Lots of dads are hoping their daughters agree with what is written by this author.

Good is Not a Bad Word Girls Gone Mild July 26, 2007 Eight years ago, a young writer named Wendy Shalit took the culture by storm with a radical book called A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue. While many people embraced the idea of a return to modesty—especially the young women whose struggles and aspirations Shalit wrote about—others were appalled. "I knew that my arguments . . . might be challenged," Shalit recalls now, "but nothing prepared me for the tongue-lashings I would receive from my elders. . . . [Feminist writer] Katha Pollitt called me a 'twit.' . . . The Nation solemnly foretold that I would 'certainly be embarrassed' and regret my stance 'in a few years.'" Well, it's now been a few years, and Wendy regrets nothing. On the contrary, she has a new book out, Girls Gone Mild: Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect and Find It's Not Bad to Be Good. As the title proclaims, Shalit is still convinced that true strength and happiness come not from deadening one's emotions and having sex for fun, but from practicing modesty and self-restraint. And guess who's on her side? As Shalit recounts, "To find out why modesty is more appealing to younger people, [feminist writer Katha] Pollitt might have talked to her own daughter, Sophie, who . . . was disgusted by contemporary sexual norms." Wendy interviewed Sophie, now a college freshman, and reports: "Like many intelligent young women, Sophie Pollitt-Cohen now realizes that the boys' immaturity cannot be separated from the girls' willingness to provide sexual favors to those boys. . . . Sophie rejects sexual exhibitionism even though she identifies herself as a feminist." Then there's Erica Jong, well-known novelist and advocate of what Shalit describes as "the concept of a random, guilt-free sexual encounter between strangers." Jong's now-grown daughter, Molly Jong-Fast, tried that lifestyle and found it utterly unsatisfying. The sad thing is, she tells Shalit, "You're not allowed to admit that [promiscuity] just doesn't work." Though devoted to her mother, Molly is "embarrassed" by Erica's writings and says to Shalit, "I was sold a bad bill of goods." Well, their kids ought to know. The sexual revolutionaries of the '60s and '70s may have thought they were helping kids avoid heartbreak by teaching them to treat sex as a recreational activity. But those kids have discovered that was untrue. They've realized that the older feminists, who were supposed to be about women's rights and dignity, were actually advising them to make sex objects out of themselves! So they're fighting back. As Shalit studied trends like modest fashion shows and boycotts of sexually explicit T-shirts, she discovered that for every girl who's bought into the cultural myths about sexuality, there's another who is refusing to go along. While acknowledging the negative, anti-woman forces in this sex-obsessed culture, she focuses refreshingly on the women who choose to protect their own "dignity" and "vulnerability." Shalit has to reflect accurately the culture young women are up against today, so some of the situations she describes are a little rough. With that caveat, I urge you to read Girls Gone Mild. And have your children who are in their late teens or older read it as well. More than ever, they need know that good is not a bad word.

I liked where the author goes with this post. It is an interesting place to land on the whole HP thing. It places the burden back on the reader. Leaving it up to the reader to determine how discerning they are for Biblical truth .. in this or in any media you are exposed to.

RE: ’Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’

Obviously, my earlier post on the last Harry Potter book has generated a lot of controversy: Are these books Christians should be reading or not? I've been listening to this debate for years now, and have been asked the question many times by people who know I'm both an English teacher and a Bible teacher. My answer has always been "yes" -- but with certain reservations, of course.

First, as an English teacher (someone who loves "fiction") and as a Christian (someone who loves "Truth"), I know that there is only one perfect book in existence: the Bible. All other products of the creative impulses God gave to men and women fall short of perfection: sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. We're each going to have issues that will determine what we deem worth reading -- or limits to how much hard mental work we're willing to do to glean gems of Truth from these less-than-perfect products of man's imagination. Frankly, I have had to wade through a lot of novels that weren't worth the time or trouble, no matter how many times my teachers said, "This is a literary classic everyone should know."

Second, years of steering students through works of literature have taught me that some students (for a variety of reasons) never seem able to get beyond a superficial understanding of a given work, while others are able to see subtle details and, thus, arrive at a more accurate and deeper understanding of the writer's themes and purpose. I believe that much of the controversy over reading Harry Potter stems from this distinction. From the beginning of the series, some Christians have dismissed them out of hand because the characters are witches and wizards. The Bible forbids witchcraft, thus the books are evil. Period. My answer to that is simple: if you believe it's a sin for you to read the Harry Potter books, then it is. Or, to adapt Paul's argument in 1 Corinthians 10 about eating meat offered to idols, "Your conscience won't allow you to read Harry; mine does."

