A PICTURE’S WORTH 1,000 WORDS: “The New ‘War’ on Terror: 9/11 and Jesus’ Approach to Enemies of the State.” Discuss amongst yourselves!

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“LOVE, LOVE, LOVE”: In “Loving Muslims One at a Time,” Mark Galli interviews Andrew George, vicar of St. George’s Church in Baghdad, Iraq—the only Anglican church that remains in the city.

What do you see in the next 10 years regarding Christian-Muslim relations in Iraq and the Middle East?

I think it’s bleak. I don’t think the Middle East is going to seriously improve. But those we work with will be changed. They will be different.

We recently got together with the religious leaders in the area who had issued a fatwa against killing Christians. Up to that day, people were being killed during Mass every day. Since the moment of the fatwa, the killing stopped.

So where Christians are building relationships, you see a lot of hope?

Absolutely. The answer is love, love, love.

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 “SCARY AS HELL”: In “The Gospel at Ground Zero,” Russell D. Moore uses the debate over whether TV news should show traumatic images of 9/11 to illuminate some issues in the proclamation of the gospel.

Let’s join the rest of the world in remembering September 11. Let’s not flinch from the trauma, but let’s not be paralyzed by it either. And along the way, let’s remember to have sympathy for those who flinch at the trauma of our gospel, who wince when the light of God’s judgment exposes their dark places. Let’s remember that the hands we are reaching out with are scabbed over with Roman spike holes, and the cross we are holding out is caked in blood.

Let’s remember, too, that the gospel brings peace and reconciliation to every Ground Zero in the cosmos. On the day when graves are opened, even those accidental tombs beneath the rubble of terror, we will see just how good this news is, even better than our shiny churches and happy choruses can convey.

But between now and then, it can be scary as hell.

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 “9/11 ENABLED CREATURES”: In “9/11: Are We All Moral Monsters?” Clay Jones argues for the affirmative.

For the sake of ourselves and for the good of our neighbor, it is humane to face our own mortality and confront how we are 9/11-enabled creatures.

Endless entertainment, whether of sports, sitcoms, or surfing the net, may amuse and distract us. Drugs and alcohol might blur the horror. But ultimately, the ugly truths keep coming back. We are all going to die. And we are all going to die as beings who are capable of doing the most horrendous things.

These are just raw facts about humankind, true for atheist and Christian alike. But if we only stare into the face of our own corruptibility and mortality, despair is inevitable. Who could ever hope again? Thus the liturgy-like rituals of patriotic bereavement seem incomplete. We need someone from outside this world to rescue us, and that’s why many of us look to Calvary.

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9/11’S SPIRITUAL EFFECTS: “After 9/11, some run toward faith, some run the other way.”

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AN AMBIVALENT ANSWER FROM MIROSLAV VOLF: “Did 9/11 Make Us Morally ‘Better’?”

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REMORALIZATION AND REVIVAL: In “How to Reverse the West’s Decline,” Rabbi Jonathan Sacks uses Ibn Khaldun’s concept of asabiyah (“social cohesion”) to suggest how the West might reverse its otherwise inevitable decline:

There is a simple choice before us. Will we continue to act in ignorance of this other narrative? If so, we will replicate the fate of Greece in the second pre-Christian century as described by Polybius (“the people of Hellas had entered on the false path of ostentation, avarice and laziness”), and that of Rome two centuries later, when Livy wrote about “how, with the gradual relaxation of discipline, morals first subsided, as it were, then sank lower and lower, and finally began the downward plunge which has brought us to our present time, when we can endure neither our vices nor their cure.” If we carry on as we are going, the West will decline and fall.

There is, to my mind, only one sane alternative. That is to do what England and America did in the 1820s. Those two societies, deeply secularised after the rationalist 18th century, scarred and fractured by the problems of industrialisation, calmly set about remoralising themselves, thereby renewing themselves.

