“Being Poor Is a Lot of Work”:

Last week our friend Helen and I spent the better part of three days driving all over town tracking down birth certificates, proofs of custody, income statements, and police background checks, hoping to qualify her for a HUD-subsidized apartment near enough that her grandson David could stay at his school and that both of them could stay in our fellowship. Helen’s recently deceased mother had been paying the rent for all of them with her Social Security, but all they have now is the paycheck from Helen’s part-time home health care job and David’s food stamps.

Without my car, my computer, my money at certain offices, and my white male privilege at others, the whole endeavor would have been utterly impossible for Helen – who is herself in need of some home health care. Even with my help, we needed a few kind folks to bend a few silly rules in our favor. By the time we got everything squared away, I was worn out and cranky. Being poor is an awful lot of work.

Thank God there is a whole bunch of us here, living together and loving our neighbors as a team. While Helen and I were jumping through HUD hoops, Karen and Donna were tracking down furniture for her and three other families in the fellowship whose living spaces are nearly empty, and our newest partner, Mark Leeman, was tracking down donors who want to invest in some rental properties we can fix up and manage right, right here in the neighborhood.

We know we can’t house everyone, but the more we see what’s going on around us, the more bound and determined we are to take care of the handful of neighbors we feel God has given to be our closest friends. After all, there is no way to build the kind of close-knit community we keep dreaming of without first making sure that all of us are safe and sound.

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“Amid growing pressure, churches in China ‘are at a critical moment,’ pastor says”:

In China, the government allows religious activity but tightly controls it, requiring Christians to meet at state-approved churches. Many Chinese Christians prefer to worship on their own terms at “house” churches, which generally start as small prayer meetings in people’s homes.

In recent years, the authorities have tolerated these underground churches. In fact, the parishioners CNN spoke to seemed unfazed by their church’s illegal status.

However, Pastor Ezra Jin, the leader of Zion Church, said these churches are now under tremendous pressure — in the midst of China’s crackdown on dissent here in the wake of the Arab Spring.

Speaking of which…

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“What Kind of Revolution?” looks at the increasingly parlous state of Coptic Christians in Egypt:

Nevertheless, religious liberty should be part of the U.S. government’s official dialogue with existing regimes and revolutionary forces alike. Religious freedom is a bedrock form of human rights. This basic freedom of conscience acts as the proverbial canary in the mine. If peoples and governments are not willing to respect religious minorities, they are unlikely to tolerate political opponents. Religious extremism also acts as an efficient incubator for violence, including terrorism, as is increasingly evident in Pakistan. “There is no political vision to deal with these types of sectarian clashes,” admitted Emad Gad of the Cairo-based Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies.

While Washington cannot impose tolerance on the new Egypt, American officials can point to the danger posed by virulent Islamists to that nation’s future. If the radicals grow in influence, they are likely to sweep away more than the vulnerable Coptic population. They might take down the new political system, with dangerous consequences for Egypt and beyond. As Georgetown’s Thomas Farr testified before Congress last month: “There will be no real freedom in Egypt — period — and there will be no real stability in Egypt — period — unless there is full religious freedom in Egypt, not only for its Coptic minority but also for moderate and reformist Muslim voices.”

The Arab Spring risks turning into the Islamist Winter. The willingness to safeguard religious liberty has become a proxy for measuring the impact of the ongoing revolution. As go the Copts may ultimately go the rest of the Middle East.

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“Irish report damns Catholic Church abuse response”:

The Catholic Church in Ireland did not take serious steps to stamp out child abuse by priests even after the scandal blew up worldwide and the Irish bishops put rules in place to stop it, a new report says.

At first, I was surprised by the use of the theologically loaded word damns in this article’s title. But after reading the article, and on second thought, the use of the word seems pretty appropriate.

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“The Transformation of American Community”:

Over the past few decades, technological, social, cultural, and economic changes have revolutionized the structure of American community. Globalization, the information revolution, and the emerging pre-eminence of the service economy have begun to undo the bonds that long defined American villages, neighborhoods, and suburbs — relationships that survived the nation’s evolution from a collection of agrarian colonial outposts into an industrial global colossus. The transformation we are living through is, in many respects, changing American life for the better — but not in every respect. And whether the long-term effects augur a brighter future or not, one thing has been made clear: Many of our public institutions are failing to adapt.