Why? Because anyone who has read the series from beginning to end can tell you that the witchcraft depicted in these fantasy novels has nothing to do with the type of occult activities forbidden by the Bible. Even real-world Wiccans scoff at the idea that Rowling is writing realistically about what they do. By the very nature of the genre, the setting and many of the events depicted within are short on verisimilitude: brooms don't fly, hippogriffs and dementors don't exist, doors don't unlock when we wave a stick at them, spiders don't talk, people aren't naturally divided into two camps--Muggles or magicals, etc. Kids above the age of five get this, even if many adults don't seem to.

But while the setting is unrealistic, the underlying meaning of the story is something every Christian should appreciate: our willingness to sacrifice ourselves to save and protect others, the value of love and friendship over power and control, the ongoing battle between good and evil (both within and without) that we must all come to terms with, and the realization that death is not the end of life.

Do the Harry Potter books lead readers directly to faith in Jesus Christ? Of course not. Nor does Hamlet, but I haven't heard too many Christians attack Shakespeare because what he wrote wasn't blatantly Christian. Instead, we are offered a storyline -- as Josh Moody over at Christianity Today terms it -- that is "pop culture's version of transcendence." And that is something we can work with around the water cooler to get people thinking about the most important issues in life.

If you can't figure out the Christian virtues, themes, and symbols in Harry Potter for yourself, then read some of the many articles and books that have been written on the subject. You might start with Bob Smietana's article "The Gospel According to J.K. Rowling" which discusses how C.S. Lewis scoffed at the notion that he had a Christian allegory in mind before he ever started The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. In the mysterious nature of human creativity, the Christian nature of the story "pushed itself in on its own accord." In a similar way, Smietana sees this process at work in Rowlings: "She began writing about wizards and quidditch and Bertie Botts Every Flavor Beans, and somewhere along the way, Christ began to whisper into the story."

Are you able to argue against the statements made below by Rev Moore? If not read the rest of this article for answers..

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The Rev. Michael Moore?

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Posted: July 20, 2007
1:00 a.m. Eastern

Fresh from the success of his latest agitprop promoting socialized medicine, "Sicko" filmmaker Michael Moore is considering whether he will use his next movie to teach us all a thing or two about the mind and will of God.

That's right, call him the Rev. Michael Moore.

Specifically, he intends to share his biblical wisdom regarding the issue of homosexuality and what he sees as irrational hatred of it.

"I think it's a very ripe subject for someone like me to make a movie about," he told the homosexual magazine the Advocate. "Simply because we are not there yet and it remains one of the last open wounds on our soul that we are not willing to fix yet."

Moore told the Advocate he is a spiritual person who supports same-sex marriage.

"There is nowhere in the four Gospels where Jesus uses the word 'homosexual,'" Moore related. "The right wing has appropriated this guy … and they have used him to attack gays and lesbians, when he never said a single word against people who are homosexual. Anyone who professes to be a Christian and does that is certainly not following the teachings of Jesus Christ."

Well, I don't know which Bible the Rev. Moore is reading, but that's not exactly correct.

Too much politics? Too much government?

