“Finding God in the Mississippi Delta” tells the awesome story of how an old ex-con and a young man with cerebral palsy forged a relationship based on Gospel music:

When John asks Lucas if he’s been saved, he shrugs. Despite the music and the love of Trinity’s congregants, he hasn’t quite made his peace with God. It’s a familiar struggle for many, but when you draw a hand like Lucas’, making sense of it all can be even more challenging.

Lucas may still be on a search for God, but the boy who was born without a breath has found his “oxygen man” – and John has found the son he lost.

When they speak of God, John tells Lucas, “Don’t worry, you’ll find him one day.” But Lucas seems content to find his solace “in the music,” and he’s happy as long as he can convince folks of one thing: “I want people to know I am more than a boy in a wheelchair.”

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In “The George/Girgis/Anderson Team Explains Marriage,” David Mills helpfully provides links to four very interesting exchanges about the nature of marriage between Robert P. George, Sherif Girgis, and Ryan T. Anderson, and their critics. Here’s the George/Girgis/Anderson team’s argument in abstract: “we argue that as a moral reality, marriage is the union of a man and a woman who make a permanent and exclusive commitment to each other of the type that is naturally fulfilled by bearing and rearing children together, and renewed by acts that constitute the behavioral part of the process of reproduction. We further argue that there are decisive principled as well as prudential reasons for the state to enshrine this understanding of marriage in its positive law, and to resist the call to recognize as marriages the sexual unions of same-sex partners.”

Here are four sets of exchanges on the subject, beginning with their extensive analysis, What is Marriage?, published in the Winter 2011 issue of the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. NYU Law Professor Kenji Yoshino replied in The Best Argument Against Gay Marriage: And Why it Fails and they replied to him not, as you’d expect, giving any ground, in The Argument Against Gay Marriage: And Why it Doesn’t Fail.

Yoshino wrote against them again with Lose the Baseball Analogy, and they responded with Marriage: No Avoiding the Central Question.

Northwestern Law and Political Science Professor Andrew Koppelman also responded to them with an article titled What Marriage Isn’t. They answered his arguments in Marriage: Merely a Social Construct?.

Koppelman continued the discussion with That Elusive Timeless Essence of Marriage. They answered with ”Does Marriage, Or Anything, Have Essential Properties?.

Finally, Family Scholars blogger Barry Deutsch asked ”What Is Bodily Union? and the three answered the question with Marriage: Real Bodily Union.

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Apropos of this series of exchanges, check out Joe Carter’s post, “The Present State of Our Polygamous Future,” where he argues, “The social acceptance of polygamy is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed throughout society. At least not yet.”

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“The Curious Case of How the United Church of Christ Lost Jesus”:

…the problem is that you’re not trinitarian just by calling yourself trinitarian. The Bible doesn’t allow for us to worship the Trinity as God A, God A, and Holy God A and still call ourselves Christian.

We can learn a lesson from the Arians, a popular but heretical faction in the early church. They didn’t want use the name “Father” either. But their motives were a little more explicitly mischievous. They didn’t think the Son was equal with God, so eternally speaking, God was not a Father since the Son didn’t eternally exist. Searching for a name to describe this view of God, they came up with “Unoriginate.”

Isn’t it interesting that when we try to clear God of his trinitarian nature and then try to describe who he is, we only have impersonal terms?

Athanasius didn’t like the term “Unoriginate,” and not just because it sounded like a poorly named professional wrestler. He rejected the title because it didn’t explain who God is fundamentally. By calling God the “Unoriginate,” we are defining him by what is in contrast, the “originate”—that is, creation. And God is not dependent upon the existence of creation, nor is he defined by it. So we must do better than “Unoriginate.”

But, as Athanasius pointed out, if we call God “Father,” we immediately contemplate the Son. And here we have something that is fundamental and eternal to both of them: The Father is the Father of the Son; the Son is the Son of the Father. To know God, we must know God as the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God. Otherwise we are grasping for totems of our own imaginations.

And now back to the curious case of the UCC. The problem isn’t only their sensitivity to gender-exclusivity in God or their modern sensibilities trumping the Bible. As we saw with the Arians, if you don’t have a Heavenly Father, then you don’t have a Son. And if you don’t have a Son, you’ve lost Jesus.

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“Campus Crusade Changes Name to Cru”:

Campus Crusade for Christ International (CCCI) is embarking on a nine-month mission to change its name to Cru, years after its founder, Bill Bright, wondered whether the evangelistic ministry should alter the brand.

It’s already a popular shorthand for the ministry, though other evangelicals often call it simply “Crusade,” the half of its name that has caused it problems overseas. The word carries connotations to the Crusades, military conquests by European Christians intended to reclaim the Holy Land from Muslims in the 11th to 13th centuries.

“It’s become a flash word for a lot of people. It harkens back to other periods of time and has a negative connotation for lots of people across the world, especially in the Middle East,” said Steve Sellers, the CCCI vice president and U.S. national director who is leading the name change project. “In the ’50s, crusade was the evangelistic term in the United States. Over time, different words take on different meanings to different groups.”

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“WWTDD? What Would The Dude Do?” Cathleen Falsani explains “Dudeism,” which is based on a character from The Big Lebowski.

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Check out this interview with Janet Reitman, author of Inside Scientology. I learned a lot of things about Scientology from this interview, things I simply didn’t know. The book looks super good too.

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“Are You Colorblind?” Yes, I am. Oh wait, you’re talking about multiculturalism in churches. Hmm. Good question!

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“Should Evolutionists Be More Critical about Social Darwinism?” Yes, according to Matt J. Rossano. Why?

Creationism should be weakened at every turn. If that means evolutionists need to be purposefully more self-critical on social Darwinism, then so be it. Looking squarely at things builds credibility and integrity, and that wins in the long run.

One wonders if he would be “purposefully more self-critical on Social Darwinism” if creationism weren’t in the picture.