3 Books

Recently, I finished reading two books and listening to another.

I'd started reading Nabeel Qureshi's Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus: A Devout Muslim Encounters Jesus, a while ago, but had set it aside in order to turn my attention to two other books--one that my Navigators coach, Bill Mowry, wanted me to read and another one recommended me to by my son.

The Qureshi book is an important one, especially given the penchant of some in the post-911 US, who erroneously think that all religions are the same and when others, in the name of tolerance, claim that all religions can lead people to God.

Qureshi was raised in a devout Muslim home and was himself an avid believer. But when he went to Old Dominion University, on his way to medical school, he met David, a mate on the school debate team, who was a deeply committed follower of Jesus.

In the context of their friendship, Qureshi became committed to proving the superiority of Islam and the errors of David's Christianity.

To do so, he dug into not just the Qu'ran and Muslim teaching, but also the Bible and Christian teaching. Qureshi chronicles a series of jarring insights that led him, with heart, head, and will to accept that Jesus is the crucified and risen "way,...truth,..and life" (John 14:6) and that Islam isn't a  witness of God. As he writes in the book's introduction: "As I studied Islam more carefully, what I learned shook my world: there is no good reason to believe that either Muhammad or the Quran teaches the truth about God."

It hasn't been an easy road for Qureshi since coming to faith in Christ. But he has remained steadfast in following Christ, even now as he fights stomach cancer.

This book is not a rabid polemic against Islam. Qureshi sensitively and lovingly explains Islamic belief with a love for his own family members and for Muslims alike. In the bargain, he helps Christians and others to more clearly and sensitively understand Islam.

I can't recommend Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus highly enough.

My wife and I (and our kids when they were young) have always made a habit of reading books in the car on jaunts of any distance. I'm the reader, since, as I've explained here before, I'm the only family member who can read while traveling without barfing.

But, a few weeks ago, I found the audio version of Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, a book which was made into an unfortunate and less than faithful to the text movie by producer Angelina Jolie. So, instead of my reading, we listened to the late, great Edward Herman read Hillenbrand's riveting telling of the story of Louis Zamperini, Olympic gold medalist and World War II hero and POW.

Much of the book is taken up with Zamperini's wartime experiences, which included a harrowing time on a raft in the Pacific after the bomber on which he was a crew member was shot down and his even more harrowing experiences in Japanese POW camps. He endured almost unimaginable privations, daily beatings, and starvation. His survival is certainly in miracle territory.

After the war, Zamperini met and fell in love with Cynthia Applewhite and they married. But the war hadn't ended for Louis. Like many veterans, he suffered from PTSD, horrible flashbacks, and increasing intervals of sullen hatefulness. He sank into alcoholism.

Eventually, Cynthia filed for divorce and Zamperini's life seemed to spiral ever more out of control. He'd never had much exposure to or interest in religion. In fact, it turned him off completely. And though he'd had what can be described as encounters with God during some of his worst experiences of the war, he never seemed to give God a thought.

Neither really had Cynthia. But not long after she filed for divorce, she attended Billy Graham's famed Los Angeles mission. The year was 1949. Cynthia received Christ by faith for the first time and His presence in her life made an immediate change in her outlook. She announced, to Zamperini's surprise and delight, that she wasn't divorcing him.

But soon his delight was mixed with anger as Cynthia pressed Louis to attend one of Graham's crusade events and meet Christ for himself. He resisted, but finally relented. He attended one night, but left as soon as Graham completed his sermon. Implausibly, he told Cynthia he would attend one more gathering if she would promise to never pester him about it again. It was that night, through Graham's preaching, the God's grace given in Christ, met Zamperini's deepest needs: forgiveness, the ability to let go of his past, freedom from his addiction, a purpose for living, life with God.

He never drank again. He never experienced another horrific dream of the beatings he endured during the war. His desire for vengeance, a desire that had grown so deep that he had been saving money in order to go to Japan in order to kill his primary tormentor.

Eventually, Zamperini became the director of a camp that transformed the lives of troubled kids like he had been and an evangelist who preached around the world about the power Jesus gives to His believers to forgive those who have hurt us so that we can live the life God has in mind for us. He even forgave and called to faith those who had menaced and beaten him when he was a POW.

He died in 2014 at the age of 97. In January, 1998, before the Olympics in Nagano, Japan, he ran a leg of the Olympic torch relay, passing the camp where he had been interned.

Whether you read it or listen to it, Hillenbrand's riveting narrative of this remarkable man's life is moving and inspiring. Like Qureshi, Zamperini found life in Jesus Christ. So can anyone.

The final book I'll mention is pure and delightful brain candy: Agatha Christie's Cards on the Table, a 1937 book that features her famous fictional detective (who she came to detest), Hercule Poirot. I love Christie's books and picked this one up for ten cents at a library book sale in Georgetown, Texas earlier this year. It's a great read.

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

Think Christianity is Shrinking?

Think again. From The Washington Post:

The center of Christianity has shifted from Europe to the global South.