Gorging on Politics Does Every Problem Have a Political Solution? July 18, 2007 If you're not already weary of the 2008 presidential election campaign—some 18 months before we vote—you must be living in a cave without cable or Internet access. The 2008 campaign began the day after the 2006 election, making this the first non-stop presidential campaign in history. The media, desperate to sustain interest in it, is reduced to pursuing such earth-shattering stories as: Which candidate owns the most pets? The answer: John McCain with three turtles, three parakeets, two dogs, and a ferret. Even Christians, this early, seem frantic over who's going to be nominated. Have we finally succumbed to what Jacques Ellul, the eccentric French reformed thinker, prophesied in the 60s? Ellul foresaw the Information Age and the need of the media for a steady flow of information to feed the populace. It would therefore gravitate, he said, to covering centers of power. Politicians would be willing accomplices because they'd gain fame and clout. All of this has created what Ellul titled his prophetic book, The Political Illusion, the idea that every problem has a political solution. He warned that this would lead to increasing dependence on the state by ordinary citizens and decreasing citizen control of government. This has proven prophetic. From Kennedy's New Frontier to LBJ's Great Society to President Bush's No Child Left Behind initiative, the challenger promises new programs, and, when elected, has to deliver. The result is that program piles upon program, agency upon agency; the whole structure of government becomes so unwieldy it can hardly function. We saw this happen in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. I fear we might see it again during another terrorist attack. While a political obsession might be good for keeping the talking heads busy on television, citizens are the ultimate losers. Virtually everybody has to deal with government, whether obtaining a driver's license or opening a business. We often end up locked in bureaucratic gridlock, even over minor issues—just what Ellul predicted. But the real evil of the illusion is that it distracts us from other aspects of life. Politics are important, of course: Christians have a duty to be the best of citizens, bringing concerns of justice and righteousness into public life. But we have to keep political activity in perspective, seeing that it fills the proper role in what Protestant reformers labeled "sphere sovereignty." Each sphere—family, church, and government—must carry out its own responsibility before God. This means we must guard against government encroachment on other spheres. And we must not let the political illusion blind us to what makes life rich and meaningful: family, church, and community. In short, culture. Politics is, after all, only an expression of culture. It can never be the ultimate source of meaning and influence in any society if people wish to remain free. Perhaps, after this endless and exhausting presidential campaign, Americans may be so gorged on politics that we'll finally say "enough!" I'm already saying it, and I refuse to speculate about the campaign. And then maybe we will reject the promises of political messiahs in favor of building up crumbling cultural infrastructure—our families, our churches, and communities. And Christians who understand the balance between politics and culture can help open our neighbors' eyes to the fact that there is more to life than non-stop politics.

Wow, are we ever confused. We thought things down in Africa are bad.. Maybe it's the other way around..

Learning from Africa

The Washington Post has an interesting editorial by Uzodinma Iweala entitled "Stop Trying to Save Africa" The author rants about Western attitudes toward Africa and the widespread feeling that the West needs to "save" Africa. He chides us that our attitudes have really not traveled much of a distance from the colonial mindset.

In many ways I agree with Iweala's position. Unfortunately we haven't learned how much we have to learn from Africa, particularly from our brothers and sisters in Christ in places where Christianity is thriving despite persecution and suffering. I think about an email my friend David sent to me from the Sudan a couple of years ago while he was their teaching pastors at a seminary, many of whom had walked for miles for days just to get there. He said:

There is a woman here who pastors a remote Anglican church in the North which her husband founded and pastored until his death. Earlier this year she watched from the bushes as her son was mutilated by machete—right in front of her husband—as Muslims tried to force the son to recant Christianity. After her son was dead, they started in on her husband, taking limb after limb, and he stood strong until he died also, refusing to recant. While she is uncomfortable pastoring the church as a woman, she says that there has been no one else to lead and "if this church dies, my family and my heart have died in vain." She has named her church, "The Church of the Agony."

As I told these people that we would be praying for their church, they told us that THEY WOULD BE PRAYING FOR OURS IN AMERICA EVEN MORE. As we pray for peace for them, they will pray that "the confusion would be cast out from our midst, so that we may clearly see the Savior in America." They say they have heard of the state of our churches, and have been faithfully praying for us already.

The point isn't that we shouldn't help in situations where God shows us to help. I think the point is more about our attitude. All of us, Africans, Americans, Europeans, etc... we are all in need of saving. We need to see that there is only One, truly able to save. I pray along with my African brothers and sisters that "the confusion would be cast from our midst so that we may clearly see the Savior in America." And I pray that God would show us ways to humbly partner with our brothers and sisters in Africa to help in ways that are effectual and that don't reek of condescending pride.

Great writeup about the concept of marriage. Focus, ponder this before you ever get mushy about the romantic stuff.

The Me-Centered Family A Disaster in the Making July 13, 2007 The lead in a recent Washington Post article paints a disturbing picture: "Children rank as the highest source of personal fulfillment for their parents but have dropped to one of the least-cited factors in a successful marriage, according to a national survey." What's the matter with that sentence? Too much to unpack entirely in a few minutes, but let's zero in on those two enticing words: "personal fulfillment." The emphasis on that idea tells us a lot about what's really wrong with marriage and family today. As the article states, "The 88-page report . . . underscores a widening gap between parenthood and marriage—at a time when living together out of wedlock has grown increasingly common and nearly one in four births is to an unmarried woman." The author quotes several people who say that they think of marriage and children separately, not as a package deal. By a wide margin, the respondents in this survey still want children. They even realize that children need a mother and a father. But increasingly fewer of them are practicing what they say they believe. Why? Because they also believe that marriage is all about "mutual happiness and fulfillment" and "personal satisfaction" instead of the "bearing and raising of children." Do you see what's missing here? Nothing about putting someone else first. Just marriage as something that makes you feel good—which, as anyone who's been married will testify, isn't an idea that works for very long. It's no wonder that more and more couples have trouble committing to marriage, and that many who do are having trouble making their marriages last. This is so ironic. We live in an era where romance seems to be on its deathbed and sexual relationships have become casual, ordinary business. Yet here we have a generation with such an impossibly romanticized view of marriage that they have to find the spouse who's always wonderful and satisfying—or no spouse at all. And it's also no wonder that the idea trickles down to child-raising. People want children to satisfy their own needs, or not at all. You may remember that a while back I talked about two very different mothers: one of them risked her marriage and her health and spent a small fortune conceiving a child; the other was filing a "wrongful-birth" suit over a botched abortion –a child she didn't want. At bottom, I said, they both had the same idea: that a child was a commodity and that their right to self-fulfillment was their chief goal. At least one married father quoted in this article, David Joyce, got it right when he said, "I think what we're running into . . . is people saying, '[marriage] needs to be about me.' And it doesn't. It needs to be about 'us' or about 'we.' Anything that's based on a 'me' scenario isn't going to last very long." Joyce is right. So what kind of marriage lasts? A marriage in which the husband and the wife understand that marriage is about self-giving, not about self-satisfaction. That parenthood is a calling to self-sacrifice for the good of the child, not an avenue for self-fulfillment. We need to start teaching our kids and young adults that me-centered families cannot survive. And instead of delivering happiness and self-fulfillment, the me-first attitude will bring, in the end, nothing but emptiness and a declining birthrate that will soon enough bring about the end of western civilization.

This is a throwback to medieval times.. Screw up and 'Off with your head..'

Is this on your bookshelf?

Bizarre Narratives and Christian Truth The Fiction of Flannery O'Connor July 6, 2007 For twenty years the letters sat in sealed boxes in a library at Emory University. But in mid-May, the seals were broken. Lovers of great fiction are now reading hundreds of private letters penned by the celebrated Christian writer, Flannery O'Connor. O'Connor wrote the letters to her friend, Elizabeth Hester, who donated the letters to Emory on condition they remain closed to the public—until now. The correspondence sheds light on the private musings of a writer whose novels and short stories provide one of the undisputed bright spots in twentieth-century fiction. Flannery O'Connor was born in 1924, in Savannah, Georgia. After spending two years at the famous Iowa Writers Workshop, she returned to Georgia, where she wrote short stories and raised peacocks. Although she died young—at age 39—she produced some of the most powerful fiction with Christian themes ever written. O'Connor represents the tail end of the Southern Literary Renaissance that included William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, and Robert Penn Warren. But she differed from them in that she was, above all, a Christian writer. According to critic Dorothy Walters, O'Connor's "bizarre narratives of absurdly comic Southerners are governed by the stern purity of a rigidly Christian view." O'Connor knew her Christian faith was an anomaly in a world grown complacent, materialistic, and secular. So to reach the prosperous, comfortable folk who made up the bulk of her readers, O'Connor used jarring, comic situations and grotesque, unsophisticated characters. She intended to shock her readers out of their entrenched complacency, especially in matters of faith. The genius of O'Connor was that she could portray religion in an up-close and unfiltered way she knew many readers would find uncomfortable. For example, in her novel, The Violent Bear It Away, a sophisticated schoolteacher named Rayber dismisses faith as irrational. But then he stumbles upon a little girl evangelist. Her sermon on God's love hits him like a punch in the stomach. "Do you know who Jesus is?" the little girl asks. "Jesus is the Word of God and Jesus is love. The Word of God is love and do you know what love is, you people? If you don't know what love is you won't know Jesus when He comes. You won't be ready." Well, you won't find that kind of talk in many other twentieth-century novels. O'Connor knew her audience would identify with the schoolteacher and would be as disturbed and affected as he was by the powerful words coming from the mouth of an innocent little girl. Much of O'Connor's fiction had this effect on its readers as it has had on me. There is something in her writing that haunts the reader so that he cannot easily dismiss it. You may not have a chance to visit Emory University and read Flannery O'Connor's private correspondence. But if you've never read O'Connor's fiction, tuck one of her novels or books of short stories into your beach bag this summer. And then, the next time you encounter a sophisticated, modern secularist—one who sneers at religious faith—ask him if he's read any Flannery O'Connor. Her writing just might be the instrument God uses to open his or her eyes to the truth.