Faith & Values

Two years ago, Eric Elnes and a small group of progressive Christians set out from Phoenix, Ariz., walking to Washington, D.C. to see what place their style of Christianity might have in a nation that seemed to view their religion as sort of an adjunct of conservative politics. What they found along the way was what Elnes describes in his book, Asphalt Jesus, as "a new form of Christian faith at the grass roots that transcends labels and stereotypes," a faith "more concerned with honesty than morality, more with embracing difference than with judging others, and more with pushing boundaries than with creating them." The book and the companion video, ... READ MORE

I was disappointed in Barack Obama's answer Saturday night when Pastor Rick Warren asked him during their televised conversation at Saddleback Church, "At what point does a baby get human life, in your view?" Obama dodged the core question with a flip reply that "Whether you're looking at it from a theological perspective or a scientific perspective, answering that question with specificity is above my pay grade." But public policy is based on the answer to that question, so the answer is well within the pay grade of someone seeking to lead the nation -- even if it simply a matter of choosing among conflicting possibilities. Not that I liked John McCain's simplistic response any better, since it really didn't answer the... READ MORE

If you are driving around Madison this weekend, you may well see a couple of long lines of cyclists peddling through the city. Today (Saturday), about 150 bikers came into Madison as part of a cross-country bike tour raising money to break the cycle of global  poverty. On Sunday afternoon, another 150 riders will be cycling up to the State Capitol, ending a four-day, 300-mile ACT-6 bike ride around Wisconsin raising money and awareness for AIDS research. The ACT ride is well known and gets lots of publicity. The Sea-to-Sea ride, put on by the Christian Reformed Church in Grand Rapids, Mich., has much less visibility, so I went to check out what these riders were up to as they gathered at Ahuska Park in Monona. ... READ MORE

I heard Rick Warren talking on National Public Radio the other day. Warren is the author of the mega-best seller, The Purpose Driven Life, the founder and pastor of the 22,000-member of Saddleback Community Church in southern California and soon will host the first joint appearance of Barack Obama and John McCain in the presidential campaign. What caught my attention is Warren's description of the changing nature of political involvement by evangelical Christians - the group of voters who have been part of the... READ MORE

I was with about 175 young people and adults from Wisconsin Sunday morning in Knoxville, only a few miles from where a man opened fire on the congregation of a Unitarian church, killing two of them, wounding six others. (See the Knoxville News-Sentinel for details.) While this horror was playing out about a mile and a half away, we were with about 2,500 other young people from United Church of Christ congregations around the country in an arena listening to ideas about how to seek peace in a violent world. (Details about the National Youth Event are here.) After police arrested Jim D. Adkisson, 58, for murder, they found a four-page letter outlining his feelings. During their interrogation of him, according to a search warrant for his... READ MORE

I'd like to offer regular previews of area events that reflect the theme of this blog -- how faith and values intersect with the public arena. If you have something you'd like me to consider including, please email me at phaslanger@gmail.com  These should be things for the general public, not events aimed just at your faith community. Three things this week: the visit of the Dalai Lama, a Return to God conference put on by Mad City Church and Lake City Church and the Interfaith Coalition for Worker Justice organizing a bus trip on July 27 to Postville, Iowa in support of Guatemalan and Mexican workers there. Dalai Lama -- For a terrific overview of the Dalai Lama's visit, read Pat Schneider's story "Guided by Karma." I also wrote ... READ MORE

Scenes from a summer Saturday in Madison and environs: It's morning around the State Capitol -- you know, that place where laws are made, where justices make big decisions, where the governor does his executive thing. But outside, it's just folks, all sorts of folks -- ages, colors, languages. It's Farmers' Market Day. The Madison Brass is playing at the North Hamilton Street entrance to the Capitol. A student with a guitar is prowling near the State Street entrance, playing for tuition, books and living expenses. Younger students are filling up their violin cases with dollars as they amaze passersby with their dexterity. Rev. Ralph Ovadal and his followers from Pilgrims Covenant Church in Monroe are warning sinners of the impending doom of hell. Among their favorite sinners are gays and lesbians. Yet about 100 feet away, the regular weekly table for... READ MORE

