INCLUDE_DATA

Jan

22

The 33rd Anniversary of RoeVWade

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We have now experienced a third of a century of failure at intercultural communication and conflict resolution that has divided our country more so than any other issue since slavery. As part of the post-RoeVWade generation, I ask, “How Long?” When Alito is confirmed and if RoeVWade is overturned, the issue will go to the state level, with many long acrimonious battles over where to draw the line for legal personhood ensuing.

I fear the many impending battles. I fear the political casualties along the way and how there will be even more acrimony at our state level gov’ts, making it harder for them to compromise to pass the needed legislation in a timely fashion.

We need to reframe this issue now. The upcoming election is going to be an even uglier one, otherwise.
dlw

Nov

9

Fan Mail

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I got a comment to my “Impending Battle” post at ye olde blogge. It’s embarrasingly flattering and so I thought I’d make a new post out of it….

Stephen Carter wrote a wonderful piece on “Why Christians Vote” a few years ago. He offered lots of reasons why anyone should vote, but argued that the reason that comes from faith is “We are willing to lose.” We value and want to serve all these people we live among, and serving includes being willing to cooperate and keep working together even when we disagree profoundly, and even when decisions are made that we consider very wrong.

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Nov

4

The Impending Battle…

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J August Higgins has a beautifully written post at his blog, A Certain Slant of Light that captures the expectation for the Cultural Wars to loom large in the coming months over the nomination of Alito. He writes that

each [foot soldier] in [their] gut that the impending battle could mark a turning point in the cultural wars, where the confluence of conservative-traditionalism, progressive-secularism, and an overweening, flanking, liberal-media, were setting up a political Armageddon — a decisive Red State v. Blue State, Originalism v. Activism, Christianity v. Nihilism, Life v. Choice battle for America’s soul.

Just as a small hamlet in Pennsylvania became a magnet in 1863 for the convergence of Yanks and Rebs in a primal-pivotal clash to determine whether a nation half-slave and half-free could long endure, an ineluctable confluence of competing idealogies is forming now in the nation’s capitol as the Left and the Right brace for a bare-knuckle brawl that could usher in a seismic shift on the Supreme Court of the land and, in time, chase Choice and the abhorrent Owner-Slave abomination that is Roe v. Wade-sanctioned abortion-on-demand from our midst.
…
That life is sacred and God’s sublime blessing, and that those 48+ million should hold an equal station with their mothers under the law — indeed, a station to which “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them” — is worthy of an epochal battle.

The centerpiece of my response would be fallibilism. I think the civil war analogy is a useful one though for different reasons. We white USEvangelicals have been fallible in our judgements as to how we should let our lights shine before others. This is true in the past and it is true today. Evidence of that is shown by Mark Noll when he considered how the Abolitionists inspired by Charles Finney sought to deal with the structural evil of slavery by using the same strategy they used to save souls, by conversion.
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