence is that violent Islamists committed these horrific acts.

Now is the time for major Christian leaders—the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury, among others—along with leaders of other faiths, to come together with leaders of modernist Islam and condemn these attacks as an attack on members of God’s one human family and as an attack on God himself.

It might seem presumptuous that I, a Christian, would speak to Muslims and tell them what to do after Sunday’s attacks, but I think I have a right, indeed a duty to do so, because members of my Christian family were murdered. I must respond, for they cannot.

Modernist Islam, made up of disparate groups now, should coalesce and should speak with one voice, repudiating this violence and the perpetrators, denouncing them and separating them from Islam—in effect, excommunicating them from the faith.

Modernist theologians within Islam should reinterpret for this 21st Century context—which includes many different people, cultures and views of ultimacy or God—passages of the Koran that, upon a literal or natural reading, appear to endorse and encourage attacks on people of other faiths or no faith in God.

A new hermeneutic or interpretative framework should be, in this Christian’s opinion, love—doing only good to the other, whoever he or she is, working for that person’s flourishing, regardless of faith or the absence of the same.

Modernists should widely disseminate their enlightened teaching and actively engage with violent Islamists, demonstrating the fallacy of their literalism and the affront to the one true God that their version of Islam poses to the one human family, which was created by the God who loves all and who sustains all—Jew, Christian, Muslim. All.

The Most Rev. Michael Curry, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, says that “If it’s not about love, then it’s not about God.”

As there was a major reform of Christianity in the 16th and 17th centuries, and as there was further reform in the 18th and 19th Centuries with the expansion of scientific knowledge, so there should be a thoroughgoing reform of Islam.

Furthermore, and specific to this holy weekend’s atrocities, religious leaders of all faiths must unite and must work together in Sri Lanka to heal the wounds—physical, psychological and emotional—left by the attacks.

This effort should be led by Muslim modernists, with the full and visible leadership and participation of leaders of all other major religious traditions, along with others of good will.

These actions should be only the start, the minimum response to this horror.