Broadly understood, the developments of the past few decades have served to weaken the ties that once bound local communities together. In their place, we are, on one hand, now choosing to invest more time and energy in keeping in touch with our closest friends and family members, and, on the other, in trading bits of information with people we do not know very well but who share some single common interest. As a result, the relationships that stand between our most intimate friendships and our more distant acquaintances — the middle-tier relationships that have long been at the root of American community life — have been left to wither. By any measure, that transition has empowered us to be more socially discerning. But the end result has been a social framework that tends to be deep at the expense of being broad, and that is frequently internally cohesive without being particularly diverse.

There are myriad advantages to the new architecture of American community. Among its drawbacks, however, is the threat it now poses to the ability of our politics to solve the problems government needs to address. The new framework has created a political dynamic in which leaders in Washington find it much more difficult to collaborate. And it threatens to undermine some longstanding assumptions, embraced on both the right and the left, about how to shape effective solutions to the challenges that will face us in the decades to come.

By the way, if you’re not reading National Affairs, you should be. Every quarter’s issue has thought-provoking articles like this one.

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“Atheists: Texas prayer day harmful”:

“The answers for America’s problems won’t be found on our knees or in heaven, but by using our brains, our reason and in compassionate action,” said Dan Barker, a co-director of the foundation [i.e., Freedom from Religion Foundation]. “Gov. Perry’s distasteful use of his civil office to plan and dictate a religious course of action to ‘all citizens’’ is deeply offensive to many citizens, as well as to our secular form of government.”

On the one hand, the practice of executives calling for days of prayer is as old as the nation, older actually. It’s a time-honored practice in a country that is overwhelmingly religious. On the other hand, executives who call for days of prayer need to make sure that their calls are not partisan, lest they identify their brand of politics with the will of God.

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“Pawlenty Appeals to Iowa with Video on His Faith”:

The video mixes the personal with the political. Mr. Pawlenty talks about how he “leaned deeply” on his faith after losing his mom when he was only 16 years old. Mary Pawlenty also talks about how she regularly prays and reads the Bible. But the candidate also dedicates segments of the video to his opposition to abortion and gay marriage and his belief that the country was founded by “as a nation ‘under God.’”

I’ve met Pawlenty and his wife. They’re good people, and I felt their faith was genuine. But the same caution I mentioned about Perry applies here. Politicians who invoke their faith need to make sure that their not conflating their personal faith with their party affiliation. Repeat this to yourself: God is not a Republican, Jesus is not a Democrat, and the Holy Spirit is not a moderate.

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“Michelle Bachmann’s Church Says the Pope Is the Antichrist.” Well, it is a Lutheran church.

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“Failure Is Not an Option”:

It’s not hard to see, then, why “moralistic therapeutic deism” (to borrow Christian Smith’s famous descriptor) plagues our churches. This god wants what’s best for us—chiefly, our happiness in all circumstances. He aims to please. Whatever does not please, then, must not come from god. Consider the latest findings of Smith and his colleagues, revealed in their forthcoming book, Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood. They asked young adults age 18 to 23, “If you were unsure of what was right or wrong in a particular situation, how would you decide what to do?” The most popular answer (39 percent): “doing what would make you feel happy.”

As you can hopefully see, this is a perfect recipe for discipleship disaster. Happiness is neither assured nor even God’s ultimate aim for us. Sometimes, for example, he demonstrates the grace of his fatherly concern by disciplining those he loves (Prov. 3:11-12; Heb: 12:5-11). When we aim primarily for happiness in our parenting and discipleship, we actually set up these young adults for needless failure. They will be surprised and hopelessly discouraged when their faith is eventually challenged, whether by skeptical professors and classmates or the inevitable disappointment of life.

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“Q&A: Bristol Palin on Abstinence after Levi.”