The religious landscape is particularly changing for the world’s Christians. A century ago, 80 percent lived in North America and Europe, compared with just 40 percent today.

In 1980, more Christians were found in the global South than the North for the first time in 1,000 years. Today, the Christian community in Latin America and Africa, alone, account for 1 billion people.

Over the past 100 years, Christians grew from less than 10 percent of Africa’s population to its nearly 500 million today. One out of four Christians in the world presently is an Africa, and the Pew Research Center estimates that will grow to 40 percent by 2030.

Asia is also experiencing growth as world Christianity’s center has moved not only South, but also East. In the last century, Christianity grew at twice the rate of population in that continent. Asia’s Christian population of 350 million is projected to grow to 460 million by 2025.

The global religious wildcard is China. Even today, demographers estimate that more Christian believers are found worshipping in China on any given Sunday than in the United States. Future trends, while difficult to predict because so much is below the religious radar, could dramatically drive down the world’s religious “nones.”

Nones are those who say they have no religion.

So, while the rest of the world is becoming increasingly Christian, the United States presently is moving in the opposite direction.

And, while it's often said that Islam is growing more quickly than Christianity is on the world scene, that's misleading. In fact, Islam's growth is a byproduct of births to Muslim families. But Christianity is seeing hundreds of thousands more conversions to Christian faith. That's real growth. Reports of the demise of Christian faith are not only premature; they're incorrect.

A random this and that

For a time, I presented Saturday This and That, links to and thoughts spun from articles that had caught my attention the week before. I haven't done one for awhile. So, here's a This and That composed of articles from the past few weeks.

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Has science really found a way for people to keep from looking stupid? A Hungarian research project mentioned at The Huffington Post, claims that three things can make people look stupid: overconfidence, a lack of control, and absent-mindedness. Come to think of it, a good chunk of comedy is comprised of one, two, or all three of these traits. 



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If you have a bad attitude about aging, it may impact how you age.

People who held more negative thoughts about aging earlier in life had greater loss of hippocampus volume when they aged. In other words, the researchers say, people who held negative age stereotypes had the same amount of decline in three years as the more positive group had nine in nine years.

...People who had more negative age stereotypes had significantly higher scores of plaques and tangles than people with more positive feelings about growing old.

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10 Historical Myths About World Christianity purports to set the record straight on a lot of common negative stereotypes of world Christianity.

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Why Lutherans and others use liturgy in worship. A current trend among millennials is an attraction to what's come to be called "traditional" worship, using liturgy.

Liturgy means work of the people and in the Christian tradition, it's a structure by which people collectively come together in the presence of God to worship, praise, hear God's Word, offer ourselves to God, and receive the sacraments.

I didn't grow up in the liturgical tradition, but as the years go by, it means more and more to me, for many of the reasons cited in this article. We even use liturgical structure in our "contemporary" worship at Living Water. 

Saturday This and That

These are some of the things that caught my eye this past week.

Ever wonder what that extra shoelace hole is for?
It isn't just for show.

Are fountain pens the next big thing?
In A Primer on Fountain Pens, Brett and Kate McKay share the writing instrument's history and tell us why, at times, they should be our instrument of choice for writing. Somehow, I don't see the fountain pen taking off as a fad.

Denzel Washington's recommended number 1 priority for college graduates...
...put God first.

Letter to JetBlue...
...from the grateful mother of an autistic child.

"How is it that really, really smart people can come to believe really, really stupid things?"...
...The revered journalist, Seymour Hersh, seems to have been looking for the "big story" for decades and, in the process, produced some embarrassments, including his just released story alleging that Osama bin Laden's death was less of an American achievement than a Pakistani government gift. Marc Ambinder suggests that, in his long journalistic career, Hersh has often been right on facts, but often way off when taking about motive, leading him to believe crazy things.

The US is "less Christian"...
...so says a new study.

But the sky is not falling...
...So shows Ed Stetzer.

The US restaurant business is stagnant...
...because millennials don't go to restaurants as much as preceding generations did. One factor that might explain this, not mentioned in the article, is the plethora of cooking shows. Cooking has become fun and hip, whereas in previous generations regarded it as a necessity and a chore. So, millennials might actually prefer eating their own cooking at home.

$179.3-million is no abstraction...
...That's how much Picasso's Women of Algiers brought in at an auction this past week.

Has the decline of baseball...
...corresponded with the decline of American character?

Hillary would, if he weren't a competitor, likely advise Jeb to watch out for questions...
...Clinton has only answered eight from the media since her campaign began, preferring to take questions from folks at town meetings. On the other hand, Bush's most challenging questions have come from "ordinary" voters, not the media, and as he answers them, seems to get himself into increasingly deeper waters. I wrote here:

While it may be in a candidate's interest to speak to the press, Clinton isn't legally bound to do so. If she wants to reach the public with town hall meetings, advertising, conventional campaigning, and social media releases, that's her choice. But it's likely to backfire on her...

Now, Bush seems to be showing us that answering any question from anybody can produce its own backfires.