I was listening to Rush Limbaugh today when a caller suggested that the king of talk radio depart from his normal reluctance to have guests on the show and invite "Barack Hussein Obama" onto the show so Obama could say whatever he wanted as long as he agreed to answer questions from Rush. Nothing doing, said Rush.  I'm paraphrasing here, because it's not a good idea to take notes while driving.  But essentially he said he did not want to have Obama on his show because he did not care what Obama had to say. Besides, said El Rushbo, (and this part is from the highlights section of his web site: "I know liberals. I know them. I know what they're going to say before they say it, I know what they're going to do before they do it, and I know how they're going to... READ MORE

Week after week, the search for who Barack Obama really is, what he really believes, goes on.  This week, you can find a serious, in-depth exploration of his religious beliefs in the Newsweek cover story and a satirical look at the underground campaign labeling him a secret Muslim in the cover art on The New Yorker. The satire is the more controversial of the two, trying not so successfully to make fun of the underground campaign to smear Barack and Michelle Obama with all sorts of rumors and innuendo about their patriotism and their relgious beliefs.  But the Newsweek article actually takes a serious look at Obama's beliefs --... READ MORE

It's not enough that Barack Obama is having trouble with conservative Christians who either think he is not really Christian at all or that if he is, he is one of those liberal sort of Christians. Now he's also in hot water with America's Muslims. So much of this nation's anxiety over matters religious seems to be swirling around Obama this season. On the Internet, there continues to be the chatter that Obama is secretly a Muslim, that he never really embraced Christianity. More publicly, James Dobson, the very conservative doctor who founded Focus on the Family, has ripped into Obama's understanding of the Bible. All this, of course, on top of Obama's well-publicized difficulties with the words of his long-time (and now former) pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. But in its effort to portray Obama as a good Christian, not a closet Muslim, his campaign has... READ MORE

As June was just beginning, in those days just before the rain fell and the rivers rose and the levees broke and the floods poured through the Midwest, one of the scripture readings in many churches was the familiar story of Noah and the ark, the story of God destroying most of creation and starting over again. It's a story that gets used as a reference point for those who want to interpret every natural disaster as a form of God's punishment on humanity. You heard it from preachers like Rev. John Hagee of Texas after Hurricane Katrina, who linked the destruction of New Orleans to plans for a gay pride parade. You heard it from Muslims after the tsunami of 2004 overwhelmed the Indian Ocean coastlines saying that immoral living had brought on this catastrophe. There's another view of that Noah story. It's a view that attributes it to the way the early Jewish... READ MORE

Now that the new ties have been folded and put away, the cards are taped to the wall for the next few weeks and the last "Happy Father's Day" has been spoken, we are left with a couple of extraordinarily important images from Father's Day 2008. Interestingly enough, they come from two fathers whose public lives were remarkably intertwined over the past year. It was NBC's Tim Russert who first publicly elicited from Democrat Barack Obama that the first-term senator might be planning to run for president in 2008. But Russert made his mark on this culture in more than just politics and media. His book about his own father, Big Russ and Me: Father and Son: Lessons of... READ MORE

Here's an eclectic collection of folks - British singer Amy Winehouse, her legally-impaired husband Blake Fielder-Civil, former President Bill Clinton, presidential hopeful Barack Obama and Huffington Post blogger Mayhill Fowler. What they all have in common is being in the midst of an ethical debate with multiple layers. How OK is it for people to behave one way in private and another in public? And how OK is it for someone to use deception to reveal private behavior? Winehouse was caught on tape singing a racist ditty. (The tape is on the News of the World web site.) The videographer? Her husband, who first promised her he was not taping her, then assured her again after the song that he had not taped her. Clinton was caught on... READ MORE

Rev. Wanda Washington says it is not easy for her to have what her denomination calls "a sacred conversation on race." She is African-American. She is a pastor of Grace United Church of Christ, a relatively new and predominatly African-American church in Milwaukee. She is a product of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, that place so much in the news of late. She is a person who carries within her anger at the legacy of slavery and gratitude to a God who, as she says, is keeping on. It's that anger, in part, that she says makes conversations about race difficult. "You need to hear my anger, to feel my pain," she told a crowd of about 100... READ MORE

An American soldier near Baghdad uses a Quran for target practice. A Marine guarding a checkpoint at the edge of Falluja gives Iraquis entering the city coins with a Bible verse in Arabic. In the Israeli city of Or-Yehuda, near Tel Aviv, a crowd burned a couple of hundred New Testaments to protest what they saw as efforts to convert Jews to Christianity. In each case, higher... READ MORE

