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These guys are using the bible to hold God hostage. They are using the bible to affirm their own ideas about God, then imposing these ideas on God. Their God is not free, but a god who does everything they believe and say.

Convenient and rampant. But catastrophic.

nakedpastor is David Hayward. David is an artist, cartoonist and writer. Go to nakedpastor.com for more cartoons, blog posts, art and insight from a former pastor who's stark naked honest about church life.

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Carl Medearis works with leaders in the West and in the Arab world, promoting peace-making as well as cultural, political and religious dialog leading toward reconciliation. He's the author of the acclaimed book on these issues, Muslims, Christians, and Jesus, and he joins us to talk about the power of understanding and building relationships. Prepare to have what you think you know challenged.

Find out more and get free audio and video at CarlMedearis.com.

Kai ABC Proteins Re-invigorate the Watchmaker Argument for God’s Existence

Suppose I discover a Rolex™ watch lying on the sidewalk in front of the Reasons To Believe offices. Without hesitation I would pick it up. My lucky day! My first inclination would be to keep the watch. But, I would like to think that after the initial excitement of finding such a valuable time piece, I would decide to make a reasonable effort to find the person who lost the watch.

Apart from a sense of right and wrong, my motivation to find the watch’s owner would fundamentally stem from the conviction that the watch didn’t simply come into existence spontaneously from the materials in the environment through the outworking of the laws of physics and chemistry. If it did, why should I feel compelled to try to find the watch’s rightful owner?

But, at some level, I would feel obligated to try to find the owner. Why? Because I know that the watch must have belonged to someone who purchased it with his or her hard-earned money from a store or vendor. More than likely, the merchant got the watch from a distributor; and the distributor from the manufacturer. Ultimately, the watch traces from buyer to manufacturer. The manufacture of the watch, of course, required the work of a watchmaker.

The Watchmaker Argument The reasoning that hopefully would lead me to seek out the watch’s owner undergirds one of history’s best-known arguments for God’s existence: the Watchmaker Argument. This argument was posited by 18th-century Anglican natural theologian William Paley (1743-1805). In the opening pages of his 1802 work, Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity Collected from the Appearances of Nature, Paley sets the stage for his famous Watchmaker Analogy.

In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there, I might possibly answer, that for any thing I knew to the contrary it had lain there for ever…But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place, I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given, that for any thing I knew the watch might have always been there. Yet why should not this answer serve for the watch as well as for the stone; why is it not as admissible in the second case as in the first? For this reason, and for no other, namely, that when we come to inspect the watch, we perceive—what we could not discover in the stone—that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose, e.g. that they are so formed and adjusted as to produce motion, and that motion so regulated as to point out the hour of the day; that if the different parts had been differently shaped from what they are, or placed after any other manner or in any other order than that in which they are placed, either no motion at all would have been carried on in the machine, or none which would have answered the use that is now served by it…

This mechanism being observed…the inference we think is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker?that there must have existed, at some time and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers who formed it for the purpose which, we find it actually to answer, who comprehended its construction and designed its use…

For Paley, the characteristics of a watch and the complex interaction of its precision parts for the purpose of telling time implied the work of an intelligent designer. Paley asserted, by analogy, that just as a watch requires a watchmaker, so too, life requires a Creator, since organisms display a wide range of features characterized by the precise interplay of complex parts for specific purposes.

According to the watchmaker analogy:

Watches display design. Watches are the product of a watchmaker.

Organisms display design. Therefore, organisms are the product of a Creator.

The Skeptics’ Challenge

The Watchmaker Argument hasn’t fared well over the centuries. Skeptics often point to David Hume’s critical analysis of design arguments, which appeared in his 1779 work Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion as devastating to Paley’s case for the Creator. Hume leveled several criticisms against design arguments. The foremost, however, centered on the nature of analogical reasoning.

Based on Hume’s arguments, skeptics curtly dismiss the Watchmaker Argument, maintaining that the two things compared—organisms and watches—are too dissimilar for a good analogy. (See pages XX.) Hume asserted that the strength of an analogical argument depends on the similarity of the two things compared, insisting that

whenever you depart, in the least, from the similarity of the cases, you diminish proportionably the evidence; and may at last bring it to a very weak analogy, which is confessedly liable to error and uncertainty.

The merit of the Watchmaker Argument then rests on two questions: Do living systems resemble man-made machines enough to warrant the analogy between the two? If so, how strong is this analogy and, consequently, the conclusion that can reasonably be drawn from it?

Molecular Motors Revitalize the Watchmaker Argument

The discovery of biomolecular motors and machines inside the cell gives new life to the Watchmaker Argument. In many instances, this molecular-level biomachinery stands as a strict analog to man-made machinery and represents a potent response to the legitimate criticism leveled by Hume and others. The biomachines found in the cell’s interior reveal a diversity of form and function that mirrors the diversity of designs produced by human engineers. The one-to-one relationship between the parts of man-made machines and the molecular components of biomachines is startling. Paley’s case for the Creator only becomes stronger with every new example of a biomotor that biochemists discover.

As remarkable as these biomachines are, perhaps none are as provocative as the biochemical timekeeping devices discovered in cyanobacteria.

Paley’s Biochemical Watch

Just as William Paley might have “pitched [his] foot against a watch” while “crossing a heath (field),” Yale biochemist Jimin Wang stumbled onto a mechanical molecular clock inside cyanobacteria (photosynthetic blue-green alga) while performing a structural analysis of the Kai proteins.

The KaiA, KaiB, and KaiC proteins play an integral role in the circadian oscillation that regulates the metabolic processes of cyanobacteria.

The biochemical activity of cyanobacteria varies periodically in response to the light-dark cycle, with certain metabolic activities repressed, or shut down, during the night. The KaiC protein is key to the cyanobacterial circadian rhythm. When its levels are high inside the cell, it represses gene expression. When its levels are low, gene expression is stimulated.

At night, the KaiC protein forms complexes with the KaiA and KaiB proteins. During daylight hours, the KaiABC complexes dissociate. Six KaiC proteins interact to form a ring-like structure. Two copies of the KaiA protein interact to form a structure that operates like a rotor inside the KaiC ring. A spring-loaded mechanism causes the KaiA protein duplex to alternate between two forms (like the opening and closing of a pair of scissors), one that interacts with the KaiC complex channel and one that does not. The KaiB protein functions like a wing nut that fastens the KaiA duplex to the bottom of the KaiC complex.

The KaiA duplex rotates within the channel, with the KaiB wing nut controlling the rotation rate of the KaiA rotor. As the KaiA rotor steps through the KaiC channel, a cam sequentially causes changes to each of the KaiC proteins. This mechanical action causes phosphate chemical groups to attach to the KaiC proteins. When fully phosphorylated, the KaiC complex dissociates. The formation and dissociation of the KaiABC complex regulates the KaiC levels inside the cell, which, in turn, controls the cyanobacterial circadian oscillation.

Once the KaiABC complex is assembled, it’s the mechanical clock-like rotary action of the KaiA duplex within the KaiC channel that controls its stability through the phosphorylation of the individual KaiC proteins.

According to Wang,

The Kai complexes are a rotary clock for phosphorylation, which sets up the destruction pace of the night-dominant Kai complexes and the timely releases of KaiA.

In Paley’s words,

This mechanism being observed…the inference we think is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker.

Dr. Rana has a Ph.D. in biochemistry and he's the vice president of research and apologetics at Reasons To Believe. Click here to listen to his recent appearance on SBE.

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Bob Goff's friends consider him the world's best kept secret. Well, not for long. Listen as we talk with Bob about his new book, Love Does: Discover a Secretly Incredible Life in an Ordinary World, and be inspired to be secretly amazing too!

Bob is the founder of Restore International, a non-profit fighting injustice committed against children in Uganda and India. He shares leadership in a Washington law firm, Goff & DeWalt, and he serves as the Honorary Consul for the Republic of Uganda to the United States.

Connect with Bob at BobGoff.com.

“Like Bob Dylan, the authentic American genius is a synthetic personality. They’re all hybrids, hence, inevitably, charlatans. It’s the chameleon nature of the American hero—the confidence man, the hustler. His solution to the question of identity is that of the three-card monte player. Anyone looking for the Grand Unifying Theory of Bob is just going to have to keep looking.”—David Dalton, Who Is That Man? In Search of the Real Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan’s not an easy man to pin down. He confounds the public, at one moment a sage and a prophet decrying materialism and war, and the next an eccentric aging musician doing gigs for Victoria’s Secret. His music is equally unpredictable, at times so insightful it resonates on the deepest level of your being, and the next barely tolerable—especially when, as John Jurgensen describes it in a piece for the Wall Street Journal, it is couched in his “always-raspy voice, now deteriorated to a laryngitic croak.”

For almost half a century, Bob Dylan has been a primary catalyst in rock’s shifting sensibilities. He has starred in and been the subject of major films; his work is taught in over 200 college courses; and few American artists are as important, beloved, and endlessly examined as he is. Yet he remains something of an enigma. Who, we ask, is the “real” Bob Dylan? Is he Bobby Zimmerman yearning to escape Hibbing, Minnesota, or the Woody Guthrie wannabe playing Greenwich Village haunts? Folk Messiah, Born-again Bob, Late-Elvis Dylan, Jack Fate, or Living National Treasure? In Who Is That Man? In Search of the Real Bob Dylan (Hyperion, 2012), David Dalton, cultural historian, screenwriter, novelist, and a founding editor of Rolling Stone, paints a revealing portrait of the rock icon, ingeniously exposing Dylan’s chameleon-like persona.

Dylan’s life in music, song, film and art, as Dalton recognizes, is really a metaphor for America. “Like most American geniuses, he’s a synthesizer,” Dalton writes. “America is a polyglot: a patchwork, a hodgepodge, a crazy quilt pieced together by our imagination. A work of fiction.”

For those who came of age in the Sixties, however, Bob Dylan was the voice crying in the wilderness—the conscience of a generation. He set to music what many were struggling to put into words and in so doing, he gave the civil rights movement some of its greatest anthems. Classic protest songs such as “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” “Desolation Row,” “Chimes of Freedom” and “Masters of War” set the mood for a youth-driven cultural revolution whose anthems were about peace and love and fighting oppression. In fact, as Dalton writes, Dylan “was seen as an antihero ready to lead an army of freaks to pull down the walls of Babylon, and amphetamine is sprinkled over Dylan’s mid-’60s albums like volcanic dust.”

Powered by idealism, the Sixties generation purported to reject materialism, helped put an end to racial segregation, opposed the military establishment and its never-ending wars, brought down a president (Richard Nixon) and essentially put a halt to the Vietnam War. And Dylan provided the soundtrack for all of it. As the legendary Judy Collins observed:

We wanted so much to change the world; we all wanted to stop the war; we wanted to stop social injustice. They were good causes because they had an innocence about them. But there was something about what Dylan was doing, a certain sophistication, that deepened our understanding of what’s really going on here. Bob dragged us from literary immaturity and made us grow up emotionally. He dragged us into the world of alliteration and metaphor in a way that nobody else could do. He was our higher education.

From the beginning, Dylan’s songs taught that there is an incestuous relationship between authoritarianism, social evils, militarism, and materialism and that the solutions to corruption are spiritual. Dylan proclaimed the existence of a God who brings judgment, a “hard rain” as one of his songs puts it, on those who perpetrate evil. Dylan’s topical songs mixed the power of Beat poetry with the folk style of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger—all with prophetic overtones. Although his songs often incorporated real events, they went beyond mere journalism to the moral underpinnings.

Bob Dylan was one of the few pop singers of any real influence who clearly articulated political ideas in his music. But, as if in midstream, Dylan abandoned politics. Perceptive enough to realize that politics is never a real answer, Dylan knew the times were not changing as he had expected.

The initial sign that Dylan was becoming disillusioned with the left and the political movements of the Sixties came late in 1963. Only days after the country had been traumatized by the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Dylan was invited to the grand ballroom of the Hotel Americana in New York to accept an award for his work in the civil rights movement. The result was a disaster. An intoxicated Dylan felt alienated from his adoring audience, which included many aging activists from the left-wing movement. He first appeared to insult them, saying, “It’s not an old people’s world.” He then simply baffled them with his speech, in which he spoke about race, class and the establishment.

I look down to see the people that are governing me and making my rules—and they haven’t got any hair on their head—I get very uptight about it…. And they talk about Negroes, and they talk about black and white…. There’s no black and white, left and right to me anymore; there’s only up and down and down is very close to the ground. And I’m trying to go up without thinking of anything trivial such as politics…. I got to admit that the man who shot President Kennedy, Lee Oswald, I don’t know exactly where—what he thought he was doing, but I got to admit honestly that I, too—I saw some of myself in him…. I saw things that he felt in me—not to go that far and shoot. [Boos and hisses] You can boo, but booing’s got nothing to do with it. It’s a—I just, ah—I’ve got to tell you, man, it’s Bill of Rights is free speech….

Dylan’s drunken rant reflected his growing view that all people are victims of those who control the system and that even the African-American hierarchy had compromised to gain political power. The speech caused an uproar, and Dylan left the hall amid a mixture of boos and applause.

“I don’t want to write for people anymore. You know—be a spokesman,” Dylan told Nat Hentoff in 1964. “From now on, I want to write from inside me.” Thus, by 1965, Dylan had abandoned the civil rights campaign and moved beyond political activism. In fact, although he had participated in key civil rights events, Dylan was not present for the final and most grand civil rights event where black and white protesters and musicians came together—the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in March 1965. There, over 5,000 people sang Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin.’”

On the musical front, Dylan abandoned the acoustic folk sound and became a rocker. By the time he went electric with his breakthrough album Bringing It All Back Home, it was clear that Dylan had assumed a new role. He had abandoned the shabby rambling-man look and assumed the countenance of a pained and scrawny ascetic.

Painfully obvious by now was the fact that drugs were driving the content of much of the rock songs of the Sixties—including Dylan’s. Dalton writes: “And in the USA of 1965 Dylan knew you needed drugs to be able to penetrate the fog of lies, barbecues, suburbs, and security.” However, while most of the Sixties generation would soon choose flower power, love and the fallacy that drugs were going to create a new society, Dylan saw the apocalypse approaching. A pivotal song is his 1965 masterpiece “Desolation Row,” which cries for humanity to renounce materialism or face destruction and alienation.

Now at midnight all the agents
And the superhuman crew
Come out and round up everyone
That knows more than they do
Then they bring them to the factory
Where the heart-attack machine
Is strapped across their shoulders
And then the kerosene
Is brought down from the castles
By insurance men who go
Check to see that nobody is escaping
To Desolation Row.

“Desolation Row” brought Dylan to the level of the great apocalyptic poets such as T. S. Eliot. Moreover, Dylan became a prophet whose main concerns are moral, not political. And he condemns virtually all he sees.

Dylan’s conversion to Christianity in the late seventies didn’t soften his views on the nature of the world. As late as 1991, when asked about the apocalypse, Dylan replied: “It will not be by water, but by fire the next time. It’s what is written.”

Unfortunately, in recent years, we’ve seen less and less of Dylan the prophet and more of Dylan the self-promoter and entertainer. Yet not even his appearance in a Victoria Secret’s commercial, surrounded by scantily clad, winged lingerie models, or reports of his being picked up by police after being mistaken for a wandering vagrant managed to diminish his impact on those who have taken his music to heart.

Strangely, however, Dylan’s ever-changing façade has inspired many. In a tribute piece for AARP in honor of Dylan’s 70th birthday on May 24, 2011, Bono shares:

When I was 13, Bob Dylan started whispering in my ear…it was a hoarse whisper, jagged around the edges, not-too-plain truths…ideas blowing in the wind about how the world could be a better place if we could just get it out of the hands of the hypocrites. When I was 16, Bob Dylan whispered in my ear about how the real enemy was not flesh and blood, but of a spiritual nature. At 21, with the slow train of faith having picked up a little too much speed, I stood at a religious crossroads and heard “Every Grain of Sand” stop time. When I got married at 22, Bob Dylan was whispering in my ear about love and infidelity. When I had my first child at 29, Bob Dylan wrote “Ring Them Bells” and “What Good Am I?” When I ran out of gas in the late ‘90s, I had Time Out of Mind to hold on to. When the world crumbled around two shining towers, and New York had its two front teeth knocked out, I had Love and Theft to hang on to. Now, having faced 50, I’m realizing I knew much more then than I do now. I’m returning to the brutal truth that “The Times They Are A-Changin’” — but you don’t have to let them change you. In short, all my life, Bob Dylan has been there for me.

Still, despite the glowing tributes, Dylan received his fair share of criticism for “playing it safe” during his 2011 concerts in China and Vietnam. “Bob Dylan, whose rasping songs of protest were once the definitive clarion-call for activism and dissent, belted out an unmistakably neutered version of his world-famous repertoire last night as he made his concert debut in Beijing”, reported Leo Lewis for The Times. “Although ground-breaking and heartily welcomed by fans, the long-awaited concert bore the hallmarks of compromise with authority—precisely the sort of accommodation the 69-year-old singer railed against with such venom in his earlier days.”

Mind you, this is the same man who walked off the Ed Sullivan Show in 1963 rather than submit to a censored song list. Then again, perhaps Dylan the activist who once claimed that a hero was “someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom” has simply given up the fight and wants only to be Dylan the musician. As he once remarked, “Songs can’t save the world. I’ve gone through all that.” After all, why should Dylan be any different from the rest of his once idealistic generation, many of whom have now become part of the very establishment they once opposed?

As Daniel Blackburn points out in the Spectator:

Western governments have largely ignored Beijing’s clampdown, which began in February as democratic activism spread from Cairo to Chinese websites. No trade sanctions or UN Resolutions are being issued here, just stern communiqués. Given that it’s nearly 50 years since Dylan purposefully stopped being the ‘voice of conscience,’ his reticence does not come as a shock… Why should Dylan do what we are too timid and politic to do? Besides, what could he achieve? Dylan’s words might be welcome to some Western ears, but he’s just one man selling records. He does not command divisions, even in the metaphorical sense. Human rights violations in China are for governments to challenge. Perhaps Dylan’s silence expresses that.

But should we really be surprised that any entertainer, no matter how Herculean they may appear, is in the end a human being like you and me? After all is said and done, Bob Dylan is and has always been an entertainer. As David Dalton tells us:

Godlike as he is, Dylan, like everybody else in the entertainment business, was subject to the three-year cycle of fame. In the ‘60s and on through the ‘70s, Dylan reinvented himself brilliantly, along with revolutionary new musical genres. But you can only reinvent yourself (and the music) when you’re on the beam; then you can multiply yourself as often as you like. Otherwise it’s just changing sets and costumes—and the outfits of the last three and half decades have left a lot to be desired: funny getups, top hats, plastic cowboy hats, gloves, hoodies, fake beards, and wigs.

Bob Dylan’s influence has been immense and his mythology will continue to haunt the cultural landscape long after he bites the dust. That influence—quirks and all—is brought to life by David Dalton in Who Is That Man? In Search of the Real Bob Dylan. David took some time out of his busy schedule to answer a few questions about the enigmatic one.

David Dalton

John W. Whitehead: Dylan grew up in Hibbing, Minnesota—an out-of-the-way place. Many devout Jews live there. Dylan was a Jew. In 1954, at his bar mitzvah, young Bob read from the Haphtarah which is a selection of readings from Jewish prophets. He read in Hebrew. Bob talked of his moral duty of being a Jew. How in the world do you get from reading the Torah in 1954 to writing and singing “Blowin’ in the Wind” in the early Sixties?

David Dalton: In America, we are a culture of outsiders, and Dylan is basically a double outsider. He was a Jew from a very remote part of America. Thus, Dylan’s view of the United States is of somebody who had almost a foreign vision. I mean, America is something he desperately wanted to be part of and identify with, yet he himself was part of an estrangement that has colored everything he has done. Dylan basically made himself an American through the reams of music he produced. At the same time, however, there actually is an interesting phenomenon in the folk movement—that is, there were a lot of Jews who were folk singers. Even from the 1940s on, the folk movement was thought to be a way of becoming part of the American community. This was through communal singing and involvement in the folk movement.

JWW: But it wound up being a critique of America in the end.

DD: Yes, of course. At a certain point, folk music and the protest movement merged. Very specifically, in the early 1960s, it merged with the Civil Rights movement, led by people such as Pete Seeger. Seeger, of course, was part of the Weavers who were part of the first folk movement. They had some hit songs.

JWW: “Goodnight Irene” and all those songs.

DD: Yes, and others. Those songs were not overtly political. The model, however, for all of this, of course, was Woody Guthrie. Guthrie had “This Machine Kills Fascists” written on the face of his guitar. It was Guthrie who fused American folk music with protests against union busting, opposing war mongers and so on.

JWW: And the corporations.

DD: And the corporations.

JWW: Which in Guthrie’s day would have been the banks.

DD: Guthrie is the model for the first phase of Dylan’s career. When Dylan came to New York City, he was looking, as all young people were, for some forbearer. So Dylan went to the hospital where Woody Guthrie was suffering from Huntington’s Chorea. Guthrie was so sick that he was basically unable to speak or correspond. Thus, nobody knows whether he really understood what Dylan was saying to him. But the general idea is that Guthrie passed on the folk mantle to Dylan. This is according to Dylan’s mythology.

JWW: Mythology is the right word. As you point out in your book, Dylan’s various transformations emerge from standing in the shadows of other people. In Dylan, you have a fusion of James Dean and Woody Guthrie and others. Is that how you see it?

DD: Definitely, he fused with James Dean who was, oddly enough, a hero of the Beats. You would have thought that the Beats might have seen Dean as a product of Hollywood. Jack Kerouac of On The Road fame once called himself the “James Dean of bebop” or something like that. James Dean is an important element in all of this.

JWW: Again, as you point out in your book, on the cover of his album Freewheelin’, “Dylan is trying to look like James Dean walking down a New York street.”

DD: That’s right. Dylan is actually the James Dean of the 1960s. American culture shifts often after a cataclysmic war such as World War II. It needs a new persona, a new character to identify with. The new sensibility—the sensibility that James Dean projected—was a teenage sensibility. The teen culture erupted with James Dean and the year after his death, of course, Elvis Presley came along who was another admirer of James Dean. Elvis was also another idol of Dylan, oddly enough. And interestingly so, Dylan basically serves the same James Dean function in the 1960s. There was all this turmoil and everything happening and here was somebody who embodied all of these other personas. Dylan embodied a James Dean-like quest for stardom. He was unabashedly ambitious with folk music, which represented authenticity. Eventually rock music would serve the same change of persona function. Rock music’s secret function was its subtext, which was “we can change the world.”

JWW: How does Buddy Holly fit into all this? Dylan has a strange fixation with Holly. As a young man, Bob went to a Buddy Holly concert and he actually thought that he and Buddy Holly had connected somehow. Holly, as you know, had a big influence on other groups like the Beatles. How does Buddy Holly figure in with the complexity that is Bob Dylan?

DD: Buddy Holly had a different influence on the Beatles. Buddy Holly represents the group which was a new phenomenon in rock-and-roll when the Beatles were coming onto the scene. Throughout the 1950s, there were singers who had bands, but they weren’t identified with those bands. Buddy Holly and the Crickets were a unit. They finally quarreled and broke up, but their inheritance for the 1960s was the rock group—the rock group as a sort of a gang. For Dylan, Buddy Holly’s influence was that he combined basically folksy tunes with a rock rhythm. Moreover, Holly was the first identifiable teenage rock star. There was Eddie Cochran. There was Gene Vincent. But none of these people were like Holly. There was something more accessible about Buddy Holly.

JWW: Unlike Elvis.

DD: Elvis to most people was really an oddity. He was a kind of southern hillbilly or an alien character as far as a northern, middle-class kid such as Dylan was concerned. Buddy Holly was somebody that you could imitate in the same way as James Dean. You could put on a red windbreaker and jeans and look sullen and angry and you were James Dean overnight. But Elvis was something else. The gold suits and the whole country western oddity of Elvis was harder to mimic.

JWW: The thing that drew me to Dylan in the Sixties was he saw right away that there was an incestuous relationship between authoritarianism, social evils, militarism, materialism and the corporate state. Dylan, whether he was mimicking James Dean or Woody Guthrie, was speaking to that in those early songs and even into his electric phase.

DD: Yes. Absolutely. Dylan came to Greenwich Village with all these early songs. They come out of a genuine impulse.  In fact, his first album was marvelous, but his first album was also a failure and Dylan, although he denies it, was extremely ambitious. There is a definite element of opportunism in his involvement with the protest movement. I don’t mean he didn’t believe in what he was saying, but there are many songs that he subsequently admitted he wrote because that was what people were looking for.

JWW: But it had an unintended effect. Dylan helped create that great resistance movement we saw in the 1960s.

DD: Absolutely. With “Blowin’ in the Wind” (aside from the fact that it really doesn’t say anything) Dylan had hit upon a very successful formula—that is, to take these old songs and add a political impetus to them. But, of course, eventually the popularity of this new kind of protest—folk rock and/or protest song—actually destroyed the folk music that had created them. Dylan was very astute about not repeating himself because his innate paranoia has to do with his insecurity about being Jewish and coming from this obscure mining town.

JWW: I don’t think he wanted to be pigeon-holed.

DD: Exactly.

JWW: It was 1963 and Dylan was honored at the Thomas Paine Awards. Bob was receiving a civil liberties award, but he vented with a drunken rant and drew the audience’s wrath.

DD: That was so amazing. Dylan actually identifies with Oswald.

JWW: Yes. Exactly. But Dylan was showing his left-leaning fans that he was not going to be pigeon-holed. Then in 1964 he tells Nat Hentoff, “I don’t want to write for people anymore. I don’t want to be a spokesman. From now on I am going to write inside of me.” So after that, things change. Next up we get Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. Dylan becomes, as you show in your book, our Electric God.

DD: Well, actually Dylan combines that with a messianic presence. Dylan is basically, in a way, the last great flowering of Beat literature. He took the Beats and the source of the Beats inheritance—which is Rimbaud—and he put that to rock music. It was an unbelievable fusion.

JWW: As you note in your book, Dylan made rock music literature.

DD: The diehard Dylan fans call Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 and Blonde on Blonde the “Holy Trinity.” And those albums are inscrutable and profound. Nobody has ever really transcended what Dylan did.

JWW: What about the effects of drugs in all this? The 1960s was awash with LSD, amphetamines and so on. Drugs, as some argue, open alternative views of reality. Wasn’t Dylan affected by drugs as he moved on through his journey?

DD: Absolutely.  Peter Stampfel of the Holy Modal Rounders, who was a good friend of Dylan’s, said it was basically amphetamines that led to Dylan’s breakthrough.

JWW: And Dylan also lived an alternative reality in who he really was.

DD: Yes. What happened is he was exposed in Newsweek as not being who he seemed to be. His name wasn’t Bob Dylan. It was Robert Zimmerman. He hadn’t grown up in the circus or with the Sioux Indians or all these stories he made up.

JWW: He wasn’t an orphan.

DD: He wasn’t an orphan. All these crazy, wonderful stories.

JWW: Dylan’s father said that his son’s persona was an act.

DD: Right. He said that his son was a corporation or something like that. In my book, Who Is That Man, what I emphasize is that to take his mythology as seriously as the facts of his life is a mistake. As Dylan says in the Martin Scorsese documentary, No Direction Home, he may have been born from the grooves in some 78 records that his parents found when they moved into a new house. He acted as if he were a foundling. Dylan basically functioned as someone who lived between the fictions he created and the actual situations of his life. The problem with many Dylan biographies is you can’t just treat him like he did this and he did that. You cannot treat Dylan’s life the way you would George Washington or Barack Obama.

JWW: Dylan has created a myth around himself.

DD: That’s right, and that myth is as potent as any literal fact about himself. Dylan is really that character. Not only are albums like Freewheelin’, Highway 61 and Blonde on Blonde such classic creations, but the person singing them, with the curly hair, the shades, the polka dot shirt and the whole thing is also a classic creation. Look at the famous interview that he did with Nat Hentoff. It is fantastic. I mean, we had never heard anybody except maybe the Beatles who had this wonderful humorous sort of surreal way of talking. For example, John Lennon was asked, “How do you find America?”

JWW: —and Lennon responded, “Turn left at Greenland.”

DD: Yes. That was great, but Dylan took this to a high art. You can see this in Dylan’s book Tarantula.  He is incredibly verbal. He is almost supernaturally talented in spinning words and images, and nobody had ever heard anybody at a press conference do this except maybe Marlon Brando. If you listen to Marlon Brando’s early interviews, he does the same thing. Like Brando, when Dylan was asked direct questions, he gave very elusive, funny responses to them.

JWW: In June 1967, the Beatles debuted Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The reaction to that album was phenomenal. As one writer notes, “The world stopped and listened.” The reviews of the album were astounding in that the critics said the Beatles had created rock music as art. At the same time, however, Dylan was getting ready to release John Wesley Harding, which was juxtaposed against the psychedelic electric sound of the Beatles. Was Dylan looking for guidance?  Was he doing that on purpose? What do you think?

DD: I think what happened was he was on a suicidal course in 1966. He was obviously taking a lot of amphetamines. He was not sleeping. But Dylan always had a basic compass to his life that came from his family where he realized he had to stop or he was going to die. John Wesley Harding came from the times when he supposedly stopped doing amphetamines, stopped roving around the world and settled in Woodstock. If you look at the pictures of him in Woodstock, it is almost as if somebody had kidnapped him.

JWW: It looks like he grew up in 1860.

DD: Yes, he looks like a rabbinical student. I think that he had to reconnect. Dylan realized before anyone else that the 1960s had basically run its course. He no longer had the ambition of transcending rock or folk music as did of a lot of singers of the 1960s. The Sixties had exhausted itself, and it had now become pretentious.

JWW: Do you think that led to his religious conversion—that huge schismatic conversion that happened in 1978? Dylan thought it was real, don’t you think?

DD: Oh, absolutely. There is no question about it. John Lennon, Keith Richards and others made some snide remarks about it, but Dylan was totally genuine. Dylan’s marriage broke up and he was suddenly adrift. He had always basically focused his emotional life on women and love. When that fell apart, he desperately needed something just as overwhelming to take its place.

JWW: And that was God.

DD: Yes, God. Dylan’s religious, right-wing rants during that time are nutty, and there is a lot of nonsense in them. However, people who saw him in concert during his Christian period have said he was at his absolute intensity, and those songs are still great.

JWW: Slow Train A Coming is a good album.

DD: That is a great album, and the two that followed were good. I know people over the years who apologize for Dylan when he came out with lame albums. If, however, an unknown person had produced them, they would say that they were unbelievably talented. Slow Train is great. But of course, Slow Train was preceded by Street Legal which is the first time Dylan used a gospel chorus and apocalyptic imagery.

JWW: Dylan seems to be obsessed with the apocalypse.

DD: Dylan has always been a possessed character, and I think the religious phase is something that was always there. I mean, he spoke of “flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark” in “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).” That kind of conviction was always there. He simply took it a lot more literally in his Christian phase. And he sang one of those songs in his recent China tour.

JWW: You have closely studied Dylan. What are his religious beliefs? Didn’t he slide back into Judaism?

DD: He was involved with Hasidic sects in the early seventies. The problem with the Christian thing for Dylan was that he felt it was a betrayal of who he was and where he had come from. All kind of apocalyptic themes run through Hasidic beliefs. In a profound sense, it is basically not all that different from apocalyptic Christianity.

JWW: Dylan had a heart attack in 1997. I actually saw him perform live right after that. Before that, I had seen a few concerts where he mumbled. You could not understand a thing he was saying. But in that 1997 concert, he sang everything clearly. He took roses on stage. He did a little dance. He smiled. Do you think his heart attack changed anything about him?

DD: Dylan is a collective entity. The reason that Dylan is so confusing now is that Dylan is partly him, partly his creation and partly what we have made of him. Near the end of my book, I invoke this idea of the group soul. This comes from the way certain insect colonies act. All the insects in the colony function as different parts of the same body and mind. They all function as one sort of unit. This is somewhat true of any rock concert. However, with Dylan, it’s more so because he has siphoned off religious apocalyptic political ideas that all fuse together and fuse us together.

I have seen Dylan concerts in recent years that were just horrible. I was really appalled at Cooperstown when he sang virtually every one of his songs, including “Just Like A Woman.” These kids standing in the audience, 18-year-old kids, were saying, “Isn’t he great?” I didn’t say anything to them, but I just was horrified. Then, in 2011, I went to Bethel which is the site of the original Woodstock concert. His performance was unbelievably good. He had a kind of claw-like attack to the piano keys, but the concert was unbelievably inspiring. Everybody was tuned in, and I think he reacts to that. I think that when he comes on stage, he reacts to the audience. At Bethel, everyone in the audience—old and new fans—were fused together. We all identified with him because, in a way, he is us. We all think of the ideal human being, and it is like Thomas A. Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ. Whether it is a religious image or a popular image, we always look for the person that we think is the exemplary character who embodies our best thoughts, impulses and emotions. I think that is who Dylan is. He is us.

JWW: How do you square the Dylan who sang about “flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark” and the Dylan who did a Victoria’s Secret commercial?

DD: Dylan wasn’t a poor boy in the way that a lot of rock singers were, but he has an absolute obsession with money. Why did he do the film Streets of Fire? He asked an actress friend of his to be in it and she said, “Why would I want to be in such a horrible thing”? He reportedly said, “Well, it’s a million dollars.”  People say every time Dylan puts out a record he buys a new apartment building. He is very …I don’t know…

JWW: Very American.

DD: Yes. Very American in the same way that he idolizes Woody Guthrie and Dion and Elvis and Liberace at the same time. He is a very promiscuous character, and he is also very American. Dylan believes in the whole idea of success in the same way that, for instance, James Dean and Hank Williams did.

JWW: Or Barack Obama.

DD: Or Muhammad Ali and so on. They don’t see any difference between success and financially supplementing their talent. The Beatniks and the abstract expressionists and the folk people disdained fame and money. Dylan embraces it all. Money is plasma in American society.

JWW: In your book, you say Dylan is basically a charlatan and that America is a fake. Explain.

DD: America is a country that we basically invented. It is very different from Europe. We are always pretending to be something we are not. We have never really grown up. We are these teenagers who are perpetually acting out a fantasy. In fact, that fantasy and charlatanism is the basis of American culture. It is the basis of the music. Writing songs is totally make-believe charlatanism. Every time you get on stage, you are pretending to be someone. The movies are our kind of dream world, our fantasy, our charlatanism. There are people up there on the screen pretending to be Alexander the Great or Thomas Edison, and they are fakes. However, that is the brilliance of American culture and its profound belief in its own charlatanism.

Constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute and author of The Change Manifesto. He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

John W. Whitehead's weekly commentaries are available for publication to newspapers and web publications at no charge. Please contact marketing@rutherford.org to obtain reprint permission.

But what's really amazing is the story God wove behind the scenes.

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Today, a director, an actress and a divinely appointed role that highlights October Baby's message: every life is beautiful.

Join director of October Baby, Jon Erwin, and actress, Shari Rigby, on Steve Brown Etc. as we talk about forgiveness and the circuitous ways of God. Then visit OctoberBabyMovie.net to see the trailer, find theaters and see Sheri talk about her role in the film.

I have terrible timing. I left the Groundlings comedy troupe, to pursue an MFA in screenwriting so I could learn to write stories beyond the “three-minute sketch with wigs.” Six months later, several of my cast mates got hired on Saturday Night Live, as actors and writers. I finished my MFA at age 34, whereupon a writing guru told me that if you don’t make it as a comedy writer by 30, you’re considered over the hill. I moved to New York to pursue a writing job that promptly fell through. Years later, I moved back to LA to revive my acting career, just as the movie Searching For Debra Winger was released – a documentary featuring a bunch of A-list actresses who couldn’t get work after age 40. I had just turned 41.

I did get a book published in 2009. I just found out 2009 was one of the worst years to release a book – after the Wall Street meltdown, consumers didn’t have the money to buy and publishers didn’t have the money to publicize them. I told myself that’s why my book made only “respectable sales” and why my publisher passed on my second book. It’s not enough to be respectable; you need to be a hit. I’m considering taking a nom de plume and writing Amish fiction. Or Amish vampires.

Regret can destroy you. You will spend your life like Lady Macbeth, trying to wash away the evidence of your guilt and failure. You will look for others to blame or blame yourself. You will tell yourself you’re a loser.

I have been able to teach. It doesn’t assuage the longing to do the thing yourself, but you get to help others and your own work improves in the process. Over the years teaching, I’ve gotten to know Jack – that writing guru who sounded the post-thirty comedy death-knell. Jack wanted to be a screenwriter and never made it; but he became a well respected teacher and mentor. At one point he ran the Warner Bros. writing workshop. Two years ago I started teaching at the same Christian college where he had become a fixture. And I started to catch a glimpse of the scores of hopeful writers he taught, prodded, mentored, and loved.

The day before my milestone birthday, Jack emailed to say he couldn’t make my party; he’d come down with pneumonia. I decided to visit him the following week. I’d had plenty of casual encounters with Jack, from church retreats to writing seminars to group lunches in the college cafeteria. But this time I could sit with him a while, share stories, and pray for him. And it might be the first one-on-one conversation I’d had with him in years.

The day before I was due to stop by Jack’s place, our mutual friend Jan texted me to say she was taking Jack to the hospital. I couldn’t visit him there, his immune system was shot and couldn’t risk additional bacteria. Over the next few days Jan sat vigil at the hospital, keeping his friends updated, getting out the word to pray. By the end of the week a thousand-member facebook group was praying for Jack to get better.

But Jack got worse. I asked Jan if I could come to the hospital to visit her: she’d been there nearly 24/7 the past five days. She and her husband were on a writing deadline, trying to shuttle kids to and from school, and not fall apart.

I arrived on a Sunday afternoon during a downpour. Jan’s husband arrived a while later. Jan was pacing the halls, trying to unlock the password on Jack’s phone. She needed to call Jack’s friends, she said. They needed to come to the hospital. They needed to say goodbye.

We prayed for a miracle. The world needed Jack. The world and all the young hopeful writers who needed someone with Jack’s wisdom and decency, who’d tell them the truth about their work, and how not to miss those deadlines and how to be a decent human being in a field where decency was scarce. But sometimes you don’t get the miracle you asked for.

It was my turn to go in. I told him how angry I was with myself about that time I’d seen him in the cafeteria, sitting alone reading, but didn’t go sit with him because I didn’t think I had anything interesting to say. I asked Jack to go look up my father and my mentor Les, a comedy writer who’d come to Jesus just a year before his death. I know they would have a lot of laughs together. I also asked Jack if he would go find my cat, Honey and pet her, and tell her I would see her soon. And then it dawned on me, what if these precious ideas we have about heaven are just that? Ideas? What if there is no resurrection from the dead? Then we are all screwed. And this is it. This is the last moment I will ever see this man.

The ICU waiting room began to fill up with Jack’s friends. I knew some of them fairly well, some not at all. But we recognized each other: we shared the same face, slackjawed shock and impending grief. And we all shared the same mark on the inside: we’d all been mentored or loved by the same man.

Jack died Monday night. Tuesday afternoon I had to go teach his classes. We spent the time sharing what we’d learned from Jack. One student said that Jack could always find the thread of gold in the mountain of garbage that was his script. Another one said she didn’t know if she could write at all. But Jack told her she had talent and she needed to work at it – because she was worth it.

A few nights later a group gathered to share our memories about Jack. Two stand out to me. The first was something Jan’s husband, Lee, said back at the hospital. “Jack was Best Man at our wedding. I don’t know if I was Jack’s best friend, because he had so many. But he was definitely mine…” He paused a moment. “Jack was George Bailey.”

George Bailey is Jimmy Stewart’s character in “It’s A Wonderful Life.” George sacrificed his dreams while others got theirs. Suicidal and on the brink of bankruptcy, George wishes he’d never been born. So an angel Clarence shows George just what that would look like: a mean, horrible place.

Lee was right. Jack was George Bailey. Without him we’d all be living in Pottersville.

The other was shared by a TV comedy producer who’d known Jack when they were both at Warner Bros. Fred is Jewish and hadn’t had much exposure to Christianity. But as a child he’d seen the film, Green Pastures, a black gospel musical. God was played by William Warfield, the commanding baritone who sang “Old Man River” in Show Boat. “I met William Warfield years later. When I saw him I thought, that’s what God looks like! And when I met Jack Gilbert I thought, that’s what Jesus looks like.”

There’s an old short story by J.R.R. Tolkein titled, “Leaf By Niggle.” Niggle is an artist; a painter. He is obsessed with a tree he sees in his mind. The tree is magnificent and expansive, harboring birds, and through the branches he can glimpse the mountains beyond. But he can’t get the tree onto the canvas. He’s got bits and pieces here and there. One beautiful leaf he’s able to draw. But he keeps getting interrupted by people who need him. There’s the farmer down the road who needs his help; his wife is sick and needs to be driven to hospital some miles away. And then his neighbor’s roof leaks, and it’s making his wife dangerously ill. So the government comes and takes Niggle’s canvas to patch up the neighbor’s roof. Time goes by, Niggle never gets the painting done. His neighbor dies and so does the wife. Niggle does eventually. He never finished the painting. All that remains is one exquisitely painted leaf. A library has the artwork framed. But then it’s lost in a fire. There is nothing left on earth of Niggle.

But up in heaven, there is Niggle at home, and the neighbor he loved into heaven. They sit under the tree – the real tree Niggle imagined in his mind is there, in all its magnificent glorious reality: birds nesting in its branches and magnificent mountains shining in the distance.

If there is no resurrection from the dead we are more to be pitied. But I imagine right now Jack is collaborating with Les on some screenplay soon to begin filming. Maybe my father is laughing along, adding a joke here or there, delighted to know his daughter made sure Jack looked him up.

Susan Isaacs is a writer, actor, and comedienne with TV and film credits including Planes Trains & Automobiles, Scrooged, Seinfeld, The Drew Carey Show, My Name Is Earl and more. She is an alumnus of The Groundlings Sunday Company and the author of Angry Conversations With God: A Snarky But Authentic Spiritual Memoir.

Click here to listen to Susan's most recent appearance on SBE.

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The story of turning Donald Miller's wildly successful spiritual memoir, Blue Like Jazz, into a movie could make a movie of its own. From screenplay to flabbergasting fundraising problems to a record-breaking fan-led Kickstarter campaign to blow back from Christian filmmakers, Steve Taylor has been on a six-year-long roller coaster ride. Join us as he talks about directing Blue Like Jazz and see the fruits of his labor this weekend in a theater near you.

Go to BlueLikeJazzTheMovie.com for theaters, the trailer and more.

In addition to directing Blue Like Jazz, Steve Taylor is a singer, songwriter and producer. He was twice nominated for a Grammy and is the only artist to win two Billboard Music Video Awards for his self-directed music videos. And that, my friends, is pretty stinkin' cool.

I am frankly amazed at how quickly we move away from this simple core conviction. Theology matters! In fact it matters profoundly because we are always in danger of losing our way in regard to rightly confessing the core mystery/truth that Jesus is Lord. Other lords seek our allegiance and bad theology can mislead us, even causing us to leave the Lord who redeemed us. But all of this does not negate the simple fact that we are saved by confessing Jesus, not by knowing which church is right, or which creed we accept or what doctrines we agree/disagree about.

I am well aware that some extremely progressive Christians deny the most basic truths that support a credible confession of Christ when they deny his death, burial and resurrection. I am aware that some progressive Christians deny the essential truth of Jesus's two natures (divine and human) in his one person. In other words there are some professing Christians who deny what is stated in the creed as essential to the faith of the earliest followers of Jesus. I am also aware that the majority of liberal and progressive Christians do not deny these core truths at all. They "see" a Jesus who looks and sounds more like a progressive (modern) liberal and this prompts them to adopt views of the faith that I find, at some points, unacceptable. Yet I also believe that far too many conservatives "see" a Jesus who looks much like a modern conservative rather than the Jesus that we actually encounter in reading the four Gospels of the New Testament. If for no other reason this makes me cautious about these labels. For some time I have accepted people on the basis of what they confess and not "read" my views into them in terms of my relationship with them as brothers and sisters. This has not been an easy road to follow. Honestly, it is extremely challenging. The further I go down this road the more I have learned to accept and love people who confess Jesus as Lord but this has not always been without significant challenges to my mind and spirit.

What I said in my chapter "Christ the Center" is rather simple. It is, in the best sense, basic. But it is not easy or simplistic. We too easily think that what is simple is simplistic. Not so.

This was one reason, among several, that I was drawn to the book, Infinity Dwindled to Infancy: A Catholic and Evangelical Christologyy (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), by my friend Fr. Edward T. Oakes. Oakes is the associate professor of systematic theology at the University of St. Mary of the Lake/Mundelein Seminary, Mundelein, Illinois. I have visited this seminary campus a number of times and have many friends on the faculty, including the extremely popular teacher and preacher Fr. Robert Barron, whose Catholicism video series I have warmly recommended.

Oakes maintains that at the heart of all ecumenical dialogue between Catholics and Evangelicals is their fundamental agreement on Christology. (Oakes was an original writer and member of the Evangelicals and Catholics Together Committee, an esteemed group which includes J. I. Packer, Timothy George, John Woodbridge, and other good friends, who are all respected evangelical academic leaders.)

Oakes has written a 459-page book to show how this common confession of Jesus Christ as the Son of God and unique Savior of the human race is the core of our common "evangelical" faith. In this magnum opus he surveys the Christian teaching on the person and nature of Christ and looks at the many doctrinal and historical issues essential to the study of Christology.

Oakes draws on recent scholarship in New Testament studies and patristic Christology as well as key medieval and major Protestant voices. He also includes major contemporary Catholic theologians and magisterial statements from Vatican II. By presenting two millennia of thinking about the Christian paradox of an infinite God who is a finite human person he concludes that poet Gerard Manley Hopkins was right to speak of "Infinity dwindled to infancy."

Timothy George, in his endorsement on the back cover of this important book, writes: "Oakes, one of best and most literate theologians, has given us in this volume a masterpiece of Christological reflection. Evangelicals and Catholics share together a common faith in Jesus Christ the Lord, the one and only Savior of the world."

But here is the is point of it all. George adds, "The closer we are drawn to Jesus Christ, the closer we come to one another." (He says this book will help us do both!)

I believe that statement. The closer we are drawn into Christ, the more we exalt him and worship him and write about him the closer we are drawn toward one another. This is the key to understanding my journey in missional-ecumenism. Seek Jesus Christ first and draw near to him. He is "the way, the truth and the life." We have significant differences about authority, the nature of the church and our understanding of how grace works sacramentally, to name only a few, but we share this: a common love for the Lord Jesus Christ. Before we discuss anything else I suggest we go back here and begin anew.

John H. Armstrong is founder and president of ACT 3, a ministry for the advancement of the Christian Tradition in the third millennium. He is a former pastor and church-planter, of more than twenty years, the author/editor of eight books, and the author of hundreds of magazine, journal, and Web based articles. John has served as the editor-in-chief of ACT 3 Review: A Journal for Faith, Church and Culture since its origin in 1992. But most importantly, he is our go-to professional religionist.

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Join Michael Card on Steve Brown Etc. as we talk with him about how the book of Mark gives us insight into Jesus' humanity and passion. From compassion to deep distress, Card gives us glimpses of Jesus' rich emotional life, and we have a lot of fun too! Don't miss this one.

In addition to recording over 23 albums, Michael Card has a master's degree in biblical studies and has authored or co-authored more than 19 books–including award winners Scribbling in the Sand, A Violent Grace and A Sacred Sorrow. Mark: The Gospel of Passion is Card's second book in the Biblical Imagination Series.

Click here to listen to us talk with him about Luke: The Gospel of Amazement.

But on the cross, all their claims of being agents of goodness were stripped away. The principalities and powers were exposed as the power-hungry agents they really were (see Col. 2:15). The cross showed how the depraved nature of demonic powers can be expressed through the rulers of this age. It also demonstrated the love of God in its most perfect form. On the cross, power was confronted by sacrificial love.

On Good Friday, it looked as though power had won. The demonic hosts must have danced in celebration. But they had counted the spoils of their victory too quickly. Two days later, the stone was rolled away and the incarnation of sacrificial love was resurrected. History, from then on, would have hard evidence that love ultimately triumphs over power. The resurrection proves that love is greater than all the power man and Satan together can muster.

The resurrected Christ still endeavors to effect change through love. He does not coerce us into His kingdom, but lovingly entreats us. He does not force Himself into our lives, but instead says, “Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me” (Rev. 3:20).

One of my favorite old gospel songs has as its first line, “He could have called ten thousand angels.” This so wonderfully explains the style of Jesus. As He hung on the cross, the Pharisees and priests mocked HIm, yelling that if He was the Son of God, He should come down from the cross–and then they would believe in Him (see Matt. 27:40-42). There is no question that He could have done just that. What is more, He could have snapped His fingers and had 10,000 angels in shining raiment appears instantaneously by His side, armed to the teeth, to wreak destruction on those who had mocked Him. But that was not His way. Love kept Him nailed to the cross. He refused to use His power so that He might reveal the love of God in its ultimate expression.

There will come a day when He will come again. On that final day, a trumpet will sound and He will unleash His power on the earth. But on that Good Friday 2,000 years ago, it was not His power, but His sacrificial love that was at work.

Tony Campolo joins us regularly on Steve Brown Etc. He's professor emeritus at Eastern University and the founder of the Evangelical Association for the Promotion of Education, an organization that develops schools and social programs in various third world countries and in cities across North America. He's the author of over 35 books, blogs regularly at his website, redletterchristians.org, and can also be found on both Facebook and Twitter

But most importantly, Tony is Our Favorite Lib. Click here for Tony's latest appearance on Steve Brown Etc.

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Join Karen on this edition of Steve Brown Etc. as we talk about her new book A Silence of Mockingbirds: The Memoir of a Murder and the tragic story of how Karly was failed by the very people that were supposed to protect her.

Karen's work has appeared in the New York Times and Newsweek, on NPR, CNN and more. She's also the author of Will Jesus Buy Me a Double-Wide? and the nationally-acclaimed After the Flag Has Been Folded. She teaches journalism at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Wa. and blogs at Patheos.com.

It's the question that gets asked whenever an alleged comedian on HBO goes a bit nuts on the subject of religious believers.

It's the same question people asked when some NFL players mocked Tim Tebow's love of public prayer.

It's the same question conservative Catholics, and others, asked when the hierarchy at The New York Times made the decision to run a full-page anti-Catholic advertisement that urged liberal and nominal Catholics to pack up and quit their church.

It's the question that tends to draw mocking laughter in the GetReligion comments pages whenever a reader dares to ask it.

The question, of course, is this: Would the powers that be in mass media have dared to approve x, y or z if this particular advertisement, comedy routine, cartoon, Broadway show, movie, music video or whatever had focused its attack on Muslims?

It's a question that is not — for me — directly connected to the journalism work that we do here at GetReligion. Please hear me say that.

However, there was a headline the other day in The Daily Mail linked to this controversial topic that was just a bit too close for comfort, for me. I am referring to the one that, with its stacked sub-headlines, proclaimed:

Christianity gets less sensitive treatment than other religions admits BBC chief

* He suggested other faiths have a ‘very close identity with ethnic minorities'

* But added that religion as a whole should never receive the same ‘protection and sensitivity’ in the law as race

I don't know about you, but I had a simple reaction when I read all of that: The head of BBC said that near an open microphone?

Here's the top of that Mail report:

BBC director-general Mark Thompson has claimed Christianity is treated with far less sensitivity than other religions because it is "pretty broad shouldered."

He suggested other faiths have a "very close identity with ethnic minorities," and were therefore covered in a far more careful way by broadcasters. But he also revealed that producers had to consider the possibilities of "violent threats" instead of polite complaints if they pushed ahead with certain types of satire.

Mr. Thompson said: "Without question, 'I complain in the strongest possible terms,' is different from, 'I complain in the strongest possible terms and I am loading my AK47 as I write.' This definitely raises the stakes."

But he added that religion as a whole should never receive the same ‘protection and sensitivity’ in the law as race.

Now the minute I read that — especially all of those short, edited, punchy quotations — I immediately assumed that Thompson had been quoted out of context. What kind of journalist could say things like that, especially one who is committed to accurate journalism, free speech, religious liberty and various other values and rights that tend to be cherished in free societies?

I told my GetReligion colleagues that I really wanted to see the whole interview, or a transcript, or both. As it turns out, that information was a few clicks away on a site linked to a rather authoritative educational brand name — Oxford. Click here for the .pdf of the interview or watch the video that is attached to this post.

By all means, read it all. The give and take is rather complex, at times, but I think that the triple-decker Mail headline is accurate, if rather blunt (in the style of Fleet Street). I immediately asked my fellow GetReligionistas if we could hold off on this story long enough for me to write a Scripps Howard News Service column based on the full interview. My goal was to put some of those blunt snippets into a broader context, if I could.

So, here is a sample of what came out of that. I began with the New York Times decision to run the anti-Catholic advertisement from the Freedom From Religion Foundation, but not the mirror-image anti-Muslim advertisement that was immediately cranked out by Stop Islamization of America.

Should Catholics have been shocked?

Truth be told, the offended Catholics had little reason to be shocked if members of the Times hierarchy based their decisions on convictions similar to those recently aired by the leader of the BBC, another of the world's most influential news organizations.

For BBC director-general Mark Thompson, the key is to understand that Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, Jews and believers in other minority religions share a "very close identity with ethnic minorities" and, thus, their beliefs deserve to be handled with special care.

Meanwhile, he said it's acceptable to subject Christians to more criticism and satire, to treat their beliefs with less sensitivity, because Christianity is a powerful, secure, majority religion — even in an increasingly secular age.

"I think it is very different to talk about Christianity in the United Kingdom: a very broadly, literally established, but also metaphorically established, part of our kind of culturally built landscape," said Thompson, in an interview recorded for the FreeSpeechDebate.com project produced by St. Antony's College, Oxford.

Christianity, he argued, is a "broad-shouldered religion, compared to religions which in the UK have a very close identity with ethnic minorities, where, you know, it's not as if as it were Islam is randomly spread across the UK population. It's almost entirely a religion practiced by people who may already feel in other ways isolated, prejudiced against, and where they may well regard an attack on their religion as racism by other means."

The bottom line, said the BBC leader, is that Muslims tend to be literalists on matter of faith and they are much more likely to be offended by criticism or satire of Muhammad than most Christians are of similar media products about Jesus. At least, that is what Thompson thinks, as a self-identified moderate, practicing Catholic. Thus, he said:

"For a Muslim, a depiction — particularly a comical or demeaning depiction of the prophet Muhammad — might have the force, the emotional force, of a piece of a grotesque child pornography. One of the mistakes seculars make is, I think, not to understand the character of what blasphemy feels like to someone who is a realist in their religious belief."

And that stunning AK47 quote?

Here's the context. You will not be surprised to know that it follows a reference to Salman Rushdie, his "The Satanic Verses" novel and a global fatwa calling for his death.

Historian Timothy Garton Ash, who conducted the Oxford interview, said this threat of violence is a "rather nasty ace" that can be played by those who are willing to say, "I feel so strongly about that; if you say it or broadcast it, I will kill you."

Thompson responded: "Well, clearly it's a very notable move in the game, I mean without question. 'I complain in the strongest possible terms' is different from 'I complain in the strongest possible terms and I'm loading my AK47 as I write.' This definitely raises the stakes."

So there you go. How does this Thompson proclamation apply to the work of journalists who want to do accurate, balanced reporting on religion-news stories linked to blasphemy, heresy and sacrilege?

It seems to me that, much like that advocacy journalism sermon delivered last October by former New York Times editor Bill Keller, the BBC leader is essentially saying that there is one set of rules for news and then there is a different set of rules for religion news. In the end, race trumps religion.

And one more thing: Did Thompson actually say that it doesn't matter if Christianity is no longer, on a typical weekend, the majority religion in England in comparison with Islam? It still deserves harsher treatment?

Read it all. Please.

Professor Terry Mattingly writes the nationally syndicated On Religion column for the Scripps Howard News Service in Washington, D.C., which is sent to about 350 newspapers in North America. He's also a regular contributor at GetReligion.org and the author of the book Pop Goes Religion: Faith in Popular Culture.

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Join writer, actor and comedienne Susan Isaacs on Steve Brown Etc. as we talk about how the obsession with getting better isn't unique to Christians and discuss the solution to the universal problem of self-righteousness: free sins!

Click here to get your copy of Steve's new book, Three Free Sins: God's Not Mad at You.

Susan Isaacs is the author of Angry Conversations with God and her acting credits include Seinfeld, My Name is Earl, Parks & Recreation and more. Visit Susan online at SusanIsaacs.net and check out her recent post in our Guest Room, "Lent Is Not A Self-Help Program."

(Read the full article here.)

The doctors have diagnosed him with “Brief Reactive Psychosis,” and he has been admitted to a local mental hospital for more evaluation and treatment.

Interestingly enough, the initial response from the christian community has been the assumption that he was drunk, or on drugs. It is almost as if we need it to be something external – demonic forces, perhaps – something easily identified, tagged, and understood.

The reality is that Jason suffers from mental illness. It doesn’t matter that it is “brief” or “reactive” – in the psych ward all psychosis looks pretty much the same (And I know this from experience).

As with all mental disorders and diagnoses, this is a very real and tangible thing. It is not a spiritual nor character flaw, nor is it simply an excuse to “get away with” acting strangely just for the sake of having fun — it is an impairment that has affected Jason, and it will take time and medicine to ease him back to reality.

Recently I was taking part in a spiritual exercise. The idea is that when you have a piece of bread in the morning, you think of and thank those down the line who have brought this bread to your table. So many parts involved in even such a simple thing, so many to thank, so much to be aware of.

I noticed as I familiarized myself with these thoughts, I found that it was also affecting how I viewed people. Instead of seeing a single homeless man, I thought of all the things that I don’t know and all of the people I’ll never meet who played a part in his life.

It humanized him, somehow.

Therein lies the reality — we are all human. I happen to have a diagnosed mental illness, and now Jason has one. Some people I know do not have a diagnosis, other people do. Each of us is susceptible to the elements, to the illnesses and diseases that exist, and regardless of our faith (of lack of), the illnesses affect us. They exist. For all of us.

If there’s anything I hope that people can glean from Jason Russell’s breakdown, its this: Nobody is too good for mental illness. Mental illness strikes without discretion or bias. It isn’t a result of some hidden sin or some terrible flaw.

We all have brains.
We all have our own struggles.
We are all humans.

To judge each other as anything less is to disrespect that which was created and called “good.”

Renée Altson is the author of Stumbling Toward Faith, a photographer, and a web developer. She lives with her husband, daughter, and 2 cats in Southern California. Click here to listen to Renée on Steve Brown Etc.

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Join Kyle Drake on Steve Brown Etc. as we talk about his new book, Unsucceeding: Waking Up From My American Dream. Hang out with us as we discuss the seemingly crazy choices Kyle made and how they led him to true peace and happiness.

[Producer's Note: This is usually where I write a little about the accomplishments of our guest. However, Kyle is totally unsuccessful. He's not a big-time businessman, politician, actor, speaker, pastor or head of a ministry. He didn't even mean to write Unsucceeding. It just kinda happened while he was being unsuccessful. You can connect with Kyle at Unsucceeding.net.]

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Join Ian Morgan Cron on Steve Brown Etc. as we talk with him about his new book, Jesus, My Father, The CIA, and Me: A Memoir… of Sorts. Listen as we discuss Ian's search for answers and peace with the past he spent years trying to forget.

Ian Morgan Cron is an Episcopal priest, speaker and retreat leader. He is also the author of Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim's Tale.

Connect with Ian at IanCron.com.

“If you listen carefully to the LORD your God and do what is right in his eyes, if you pay attention to His commands and keep all His decrees, I will not bring on you any of the diseases I brought on the Egyptians, for I am the LORD, who heals you.”

Exodus 15:26

Which has benefited humanity more, science or religion? Most atheists would say science. The hard-fought advances in knowledge, won by the unrelenting application of the scientific method, have consistently improved humanity’s lot—enabling us to live longer, healthier lives.

Skeptics often ask, “Can Christianity, or any religion for that matter, boast of the same accomplishment?”

In this context a skeptic recently asked me, “If there was a deity who made and loves humanity, and communicated with humans through the Bible, why wouldn’t he provide information that would help human beings live healthy lives?”

According to the questioner, if people had to rely on religious systems exclusively, we would still be living in the medical “dark ages.” And thanks to science we don’t.

But, as it turns out, the Bible does impart medical wisdom that allows humans to live long, healthy lives, as cutting-edge advances in the war on AIDS attest.¹

Male Circumcision and the Spread of AIDS

Researchers have discovered that African boys, who are circumcised as part of the rite of passage to adulthood, contract AIDS at a much lower rate than those who aren’t circumcised. In fact, the odds of contracting AIDS are reduced by about 57 percent.

Based on these promising statistics, thirteen countries have implemented programs to try to get 80 percent of men in Africa circumcised by 2015. If successful, this mission will not only dramatically reduce the number of AIDS cases, but also will save almost $17 billion compared to the current treatments that involve the lifelong administration of antiviral agents.

Male Circumcision and Cancer of the Penis

Male circumcision confers other benefits as well. The medical community has observed that the incidence of penile cancer is practically nonexistent among men who have been circumcised. While medical experts are still uncertain why removal of the foreskin protects against cancer, a significant amount of statistical data supports the prophylactic benefit of the procedure.²

Male Circumcision and Cervical Cancer

New research has determined that male circumcision also promotes female health as well. For example, a recent study discovered that the incidence of cervical cancer in women is reduced when their partners have been circumcised.³

None of These Diseases

In the classic work, None of These Diseases, physician S. I. McMillen demonstrates that the commandments given to Israel thousands of years ago serve as an extraordinary manual of preventive medicine.⁴ Clearly, the commands given to Israel had purposes other than the medical benefits they would provide. Still, the fact remains that by adhering to these laws, God’s chosen people derived very real health benefits.

Such is the case when it comes to circumcision.

God commanded Abraham to perform circumcisions on the eighth day after birth (Gen. 17:12). As McMillen points out, this is the ideal time to carry out the procedure because it ensures that the infant’s blood readily clots after circumcision. For the first four days after birth, an infant has a limited amount of vitamin K and clotting factors in its blood. On day five, the level of these materials increases, reaching the maximum level on day eight.

Additionally, God commanded that a flint knife be used to perform the circumcision (Josh. 5:2). According to McMillen, this practice is significant because when a flint knife is sharpened the surface layer is removed, leaving behind uncontaminated stone that would have minimized infection.

To be certain, the Bible does not focus on healthy living or on dispensing medical advice. It is a book about God’s plan of redemption. Still, the commands that God gave to the Israelites—instructions designed to reveal His plan for humanity—if carefully followed, provide (as a secondary consequence) protection against the diseases that plagued Egypt. And as medical science advances, the wisdom found in the pages of Scripture is substantiated again and again, giving believers confidence of its divine inspiration.

Endnotes:

1. Katherine Harmon, “Can Male Circumcision Stem the AIDS Epidemic in Africa?” Nature from Scientific American (November 30, 2011): doi: 10.1038/nature.2011.9520.

2. Brian J. Morris et al., “The Strong Protective Effect of Circumcision against Cancer of the Penis,” Advances in Urology (2011): Article ID 812368, doi: 10.1155/2011/812368.

3. 3. Salynn Boyles, “Male Circumcision Cuts Women’s Cervical Cancer Risk,” WebMD (January 6, 2011).

4. S. I. McMillen, None of These Diseases, revised, updated, and expanded edition, ed., David E. Stern (Grand Rapids: Fleming H. Revell, 1984).

Dr. Rana has a Ph.D. in biochemistry and he's the vice president of research and apologetics at Reasons To Believe. Click here to listen to his recent appearance on SBE.

Nothing gets Steve Brown into more trouble than when he gives people three free sins (a practice that started on this talk show). So what does he do? He jams a stick in the hornet's nest and writes a book about it.

(If you're on the front page of the site, click "Read More" to see the trailer for Three Free Sins and audio player options.)

Join big-time pastor and author, Tullian Tchividjian, as he hosts this edition of Steve Brown Etc. and interviews Steve Brown about his latest effort to corrupt minds with the gospel, Three Free Sins: God's Not Mad at You.

Steve says the reason Christians are so bad is we’re trying so hard to be good. We’ve missed what God’s grace is all about. That’s the message of Three Free Sins—how to get free from the misguided obsession with sin management that binds so many Christians. We don't get just three free sins, but unlimited free sins!

Start clicking to hear the radical truth that the only people who get any better are those who know that, if they don’t get any better, God will still love them anyway. And, oh yeah, buy the book.

(If you're on the front page of the site, click the title of this post to see the video player.)

Constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute and author of The Change Manifesto. He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

John W. Whitehead's weekly commentaries are available for publication to newspapers and web publications at no charge. Please contact marketing@rutherford.org to obtain reprint permission.

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Join us as we talk with veteran religion writer, Mark Pinsky, about his new book, Amazing Gifts: Stories of Faith, Disability, and Inclusion.

Also, if you're in Central Florida, join Mark and a panel of people featured in Amazing Gifts on Saturday, March 3rd, 3:15 PM at Northland, A Church Distributed.

Visit MarkPinsky.com for all things Mark Pinsky.

“Mardi Gras” is French for “Fat Tuesday.” The Anglicans call it “Shrove Tuesday” and celebrate by eating pancakes. I wondered if “shrove” was Anglican for “fat.” Pancakes make you fat; just look at the church’s founder, King Henry VIII. But when I looked up “shrove” in the dictionary, it said it meant “the past participle of “shrive.” Oh, right; how could I forget? Okay, so then I looked up “shrive,” which means to confess and be absolved of guilt. So there it is: pancakes eaten on Shrove Tuesday have been absolved of calories. Everybody wins.

My husband and I have attended an Episcopal church for four years. We had aged out of the hipster church model and needed something less prone to celebrity pastor flameouts. I grew up Lutheran, so the liturgy feels grounding to me. Of course it has its annoyances. One Sunday the choir sang a tortuously dull hymn whose sole value was that marked the 14th Sunday after Pentecost. I actually longed for a Chris Tomlin rock anthem. But I do love the liturgy, and I’ve come to appreciate the church calendar. And my favorite church season is Lent, which continues through Holy Week and ends on Easter Sunday. You can read last year’s post on Holy Week here.

I started observing Lent a few years ago when I sensed God asking me to give up one specific thing: Driving While Righteous. Hey, I live in Los Angeles, a city crowded with überrich primadonnas and the angry blue-collars who take out their trash. I’ve watched BMW’s plow through red lights and use the emergency shoulder to get a single car length ahead. I’ve been the object of road rage for driving the speed limit in the slow lane. I fantasize about shooting out their tires. Driving While Righteous has been on my Lenten abstinence list for six years running. I’m not learning the lesson very well.

This will be the second Lent that I’m giving up Facebook and Twitter. This one is actually a blessed relief. There’s too much pressure having to “like” someone’s band or hide one political extremist friend from another. Besides, I waste far too much time on those sites – time I could spend praying, writing, or dealing with my righteous indignation before I get behind the wheel.

Before you dismiss abstaining from social media, think about the amount of spiritual energy generated around the globe from the simple act of prayer. Visualize it as a huge, electrical grid connecting the world with light and heat of the Holy Spirit. Now, visualize Mark Zuckerberg in his black hoodie, throwing the switch and causing a global spiritual brown-out. We can even monetize that energy drain: Facebook’s impending IPO could net over a hundred billion dollars. A hundred. Billion. Dollars.

Imagine what God could do with a hundred billion dollars worth of our prayers.

I headed to Ash Wednesday service, already gearing up for my social media blackout. But Reverend Anne said something that got my attention: Lent is not a self-help program. It’s a crash course in getting real with God.

One: why do we have ashes imposed on our forehead? To remind us of the truth we only think about when a child is born or an old person dies: we belong to God. He is who we came from, and he is to whom we will return. What shape we return in depends on what we do with all those in between years.

Two: take an inventory. What is that one sin you have a hard time giving up? I knew what mine was: entitlement. I did all this awesome stuff for God, so why didn’t he bless me, the way he’d blessed everyone within my arms length? Why couldn’t he bless me with the chance to make a living at the thing I’m best at doing? I didn’t want to go out and buy a BMW with a machine gun mounted on it. I wanted to adopt a boy from Ethiopia. How can these be extravagant dreams?

“Or maybe it isn’t a sin,” Reverend Anne continued. “Maybe it’s a deep wound in your soul that is so enormous you cannot let anyone near it, least of all God.”

Bullseye. I knew exactly what it was. It was the wound that regularly shows up in my dreams, in the hours I cannot sleep, and in the dread I feel at the first hint of waking. It is that deep sorrow over a lifelong dream that God seems to have kept out of my reach. It leaves me feeling unblessed, uncherished, unloved by God. My reaction in my dreams is always the same: rage and grief that destroys everything and everyone. My reaction when I wake up is the same, too: get coffee, turn on the computer and cover it up, with productivity, busywork, facebook or amazon.

An actor friend I talk to about three times a year emailed me last week. He had been praying that morning and God gave him a word about me. The gist was, there’s something you’re afraid to do, but God wants you to do wholeheartedly. I knew what it was: a creative project I’ve been procrastinating on, for fear that God will refuse to bless it, my lifelong dream will die and I will have to become a legal secretary. This is the wound that is so overwhelming I won’t let God near it.

And you know, God doesn’t have to bless it, does he? How many of us want good things: to be married, or to have children, or to adopt a particular boy in Ethiopia, or get out of debt, or (insert that longing you have here). How many of us have done as much as we can and we live on the edge of having our hearts utterly shattered?

It has been five days since Ash Wednesday. Every day I have woken up to that dread, got my cup of coffee, and opened not my computer but a blank journal. The journal is filled with anger and tears. The first two days I was so angry I didn’t wait to hear what God had to say in reply. And I don’t know if he will. The upside is, I’ve been getting work done on that project I’ve been putting off.

This Lent is going to be difficult for me. It’s going to be about opening the wound my hard heart is so sure God does not care enough to heal. But what other choice do I have? What choice do any of us have? Sometimes you get to a place in your life where you can no longer NOT do that thing you know you were supposed to do. Even if you die trying.

It’s going to be a long forty days. I pray I’m not the same person come Easter morning.

Susan Isaacs is a writer, actor, and comedienne with TV and film credits including Planes Trains & Automobiles, Scrooged, Seinfeld, The Drew Carey Show, My Name Is Earl and more. She is an alumnus of The Groundlings Sunday Company and the author of Angry Conversations With God: A Snarky But Authentic Spiritual Memoir.

Click here to listen to Susan's most recent appearance on SBE.

"I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ."

- Mahatma Gandhi

I get what Gandhi was talking about in that quote. I'm a Christian who's not very much like Jesus at all, and I'm certainly not alone. What's up with that? Hugh Halter says it's because Christians aren't sacrilegious enough. Huh?

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Hugh Halter is the national director of Missio and the lead architect of Adullam, a congregational network of missional communities in Denver. Join Hugh on this edition of Steve Brown Etc. as we talk about his new book, Sacrilege: Finding Life in the Unorthodox Ways of Jesus. Maybe we outcasts are more like Jesus than we think.

Now we have another hotly-debated court case about prayer in our schools in the headlines. Jessica Ahlquist, an atheist high school student in Rhode Island, was recently part of a successful lawsuit to remove a longstanding printed prayer on the wall of her school auditorium. The response to Jessica has been nothing short of amazing. She has been threatened on-line and ostracized at school. She has stood before angry crowds of parents who have attacked her for her public stand. It has gotten so bad that Jessica needs police protection at school.

What should Christians think and do about this situation?

First, it would help if we had a much better grasp of the legal and Constitutional issues. Jessica is arguing for freedom of religion from the state, but in a way that appears to many to be an attack on religion. In fact I think the decision underscores the protection that our state gives to all religious expression. As we become even more religiously diverse I believe this reality will be more important to serious Christians. Let me explain.

What is being challenged here? A prayer posted on a wall asking for mental and physical growth, for kindness and good sportsmanship and for students to bring credit to their high school. It is, in simple terms, a rather innocuous prayer. It is not, to put this plainly, a deeply Christian, Christ-centered expression of faithful belief and practice. It is an expression of civil religion. It is a relic of our culture, a culture that is rapidly changing.

Do we believe that it is the role of the state to be the custodian of our faith in some public way? If you want to trace this argument go back to Emperor Constantine, where Christianity was granted official state protection and wedded to the state in a manner that gave it preference over Roman deities. The results of this marriage have been, at best, very mixed. Religious wars and major shifts in cultures have resulted from this arrangement. In America we separated church and state, primarily to protect the church from the state. Over the course of 225-plus years we have been working out what this actually looks like in a society that was predominantly Christian, at least in a cultural sense. When the state sponsors or supports any expression of faith, Christian or otherwise, what we get is civil relgion. Why do we fight so hard to protect this form of civil religion when the clear facts are that it is not working as it once did? Further, is civil religion really the friend of vibrant, prophetic, radical discipleship in public? I think not.

But the more intriguing question in the Jessica Ahlquist story is what Christians are actually doing, or not doing, in regards to this student? Those who are attacking this girl call themselves Christians. (The town is heavily Roman Catholic.) As these citizens embrace their expression of civil religion they show just how meaningless and misguided this approach is by their daily actions.

Think about this for a minute. If the parents and students at this school want to defend biblical Christianity they should pour out true love for Jessica. They should stand by her in this very difficult time. Yet this girl needs police protection. She is not even able to receive flowers from well-wishers who have tried to send them to her from local florists. Jessica is a neighbor but she has been turned into an enemy. Nothing could be further from the clear commands of Jesus.

What is being confirmed in the minds of millions who watch this story unfold? I believe many will draw the conclusion that Christianity is about power and getting our way. Rather than being about love for neighbor it is really about meaningless, divisive speech, a form of speech that further reduces the church's power to spread the good news. Through the actions of people in Rhode Island, and far beyond, multitudes show that faith is more about a prayer on a school wall than about a suffering girl who is threatened and vilified.

In microcosm this story reflects what is going on in our culture. Civil religion is still very strong, make no mistake about that. But brick-by-brick this cultural house is coming down. It seems to me that we have several ways we can respond. One is to fight these battles through protest and partisan political struggles. (Christians invest millions of hours and dollars in these efforts!) Another response is to work for a new public square where all religions have their place. In this context Christians can use this puiblic square to openly witness to the love of Christ through words and actions that are consistent with a robust missional faith. We can even share the gospel. This is what my son's mission, Crossroads Kids Club, is doing inside public school buildings every week. (Most Christians protest taking a prayer off the wall of the school yet they care very little about sharing the story of Christ's love with the kids inside the schools when you actually show them that it is both legal and easy for a local church to do!)

So which will it be? Will we accept what has happened to civil religion and adjust to this new reality of a plurality of faiths in America? Will we go inward and be silent or simply protest these decisions of the courts? Or will we love the Jessica Alhquists of the world and show them how much God actually loves them through our words and actions? Will we actually adopt a missional mindset that is in line with what Jesus taught and use the freedom of religion that we still have in this great country to make disciples of Jesus?

John H. Armstrong is founder and president of ACT 3, a ministry for the advancement of the Christian Tradition in the third millennium. He is a former pastor and church-planter, of more than twenty years, the author/editor of eight books, and the author of hundreds of magazine, journal, and Web based articles. John has served as the editor-in-chief of ACT 3 Review: A Journal for Faith, Church and Culture since its origin in 1992. But most importantly, he is our go-to professional religionist.