While I recognize that there's a good chance that anyone who runs for president is either (a) filled with megalomania or (b) racked by feelings of inferiority, I nonetheless feel badly about the meat grinding analysis and tedious verbal parsing to which all candidates for the country's highest office are subjected.

A legend has died...
...B.B. King passed on Thursday. Love this article about him from USA Today.

"10 Historical Myths About World Christianity"

From a professor at the University of Edinburgh.

Did Brit Hume "Evangelize" Tiger Woods

Blogger Ann Althouse says that Brit Hume "evangelized" golfer Tiger Woods in this clip from Fox News. Many of Althouse's commenters seemed to agree and they didn't like it.



I have a slightly different take on the matter from that of Althouse or some of her readers.

The term "evangelize" is rooted in the New Testament word euangelion, meaning good news. (The New Testament was written in Greek.) For Christians, the good news (or Godspell, Gospel, in Old English) is that God restores relationship between God and humanity in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. All who repent and trust in (or believe in) Christ have forgiveness of sins, restored relationship with God, the capacity to believe in God's promises, and so on, in addition to eternal life.

In a way, Hume does "evangelize" in this clip, I suppose.

But in commending "good" news, did he violate the tenets of another "good," that of good journalism?

What interests me about Hume's comments to me is that I once saw Juan Williams give an interview in which he was asked about his involvement with Fox News. (Williams used to be a commentator there. I have no idea if he still is.)

Williams, who is overt about his Christian faith and often reports and opines on the intersection between faith and daily life, said that one of the most interesting aspects of his work at Fox came in his relationship with Hume.

Hume, he said at that time, had always been skeptical about Christianity and felt deeply uncomfortable with any discussions of the faith, on air or off. He was wary of Christians, regarding them as suspect, intellectually and otherwise.

Williams said that he felt that he had opened some sort of door of insight onto Christian faith for Hume, revealing to him that it wasn't as suspect or foreboding as he had seemed to think it was.

To me, Hume's prescription for Woods, though clearly informed by sympathy for the golfer, is almost distant and clinical, utilitarian. It doesn't come off as the endorsement of a "satisfied customer" of God's grace given in Jesus Christ, but as the observation of an outsider suggesting that the Christian faith might offer to Woods exactly what Hume believes the golfer needs right now.

Hume observes that Woods needs forgiveness and redemption and says that, based on his observations, Woods is less likely to find those things in Buddhism, to which Hume understands Woods to be an adherent, than in Christianity. Hume's comments were presented with a kind of objectivity, it seemed to me, an impression buttressed by Williams' comments, unless, of course, Hume has undergone a conversion since that time.

As for the appropriateness of what Hume said, it appears to have come during some sort of round-robin discussion. Under those circumstances, he's functioning as a commentator, not an objective journalist, and he has as much right, under those circumstances, to express his views as any other commentator. What he said certainly isn't the most outlandish thing I've ever heard in a cable news bull session.

I should put my biases on the table, so that you can better assess whether to totally dismiss what I've written here.

First, I'm a Christian and I do believe that Christ brings forgiveness, hope, and restoration. I would gladly--and I hope respectfully-- commend following Jesus Christ to Woods if the opportunity presented itself.

I'm a Lutheran, a pastor of a denomination which is seen as being liberal, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). But I'm unabashed in quoting Jesus when He says, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life." I believe Jesus restores relationship with God, giving new life and hope to all who believe in Him. I'm a very evangelical Christian. I think that there's good news to tell and I'm unabashed about telling it, but I hope I do so in a way that is respectful of everybody's perspective. Back when I was an atheist, one of the things I most hated in the world was Christians who went beyond telling me about what Christ meant to them to forcing their version of Christianity down my throat!

Second, I haven't watched Fox News in several years, other than for several seconds when my channel-surfing landed me there. It just isn't my cup of tea. (It should also be said that I haven't seen MSNBC in more than two years, either. When we moved to our new community in 2007, we found, to our chagrin, that MSNBC wasn't part of the basic cable package to which we subscribe. We miss Chris Matthews, but not Keith Olbermann, the latter of whom I loved as a sportscaster, but who I found abrasive and self-important as the host of Countdown. I haven't seen any of the newer personalities there--at least not for more than a few moments on the Internet--in order to be able to comment on what they're like.)

Third, I've never been much of a Brit Hume fan, even when he worked for Jack Anderson or later, ABC. But I did enjoy watching CSPAN's Brian Lamb, the most admirable of objective of journalists, interview Hume several years ago. Lamb helped me to see Hume a bit differently than I had before and again, then, there was no indication of Christian zeal on Hume's part.

If any of these disclaimers help you to explain away my less-than-critical take on Hume's comments regarding Tiger Woods, so be it.

"All Monotheisms Are Not Alike"

Stan Guthrie provides a helpful comparison of Christianity and Islam here.

For more on the Apostles' Creed, see here. (This is Martin Luther's explanations of the Creed from The Small Catechism.)

Christian and Muslim at the Same Time?

No way!

"God is not a marshmallow."

Amen!

If It's Almost Spring...

it must be time for a religious controversy. So says Father James Martin and I think he's right.