Safe Haven

5 Thoughts For Today 5. Grace is like a reset button for the sojourning Christian who stumbles. 4. Arguably, Daniel Craig may be known as the best James Bond of all time. 3. I am surrounded by great friends, many more than I could hope for. 2. I like my politicians honest, actually conservative, and physically fit. (Let the reader understand.) 1. It's obvious that she was beaten senseless with the Beautiful Stick.

On the one hand, I'm neither a big believer in conspiracies, nor compelled to recklessly guess at the workings of God's providence, but let's review: --Polls suggest that the man who would be the first Mormon (AKA, Institutionalized Arianism) President of the United States leads by as much as 5 points less than 2 weeks before the election; --A monstrous hurricane COMES OUT OF NOWHERE to slam the eastern coastline, wreaking havoc, forcing the challenger off the campaign trail for a week, while the sitting president is seen by all, assisting the local authorities; --The Republican governor of New Jersey praises the sitting Democratic president for his assistance, after having spent the better part of 4 years ripping him to shreds; --Exit polls report that 42 percent of those who decided within the last week said the hurricane was a factor in how they voted; --The Democratic president wins a second term by narrow margins in the swing states. Like I said, I'm no...

Yesterday was completely shocking. The conservative press and most Republicans truly believed Romney would win. Barone is right about one thing: the political cultures are tightly sealed, and never really touch. That in itself is bad for the nation. There seems to be another Christian reaction to all this, mainly from evangelicals: that all this fussing is really idolatry, because isn't Jesus King anyway? It's a retreat. And the dirty little secret is that your hermeneutics do this to you. After all, where does the dissonance created by disunity go? There's a patch like on a spare tire on the ecclesiology as it is. To avoid the hard questions about dogma and the implications of an invisible "Church," there's a pretty high tolerance of theological agnosticism, beyond the barest creedal committments, and those are ad hoc . If those are fideistically derived, moral absolutes in a pluralistic public square is definitely a bridge too far. People who aren'...

Here on this momentous day of decision, I wanted to take a step back from the politics for a moment, and thank President Obama. Do you realize what America did four years ago? The same country that was digging in its heels to protect systemic discrination de jure against a whole group of its citizens-- the murders, violence, and exclusion that we've read about and many older than me lived through, inflicted on the American descendants of African slaves brought here against their wills--we have repudiated all of it, just by voting? Though the president himself is not precisely of this stock as the son of a Kenyan father, and a caucasian mother, he really did change the way we thought about all those painful chapters in our history. It by no means ended racism against anyone, but there is now a racial cynicism that will always be anachronistic in our country, by the very fact that Obama was elected. Malia and Sasha Obama really can dream as big as they want, and if one...

Sometimes, injustice is right at your feet. I can appreciate those who desire to help half a world away. We need that, too. But right here in America, good people suffer the indignity of false accusation. And our system doesn't guarantee anything; it leaves the most patriotic and optimistic Americans wondering what in the Mike Nifong is going on here. Mitt Romney and President Obama aren't even on my mind right now; I want my friend cleared; I want him back in his place, where he belongs. I admit, maybe I took him for granted. Though I told him before it all happened, "I'll miss you when you go away." I think the emotion of it surprised him. I hate when I get weirdly prophetic like that. Now, I just want to fight. The people who did this are lucky I don't know them. I'd never hurt them, but I would scream in their faces until they cried as much as we have. Lord, have mercy. I'll never laugh at another joke about these issues again. I know that mu...

A Pittance Of Grace, and the "Noltie Conundrum" After going to Confession for what seems like the gazillionth time in a very short period, I think I understand something about mercy today. Mercy is the love of God for sinners, in the simplest terms. He showed me how deep the love goes, in the person of His priest. Those of you who think Catholicism is some kind of performance treadmill are, I'm sad to say, insane. On the other hand, there are enough little details and devotional practices to keep door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen in business for centuries, if you put them in books and did that sort of thing. [This is the worst metaphor ever.--ed.] All that is to say, you can put yourself on the treadmill pretty easily. And I think I've been doing that recently. You get wound tighter than a drum, and a little proud, and you're asking for trouble. One never wants to sin to find out how much one really needs God, but it can happen that way. In any case, t...