I know Rev. Jeremiah Wright has become emblematic of problematic preachers, but actually, I think a lot of what has gotten him in hot water has been well within the traditions of prophetic preaching. (See the column I wrote on this last March.) I'm a lot less sympathetic to the act put on last Sunday at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago by Fr. Mickey Pfleger, a long-time white Catholic activist... READ MORE

A new and perhaps surprising voice has joined the chorus calling for a more explicit role for moral values in debates over public issues. This is not a call for playing religion as a trump card to shut down debate. Rather, it's a call to recognize that underneath most of our public controversies are sets of values that need to be engaged explicitly and boldly if society is to move beyond a simple "I win-you lose" formulation of public policy. From the world of religion, Rev. Jim Wallis of Sojourners has been making this case in his recent books, including his latest, The Great Awakening. From the world of journalism, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne joins the discussion with his new book, ... READ MORE

Pastors and politicians are making life hard for each other once again, making the point along the way that when candidates seek endorsements from religious leaders and religious leaders start flinging around their pastoral power in the political arena, things can take a very bad bounce. I'm referring, of course, to this week's crashing and burning of the two very conservative pastors who had endorsed John McCain, much to his pleasure at first and then much to his horror as he was faced with what they really believed. This was different that the imbroglio around Barack Obama and his pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Obama did not seek out Wright's endorsement, nor did Wright endorse him. There's a different set of issues around their relationship, but I'll get back to that. John McCain, though, actively pursued the very public endorsements of Rev. John... READ MORE

Barbara Lundblad might have asked for a show of hands from the 2,000 or so mostly white preachers sitting in front of her, but she was too polite to do that. The question was how many of them had used their sermon time this past Sunday to talk about the issues of race in this country. Lundblad was talking at a gathering in Minneapolis called the Festival of Homiletics, a five-day event that brings together preachers from a wide variety of primarily mainline Protestant denominations. She was reflecting on the national uproar over Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama's pastor. And she was wondering whether pastors had taken up the invitation... READ MORE

Get ready for round two (or is it round six?) of the tarring of Barack Obama with his religious affiliations. The opening bell came on Thursday when the California Supreme Court overturned that state's ban on same-sex marriage. In round one, the focus was on Obama's ties to his outspoken pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. The subtext was race. In round two, the focus will be on the stands of the larger denomination that Obama is part of -- the United Church of Christ -- and the subtext will be sex. Ah, race, sex, religion, politics -- plenty there for a volatile confrontation. The potential problem for Obama is that the UCC (which is... READ MORE

Two dramatic incidents in Elias Chacour's life provide neat bookends to his efforts to live out a different kind of reality in northern Israel. One involved inviting Muslims in his small community to use his Melkite Catholic church for worship. The other involved putting his life at risk when Hezbollah threated to "destroy Haifa on the head of the Jews" during the 2006 war between Israel and Lebanon. As Israel this month celebrates the 60th anniversary of its creation as a modern nation -- and the Palestinian Arabs in Israel and displaced to surrounding nations lament the destruction of their way of life in the process -- Chacour was in Madison talking Wednesday evening to several hundred people about his work as a leader of Palestinian Christians. The tour was... READ MORE

In the opinion section of the Cap Times print publication for May 14, I have a column about a restorative justice program at the Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage. This program is part of the Prison Ministry Project run by Rev. Jerry Hancock through First Congregational United Church of Christ. While this project is doing amazing things inside the walls of prisons, I want to at least take note of another local effort that is engaged in the very hard and very important work of helping prisoners re-enter society once they have completed their sentence to prison. The Madison-area Urban Ministry has developed ... READ MORE

Just as those long-promised tax rebate checks from the federal government are standing to land in people's mailboxes and bank accounts, voices are being raised in a number of area churches that maybe spending it on consumer goods is not the best way to help our society. The rebate -- billed as an economic stimulus effort -- was adopted by Congress and signed by President Bush to try to get some extra money flowing in a slowing economy. Stores are ramping up all sorts of promotional efforts to get a share of the rebate dollars. But this Sunday at First Baptist Church on Madison's west side, some members of the congregation will be putting part or all of their checks into the offering plates. The money will be allocated to some clearly defined programs... READ MORE