“Perry’s ‘call’ could shake up GOP field”:

At a press conference Monday, Perry confirmed what he recently told the Des Moines Register. He is feeling called by his faith and his friends to run.

“I don’t ever get confused. I am a man of faith,” he added.

The governor resisted the suggestion that his comments meant he is being called by God to jump into the GOP race.

Ugh! And my ugh is not directed at the notion that a person might feel called to political office by their faith. As Perry correctly notes, the “call” doesn’t necessarily mean a personal go-ahead from God. It can mean something like feeling a weight of moral responsibility to take appropriate action at an opportune moment, of having “a charge to keep,” as Charles Wesley’s hymn puts it. The charge to keep—rather than a personal divine call—is what Mordechai meant when he suggested to Esther that she had been elevated to the queenship “for such a time as this,” namely, to rescue her people from persecution. I’m okay with politicians speaking about a “call” in this sense.

Rather, my ugh is directed at Perry’s statement, “I don’t ever get confused. I am a man of faith.” Are faith and confusion—even doubt—really separable? Jesus sweating drops of blood at Gethsemane, his cry of dereliction on the Cross, the disciples simultaneous doubt and worship in Matthew 28:17—don’t these incidents demonstrate that faith and confusion can go together? That faith is the courage to act in spite of one’s confusion and doubt?

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“A Forgetful Duo: Obama and Wallis”: The Rev. Jim Wallis has organized a clerical “Circle of Protection” around the welfare state. On Wednesday, eight members of that circle met with President Obama. “The eight offered their support in Obama’s budget debates with conservatives.” Marvin Olasky, citing Mark Tooley, responds:

The left pays attention to person A, who has a problem, and person B, the politician who purports to have a solution. The left ignores person F, who pays more taxes so that person B can gain glory for sending aid to person A. In the late 19th century, William Graham Sumner offered a similar equation and called person F “the forgotten man.”

For a recent example of forgetfulness in reporting, look at some recent reporting on the Minnesota government shutdown. The Associated Press told of how those reliant on state funds were “scrambling,” and that was important to report, but the scrambled 1,200-word story disregarded taxpayer F, who has to pay the bills. Other stories told of people who could not camp in a state park because of the shutdown—but the forgotten man was . . . forgotten.

If you rob Peter to pay Paul, you’ll gain Paul’s vote, which is somewhat corrupt if you think about it. But if you rob Peter too often, then not only does Paul not get paid, but now Peter needs help too. Hey, that’s an apt description of our current economic crisis!

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“Has Mission Become Our Idol?” Skye Jethani argues that some missional activists have elevated life for God over life with God, and he may be right. What bothers me about this post, however, is Jethani’s use of the Parable of the Prodigal Son. He argues that the elder brother represents the “life for God” crowd. I don’t think that’s correct. The Prodigal Son is the third of three parables Jesus tells in response to the Pharisees and scribes’ complaint, “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them” (Luke 15:2). As I read the parable, the problem with the Pharisees is that they wrongly identified themselves as living for God precisely because they didn’t welcome repentant sinners. And they didn’t welcome repentant sinners precisely because they didn’t actually live with God. If they lived with a merciful God, they would live for mercy too, since God is a merciful God. Far from illustrating the dangers of the “live for God” mentality, then, the Parable of the Prodigal Son exposes a pseudo-missionality that grows out of a pseudo-spirituality. I don’t see that pseudo-missionality among today’s missional activists. Rather, they’re like Jesus, out there ministering mercifully to spiritually and materially broken people. And I think they do this precisely because they’ve understood the heart of God for the last, lost, and least.

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“The Two-Biological-Parent Family and Economic Prosperity: What’s Gone Wrong and Where to Go from Here.”

The relationship between the two-biological-parent family and economic prosperity is an immense one. As Harnish McRae observes, “the conventional family is an efficient mechanism for combining bringing up children and making a living.” There are a number of reasons why non-traditional family structures constitute such a drain on the American economy. In fact, unless this trend is reversed, the United States appears destined to lose its position as the world’s foremost economic power, a position it has enjoyed since about 1900.