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On this edition of Steve Brown Etc., Steve's boss from the seminary, Don Sweeting, stops by to talk about his new book How to Finish the Christian Life: Following Jesus in the Second Half. Let's face it, Steve could finish the Christian life any minute now and he needs the help. If you get something out of this program too, bonus!

Don Sweeting is the president of Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando and professor of church history. He wrote, How to Finish the Christian Life along with his dad, George Sweeting, the former president and chancellor of Moody Bible Institute.

It’s always a good idea to settle problems by going to Jesus. Certainly Jesus had something to say about the kinds of music that we utilize in church worship, even if He did not speak to it directly. In Matthew 13:52, we read that Jesus said, “The kingdom of Heaven is like a householder who brings out of his treasure chest things new and things old.” There you have it! There has to be room for the new music, and there has to be room for the old music, too. Any worship service that is all the new stuff is not the kingdom of God. Any worship service that is all the old stuff is not the kingdom of God. There needs to be balance between the two if it’s to be representative of the kingdom that Jesus wills for us to enjoy.

Some churches have tried to settle this conflict by having two different services—one which uses contemporary worship music and one where the music is traditional. The problem with this is that it tends to create two separate congregations with two different perspectives on the faith. Music does condition the way in which we understand our Christianity and the way we live it out. I, personally, would like to see in each church a blended service that makes room for both the old and the new, so that those who relate to contemporary worship music will feel an opportunity to express themselves and those older folks (and it’s usually the older folks) who want the traditional hymns will find that there is a place in the worship service for their music as well.

Jesus had it right and we should follow His suggestion and evidence something of the kingdom of God by having both the old and the new when we gather together as a body of believers for worship.

Tony Campolo joins us regularly on Steve Brown Etc. He's professor emeritus at Eastern University and the founder of the Evangelical Association for the Promotion of Education, an organization that develops schools and social programs in various third world countries and in cities across North America. He's the author of over 35 books, blogs regularly at his website, redletterchristians.org, and can also be found on both Facebook and Twitter

But most importantly, Tony is Our Favorite Lib. Click here for Tony's latest appearance on Steve Brown Etc.

Nothing gets Steve Brown into more trouble than when he gives people three free sins (a practice that started on this talk show). So what does he do? He jams a stick in the hornet's nest and writes a book about it.

(If you're on the front page of the site, click "Read More" to see the trailer for Three Free Sins and audio player options.)

Join big-time pastor and author, Tullian Tchividjian, as he hosts this edition of Steve Brown Etc. and interviews Steve Brown about his latest effort to corrupt minds with the gospel, Three Free Sins: God's Not Mad at You.

Steve says the reason Christians are so bad is we’re trying so hard to be good. We’ve missed what God’s grace is all about. That’s the message of Three Free Sins—how to get free from the misguided obsession with sin management that binds so many Christians. We don't get just three free sins, but unlimited free sins!

Start clicking to hear the radical truth that the only people who get any better are those who know that, if they don’t get any better, God will still love them anyway. And, oh yeah, buy the book.

I think someone may have had a journalistic epiphany on the whole Health and Human Services thing.

But before we go there, stop and, for a moment, join me in contemplating the following journalism puzzle.

The Obama administration's new HHS regulations — click here for a sample of GetReligion coverage — continue to cause an electric buzz here inside the Beltway. At the moment, people continue to focus on the Catholic angle of this story.

That's logical. I get that. I mean, why would a Democratic candidate want to tick off Pope Benedict XVI in what will almost certainly be a tense election year?

Keep thinking. If this battle over the HHS rules is merely a "Catholic" story, it's logical to think that it is essentially a story about birth control. This logic has been leading reporters to another semi-logical conclusion. They're thinking: Most Catholics use birth control. Thus, most Catholics are not going to care about the HHS rules. The pope and the bishops are all just blowing smoke and this story is no big deal — other than to a few crazy Catholics (none in the typical newsroom, naturally) who actually care about church doctrines about sexuality.

However, if this is simply a story about birth control, logical journalists will need to figure out why so many liberal Catholics are currently so upset with the White House for picking this fight at this moment in time.

This leads us to the fact that U.S. bishops and the pope see this as a battle over issues much bigger than birth control. They see these rules as a direct attack on the religious liberty of Catholics and other believers. They see this as a First Amendment story in which the government is forcing religious groups — the institutions, not individual believers — to commit or fund acts that are sinful and evil, according to the doctrines proclaimed by these religious groups.

Seen from this angle, the ruling on birth control is simply the point on a much larger spear. The next thing you know, the U.S. Justice Department will be trying to get involved in decisions about who is hired and fired by religious groups. Wait a minute. That sounds familiar.

Please hear me say that there is no way to cover this story without hitting the birth-control angle and hitting it hard. However, there is no accurate, balanced way to handle this story without covering the larger religious-liberty angle, as well.

I also know that the potential impact of the HHS rules IS HUGE when you look at the Catholic numbers. What percentage of the nation's health care (especially for the poor) is provided by institutions with Catholic roots or ties? Then there is the fact that the nation contains nearly 250 allegedly Catholic colleges and universities. This is big stuff, folks.

The big question for journalists is this: Which angle frames the story? Which drives the coverage?

So stop and think. If this is primarily a story about birth control, then it's safe to say that only pro-Vatican Catholics will be screaming bloody murder these days. But that isn't the case, is it? Instead, leaders in a wide variety of religious groups are mad as hades, because they see the larger legal picture. They are asking: Is America a place in which people have freedom of worship or freedom of religion?

Finally, I think that we have a national-level story that has found a way to frame this story accurately.

Here is the top of religion-beat veteran Rachel Zoll's report for the Associated Press:

The Obama administration's decision requiring church-affiliated employers to cover birth control was bound to cause an uproar among Roman Catholics and members of other faiths, no matter their beliefs on contraception.

The regulation, finalized a week ago, raises a complex and sensitive legal question: Which institutions qualify as religious and can be exempt from the mandate?

For a church, mosque or synagogue, the answer is mostly straightforward. But for the massive network of religious-run social service agencies there is no simple solution. Federal law lays out several criteria for the government to determine which are religious. But in the case of the contraception mandate, critics say Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius chose the narrowest ones. Religious groups that oppose the regulation say it forces people of faith to choose between upholding church doctrine and serving the broader society.

"It's not about preventing women from buying anything themselves, but telling the church what it has to buy, and the potential for that to go further," said Sister Carol Keehan, president of the Catholic Health Association, representing some 600 hospitals.

Keehan's support for the passage of the Obama health care overhaul was critical in the face of intense opposition by the U.S. bishops. She now says the narrowness of the religious exemption in the birth control mandate "has jolted us." She pledged to use a one-year grace period the administration has provided to "pursue a correction."

I am bringing all of this up, again, for a logical reason (or two).

For starters, it will not surprise regular listeners of our "Crossroads" podcast that this issue was the subject of this week's discussion. You can find it at iTunes or simply click here to listen online. However, the main reason we talked this through — again — is that this story is not going away. Instead, it's taking on a life of its own on op-ed pages and in news reports (and not just because GOP types think it's a nice reason to wound the White House).

Oh, we also spent a few minutes discussing that whole GetReligion turns eight thing.

Enjoy the podcast.

Professor Terry Mattingly writes the nationally syndicated On Religion column for the Scripps Howard News Service in Washington, D.C., which is sent to about 350 newspapers in North America. He's also a regular contributor at GetReligion.org and the author of the book Pop Goes Religion: Faith in Popular Culture.

Love it or hate it, social networking is here to stay. People spend more than 110 billion minutes a month on sites like Facebook and Twitter. That translates to a lot of status updates and tweets as people seek to connect with one another. But do they really, and to what end?

Join Toni Birdsong on this edition of Steve Brown Etc. as we talk about her new book, @stickyJesus: how to live out your faith online. Is social networking an unprecedented opportunity to reach out to hurting people the way Jesus did or is it just a fun way to share this kind of thing? Let's talk.

Toni is a partner in Birdsong Creative. She's a self-described, “Communications Snob, Idea Wrangler, Entrepreneur and Author gaining fun and profit from an incurable case of Creative Obsessive Disorder.”

I don’t make new year’s resolutions anymore. After decades of broken promises and disappointed efforts, I started picking a new year’s word to remember and operate from for 12 months. I’ve had some interesting words since starting this, but I never make the conscious choice–the word always comes to me.

One year I was surprised by the word “Genesis.” I saw the theme of “beginning” played out throughout that year in countless ways, and because I was tuned in to the concept, I found a lot of connections that might have otherwise gone unnoticed.

This year my word was slow to emerge, but when it did, I was flabbergasted.

Embrace.

Uh, really?? I questioned the air. Embrace is kind of a lame old-fashioned way of saying “hug” — right? After going through my local dictionary, I found the usual meaning I had expected: to hold or clasp with the arms in affection. I also found some other definitions, but nothing that really stood out as important enough to be my New Year’s word.

Then I heard the still small voice.

“embrace your life”

I started to feel uncomfortable. There is much that is hanging out beyond my reach; dark and scary and pushed away out of my own necessity. It is some of the ugly stuff of life; certainly terrifying, and definitely not embraceable.

I spend a lot of time wishing I was someone else. I wonder what a different existence would look like; what I could be if I had pursued more of my dreams.

“embrace your journey”

My journey?? Well, I have no more journey, I protested. It was chronicled in a book, and then left there.

I knew this was not true. I know that much of my journey has continued after Stumbling Toward Faith. It’s just that I’m afraid of angering people or discouraging people — the journey I’ve been on could be considered heretical or blasphemous.

I worry about that. I worry about people reading my book, and then freezing me as that same person. It’s been eight years since it was written. Things do change, and our journeys do continue.

“embrace yourself”

I snorted. I am often disrespectful and unkind to myself. Care for myself is difficult; why would affection be any easier?

“embrace the now”

This is when I started thinking that this word was doable. I have been studying mindfulness and attending to the present for several years, and I’ve become rather good at it. I am able to stop a situation in the midst of itself, reflect on how/what I can do, and often talk myself through any existing anxiety or frustration. I’m not perfect, and too many times I find that I choose to engage in the negative things rather than momentarily step outside of them.

But dealing with a moment at a time (or even a day) is a good way of being aware–aware to your own self, and to others.

It’s been only a month since the word embrace came to me, but I am discovering chances to live differently as a result. I am a fighter–I am stubborn–and don’t give in easily. Sometimes, trying to embrace feels unbelievably selfish. Sometimes “the now” is so screwed up I can’t even choose it through my feelings of overwhelm, anger, and despair. I grew up learning that I had to push things away in order to survive. I had to fragment things, make divisions; do anything I could just to keep going.

Now I am trying to live at the other end of the spectrum. Now I am acknowledging that there is another way to live, and that this kind of life includes coming close to things I’d rather push away. It’s connective, this embracing, and it involves ruthless trust.

Renée Altson is the author of Stumbling Toward Faith, a photographer, and a web developer. She lives with her husband, daughter, and 2 cats in Southern California. Click here to listen to Renée on Steve Brown Etc.