I am now blogging at a new site:
I hope you’ll update your links and make your way over there. I am going to shoot for one post a day from now on (perhaps excluding weekends). But no promises! In any case, I hope the new blog will result in better and more frequent writing.
Go listen to this poem by Taylor Mali. Nothing could be more timely.
(I would have embedded the video here, but I don’t think WordPress supports Vimeo).
In a word, yes. Rush Limbaugh stirred up controversy by being the first to say so several months ago, but if you think about what he means, it makes perfect sense.
Like Rush, I want President Obama to fail because President Obama is essentially a socialist. His political theory is saturated in big government, lavish spending, high taxes, and the multiplication of entitlements. Like he said to Joe the Plumber, he wants to “spread the wealth” around. He is pushing hefty, unprecedented environmental regulations at a time when we are facing 10% unemployment and cannot afford to strangle businesses with more regulations (and it just so happens that in recent days the whole global warming theory has taken a massive credibility beating, yet the President remains undeterred in his desire to unilaterally save the world from carbon).
I want President Obama’s health care plan to fail. I want cap-and-trade to fail. I want high taxes to fail. I want big government stimulus packages to fail. I want everything this President stands for to fail, because he stands for everything that is against the well-being and prosperity of our nation. If his domestic agenda crashes to the ground and burns, then America will have succeeded, and my loyalty is to my country first, not to the man who happens to be leading it for these four years.
But there is one exception. I want President Obama to succeed in Afghanistan and in Iraq. He gave a good speech tonight. This was one of those rare occasions when he talks about 9/11 and about the ongoing terrorist threat to our national security. I hope and pray that his strategy works, that we pave the way for a secure and stable Afghanistan, that we put Al-Qaida and the Taliban on the run, and that we bring our boys home soon enough. I don’t trust my President on anything related to domestic policy. But listening to him speak tonight, I am giving him my trust and support on the objective of victory in Afghanistan. I hope that if a politically divided country can find unity in nothing else, that perhaps we might be able to find some measure of unity in this.
“One of the few advantages to the country in having Congress overwhelmingly in the hands of one party is that the lack of need to compromise lets the leaders of that party reveal themselves for what they are– in this case, people with unbounded arrogance and utter contempt for the right of ordinary people to live their lives as they see fit, much less the right to know as citizens what laws are going to be passed by their government. The question is whether voters will remember on election day in 2010.”—-Thomas Sowell
Candidate Barack Obama leads a movement in which masses of people enter the political arena for the first time. He is hailed as an inspiring figure.
During the first year of President Barack Obama’s presidency, conservatives begin to enter the political process in massive numbers in opposition to his policies, and they are demonized as angry, manipulative, violent mobs whose only goal is to stifle debate and impose their will.
To paraphrase Rush Limbaugh, why is a community organizer so upset that communities are organizing?
Today and tomorrow the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention is being held right here in Louisville, Kentucky. I attended the afternoon session, but unfortunately I had to miss out tonight when it appears that all the good stuff happened.
But I’m glad to see that Michael Spencer has provided an excellent summary and analysis of what happened tonight. The Southern Baptist Convention is changing as it transitions to a younger generation of leaders. I see the shift as a positive development. Younger leaders typically have little or nothing to do with the “boycott” mentality the SBC has been famous for recently. They are typically more focused on the gospel and on local churches than they are on culture wars. They are more likely to support a statement like the recent call for a Great Commission Resurgence than they are to support a resolution rebuking Pepsi.
Tonight was a good night for the SBC and a new generation of SBC leaders. But this is not the time for triumphalism, as Michael Spencer points out:
Younger leaders: You won today. Now be mature. Be gracious. Be kind. Build bridges. Heed wisdom and heal riffs. Watch Danny Akin and do what he does the way he does it.
I agree. In fact, there are three people I would point to who have been models of gracious and effective influence in the SBC recently: Southeastern Seminary’s president, Danny Akin; the current president of the SBC, Johnny Hunt; and the director of Founders Ministries, Tom Ascol. I think those of us who belong to the younger generation of the SBC should look to these men as models of gospel-centered ministry. There are a number of differences in theology and style between them, but they are all three united by a common vision for local churches to fulfill the Great Commission by partnering with one another and taking the message of Jesus Christ crucified to the nations. I hope and pray that the future of the SBC is defined by this vision.
From Doug Wilson’s Ascension Sunday sermon, addressed to President Obama:
Mr. President, your past record, your campaign promises, your political affiliations, your supporters, your political philosophy, and your record since the election, all consistently indicate that your appointment to the Supreme Court will be a pro-abortion nominee, one who favors the continued recognition of a ghoulish “right” to slaughter the unborn. Your rhetoric, as displayed very recently at Notre Dame, hypocritically aspires to transcend this moral confrontation, sometimes disingenuously called “a debate,” as though you are somehow above it all—but your record and actions indicate otherwise. You are radically down to earth in your complete support of unrestricted abortion rights. You are a thoroughly committed partisan in this sick war that adults have declared on children. This means that we have every reason to believe that you will decide, or that you already have decided, to nominate a pro-abortion judge to this vacancy. And so we come to the central point of this message, declared to you by a minister of Jesus Christ, speaking in His name and on His behalf. You may not do this thing. And if by the time this message is preached, you have already placed the name of such a person in nomination, you are commanded in the name of the Lord Jesus to repent, and withdraw that name from consideration. The one to whom you ultimately answer is the Lord Jesus Christ, and not the American people. And this Jesus, who is the Lord of all presidents and parliaments, kings and congresses, forbids what you are in the midst of doing. And so I say it again. You may not.
You said in the campaign that you did not have “a litmus test” for your nominees, but it is important for you to know and recognize that the Lord Jesus does have a litmus test for judges. He requires them to hate injustice and to judge righteously (Dt. 1:16), to defend the fatherless (Is. 1:23; Jer. 5:28), and to keep the land from being soaked with the blood of innocents (Hos. 6:6-8; Ps. 10:18). Judges must adjudicate with godly wisdom (Prov. 8:16). Judges must recognize that there is a Judge above them, one to whom they answer. The Lord is our judge, lawgiver and king (Is. 33:22). And judges who refuse to acknowledge the wisdom of heaven are judges that the Lord will bring down to nothing. He makes the judges of the earth as vanity (Is. 40:23).
Read the whole sermon.
Every once in while I check my blog stats, mainly in order to remind myself how much no one cares what I have to say (that way I won’t feel so compelled to say it and then I can spend time doing other things that actually have value). Well, today I just checked them, and something extraordinary happened on Wednesday, May 20th.
I normally run between about 12-30 views per day. Not impressive by any stretch of the imagination. But on the 20th I got 230 views. Now, this sort of thing has happened before, and I have always been able to trace it back to one particular post of mine (usually a political one) that ends up getting linked by a FoxNews story or something like that. And when I say “ends up getting linked,” I don’t mean that the author of the story intentionally links to me. I mean it gets linked under the “automatically generated” category that you find at the end of blogs.
So, on those few occasions when I have had multiple hundreds of hits in one day, I can figure out why pretty quickly. But I have no idea how this happened on Wednesday. I checked out the hits and noticed that they were widespread over a number of different posts. For some reason, about ten times more people than normal visited my blog on Wednesday.
If any of you were part of that group that came by on Wednesday, what was it that drew you here?
