A Danish TV crew was at SAMP this morning, both the 9 & 10.45 am services. They did a profile story one of our members.  The story is to about integrating faith and life and how faith can influence a voting decision.

The station is a European CNN and CBS affiliate.  The story will be a part of their prime-time newscast and will be seen across Northern Europe.

They were interesting folks.  And, they were fascinated about the general faithfulness of Americans and as noted above, the significant role faith plays in the American electorate.

Video from MSNBC via Real Clear Politics

Ineptocracy (in-ep-toc’-ra-cy) – a system of government where the least capable to lead are elected by the least capable of producing, and where the members of society least likely to sustain themselves or succeed, are rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscated wealth of a diminishing number of producers.

Seriously.

Recognizing the serious threat turkey fryers pose to the national security of the United States the Department of HOMELAND SECURITY has issued a warning via Twitter to all Americans.

Linked to the tweet was this ominous video:

Gotta love living in a nanny state.

An upcoming Supreme Court decision might give government, rather than religious organizations, the final say on who counts as a religious minister.  Here’s an interesting article from the Witherspoon Institute:

Civil authorities, James Madison noted, are particularly incompetent judges of religious truth. The First Amendment Madison helped shepherd through the First Congress thus explicitly protected establishments of religion from governmental meddling. History, however, has repeatedly shown the difficulty of drawing bright lines between the sacred and the secular, and the Supreme Court has long faced the delicate task of adjudicating disputes between the two. One such dispute currently pending before the High Court will decide the degree to which the religion clauses of the First Amendment insulate the employment decisions of religious organizations from federal anti-discrimination statutes . . . .

One of those voices is that of the Obama Administration, whose Department of Justice filed an opposition brief encouraging the Court to reject the ministerial exception outright. During oral arguments, Acting Deputy Solicitor General Leondra Kruger insisted that the “insight of the ministerial exception” is merely that it will sometimes take an “extraordinarily compelling governmental interest” to justify interference with a religious organization. Churches and other religious groups, Kruger conceded, have certain associational rights under the First Amendment, but she provocatively claimed that the “basic contours of the inquiry” in religion cases were no different than in any other case involving associational rights. Kruger’s argument thus minimized the importance of the religion clauses of the First Amendment to the rights of religious organizations, and, as Justice Antonin Scalia maintained, the government’s contention here was “extraordinary.” Right “there, black on white in the text of the Constitution are special protections for religion,” Scalia noted. “And you say it makes no difference?”

Read it all - and keep an eye on this case.

China’s one-child policy is an epic disaster. Why, then, does it have so many cheerleaders?  An interesting article from The Weekly Standard:

A few weeks ago Vice President Joe Biden made, by his standards, a minor squall when he visited China and held forth on the country’s One-Child policy. Biden didn’t endorse One-Child, exactly, but said that he would not “second guess” it. He wasn’t the first Westerner to look favorably upon the regime. Tom Friedman once mused that One-Child “probably saved China from a population calamity.” The Associated Press lauded it recently as a “boon” to Chinese girls. Others believe One-Child to be so admirable that it ought to be replicated on a global scale. Financial Post columnist Diane Francis, former Planned Parenthood director Norman Fleishman, and Ted Turner—among others—have all said that the entire world ought to adopt China’s One-Child policy.

Read it all.

Nathan Finn offer this for your consideration:

Every semester, I teach a couple of church history survey courses at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. The first course, Church History: Patristic and Medieval, more or less covers the period from the end of the first century AD to the dawn of the sixteenth century. One of the topics I address is the crusades. Many students are very interested in the crusades. They hope that understanding the religious wars between Christians and Muslims will help us better navigate our own contemporary context, particularly the War on Terror and growing emphasis on evangelical missionary work in unevangelized Muslim nations.

Unfortunately, the crusades are white hot landmines on the battlefield of political correctness. Many on the cultural Left use the crusades as an argument for secularism, or at least the muffling of (conservative) religious voices in the public square. They strongly imply that America in particular and Western Culture in general are to blame for most of the ills around us. Some even insinuate that we deserve the scorn of Islamic terrorists, though to be clear, the Left believes that the terrorists take their scorn too far in resorting to violence. Not surprisingly, many leftwing Christians make similar arguments. Just read the reports of any national gathering of the mainline denomination of your choice over the past eight or ten years.

Read the rest.

I love political satire. I especially love JibJab. With the race for the White House underway I am anticipating rich material for forthcoming commentary. Here are a few of my favorite JibJab videos:

He’s Barack Obama

McCain/Obama (2008)

Bush/Kerry (2004)

As the political season begins to ramp up again (as if there’s been a break) with Presidential candidates debating each other in 30 second sound bites I thought this article, one in a series on the Sermon on the Mount, might serve as a helpful framework for the Christian to make sense of our politics. Most helpfully, you will see, is that Stephen begins with faith and seeks to work that faith out in the public arena. Far too often I encounter people who, while Christian, are defined by their political ideology and then marry that ideology to their theology and so make Jesus a servant of their political agenda.

Stephen writes:

So what is it that we know about ourselves when we know ourselves in God, in Jesus Christ. The first thing we know is that we are sinners, that our self-love is “naturally” curved in on itself. Hence, it is not enough to love oneself in the modern therapeutic sense. It may be true that it is difficult for people with low self-esteem to sort out dying to self from mere self-hatred. Nevertheless, it is only when we die to self that we can truly live (cf. Mark 8:36). The robust attitude of the publican in Jesus’ parable is our model: “Lord, have mercy on me a sinner” (Luke 18:10-14). When we know and confess ourselves to be sinners, we can also accept God’s judgment that we are sons of God. We are justified by His Son and we have become heirs. Hence, to know oneself is to know oneself approved and righteous in His eyes. Jesus said of the publican: “he went down to his house righteous.” Nothing had changed in his outward status. He was still a despised publican in the eyes of society. But in God’s eyes, he was a saint.

So we know ourselves to be both sinners and saints. What then are we to do with this knowledge in the political sphere?

Read the rest.