The three decades, 1820-1850, saw an unprecedented proliferation of groups dedicated to social, political and educational reform-building schools, YMCAs, orphanages, starting temperance groups, charities, friendly societies, campaigning for the abolition of slavery, corporal punishment and inhumane working conditions, and working for the extension of voting rights. Alexis de Tocqueville was astonished by what he saw in America and the same process was happening at the same time in Britain.

People did not leave it to government or the market. They did it themselves in communities, congregations, groups of every shape and size. They understood the connection between morality and morale. They knew that only a society held together by a strong moral bond, by asabiyah, has any chance of succeeding in the long run. That collective effort of remoralisation eventually made Britain the greatest world power in the 19th century and America in the 20th.

“Remoralisation” is one way to put it. Another way to put it is “revival,” which in both Britain and America was the wellspring of moral reform.

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A MATTER OF INTERPRETATION: “Canon as Tradition: The New Covenant and the Hermeneutical Question.”

Privileging the early patristic tradition as some kind of “hermeneutical ground zero” or as necessary for evangelicals to stay orthodox therefore neglects the hermeneutical norm the canonical writers employed in the new-covenant Story and falls into the same tar pit as the “other christianities” also being pushed today. Both camps mistakenly assume that Christianity simply began with Jesus Christ and then proceed to argue for heresy or orthodoxy from there. However, it was not in competition with other contemporary options that the disciples located their gospel. Rather, they looked back to the OT canonical script for their interpretation of the person, life, and ministry of Jesus Christ. This indeed was the hermeneutical lens for the gospel that founded the church and that always measures the church and that the Protestant Reformers intended under the maxim of sola scriptura.

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MEN AND PORN: In “MIA: Men Who Don’t Use Pornography,” Amy Julia Becker reflects on a sociological study about “men who buy sex” that discovered that “virtually all men use porn.” That’s not good.

The report concludes that men who buy sex are different from those who do not: “The common myth that any man might buy sex (i.e., that a sex buyer is a random everyman, an anonymous male who deserves the common name, john) was not supported. Sex buyers shared certain attitudes, life experiences, and behavioral tendencies that distinguish them from their non-buying peers in socially and statistically significant ways.”

Farley wants to abolish the sex trade, and her findings support the conclusions that buying sex is linked to criminal behavior, violence against women, and objectification of women. Furthermore, her study shows that buying sex is harmful to the men themselves, who self-report “ambivalence, guilt and negative thinking about buying sex. They felt just as many negative feelings after buying sex as they did before.” The men who bought sex reported difficulty achieving intimacy with women in other relationships (61% of the men who bought sex had a wife or girlfriend).

The study demonstrates a qualitative difference between the two groups of men. But an article about this study in Newsweek complicates the picture. Newsweek reported that “buying sex is so pervasive that Farley’s team had a shockingly difficult time locating men who really don’t do it.” In Farley’s words, “We had big, big trouble finding nonusers.” Eventually, Farley and her team loosened their definition of “sex buyers.” In the study, she writes, “We defined non-sex buyers as men who have not purchased phone sex or the services of a sex worker, escort, massage sex worker, or prostitute, have not been to a strip club more than one time in the past year, have not purchased a lap dance, and have not used pornography more than one time in the past week.” Virtually all men use porn, in other words, on a regular basis. Seventy percent of the “non-usuers” were married or had a girlfriend.

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AN INCREDIBLY BAD IDEA FOR A REALITY SHOW: “Jim Henderson Reality Show Pitch Would Pit Faith Against Faith.”

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YET ANOTHER REASON NOT TO WATCH IT: “SpongeBob in hot water from study of 4-year-olds.”

The cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants is in hot water from a study suggesting that watching just nine minutes of that program can cause short-term attention and learning problems in 4-year-olds.

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BUT IS BIGGER BETTER? “For churches today, the word is ‘big.’”

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COUNTERINTUITIVE BUT TRUE: “Why We Need Authority.”

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IN THE NEWS: “Anglican leader to resign next year—report.”

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FROM MY MAGAZINE: “Cultivating a Heart for Holiness” by Cheryl Bridges Johns.