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“Why Reinhold Niebuhr matters now”:

The fact that things are not going well in the American wars, and that neither political party seems to have a solution, helps create a space for Niebuhr. In moments where the political options all seem unsatisfactory, Niebuhr does well. His books are jeremiads, public exhortations linking spiritual renewal to social reform. Like their author, they are consumed with the challenge of pressing religion into worldly service, of applying the moral authority and insights of theology and religion to social and political problems.

But his work also emphasises the dangers that accompany the use of power, the limitations of human foresight, and the chance that good intentions may bring bad results. Human imperfection and the dangers of power were his main themes. Because it inculcated a false sense of virtue and goodness, Niebuhr wrote, power was more likely to transgress God’s laws than do God’s work.

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“Rethinking a Classic from the Conservative Contraception Canon”:

However much you might be dazzled by your stance on marriage/pacifism/contraceptions/whatever-else, please be at least as captivated by what other people actually say about their own lives. Let them intrude. Let them intrude far enough that it feels like your stance might be threatened. Then we can talk about welcoming the Other.

Yeah, and don’t write a book about the meaning of marriage and childbearing when you’re still in your twenties because you probably don’t know jack about either.

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“Why Bother with Marshall McLuhan”:

I have been reading McLuhan off and on since, at age sixteen, I bought a copy of The Gutenberg Galaxy. His centenary — McLuhan was born in Edmonton, Alberta on July 21, 1911 — provides an occasion for me to clarify my own oscillating responses to his work and his reputation. I have come to certain conclusions. First, that McLuhan never made arguments, only assertions. Second, that those assertions are usually wrong, and when they are not wrong they are highly debatable. Third, that McLuhan had an uncanny instinct for reading and quoting scholarly books that would become field-defining classics. Fourth, that McLuhan’s determination to bring the vast resources of humanistic scholarship to bear upon the analysis of new media is an astonishingly fruitful one, and an example to be followed. And finally, that once one has absorbed that example there is no need to read anything that McLuhan ever wrote.

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“Mistaken Monotheism”:

Christianity, Islam, and Judaism are commonly known as the “three great monotheistic religions.” But this label may assume too much. The word monotheism was not coined until the 17th century when Cambridge don Henry More used it to describe any view that held to one person (or principle) as God. The word was co-opted in the 18th and 19th centuries by OT critical scholars who were engaged in revising OT composition history. In the spirit of that age, they saw the history of religion on an evolutionary scale. As human religion developed, it progressed from pantheism to polytheism and finally to the “ethical monotheism” we see reflected in “Deutero-Isaiah,” his friend “Trito-Isaiah,” and other later prophets. This evolutionary process was a movement from the belief that all things are spiritual and divine, to the belief that only a few things are divine, and finally only one thing is divine.

Among other problems, this notion of religious history creates the possibility of an abstract monotheism in which the only real tenet is the belief in a single divine being. Unfortunately, most people on the street probably understand “monotheism” in this way (if they understand it at all). But there is a fatal flaw with this abstract monotheism: nothing like it actually exists. Whenever we talk about “God” in the abstract, we must immediately move to the concrete. That is to say, just as we cannot say anything specific about an abstract person without immediately explaining which person, we cannot say anything of substance about God without explaining which God. So then, if we assume the three monotheistic faiths are talking about the same God, we are begging the question. Not everyone who uses the word monotheism means the same thing by God. It seems this kind of circular reasoning can lead [Miroslav] Volf to claim that those who deny Muslims and Christians worship the same God must also deny that Jews and Christians worship the same God. But this line of thinking misses an important part of the picture.

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“Blogosphere abuzz over Murdoch as ‘Bible mogul’”: Umm, the guy owns a company (News Corp) that owns a company (HarperCollins) that owns a company (Zondervan) that publishes Bibles. And that makes him a Bible mogul?

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“Hindu diners sue Indian restaurant for selling meat samosas”: Sheesh! The restaurant made a mistake. It shouldn’t have to pay for sixteen diners to travel to India to “purify their souls.”

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“The Career Goal of Millennials: Work That is Fun, Flexible, Facebook Fodder”: Of course, their unemployment rate in the current economy is 13%, which isn’t very fun, doesn’t allow much flexibility, and means they can’t pay for internet access to FB, but whatever…

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“Economic Freedom & Quality of Life”: