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Issue 013 <previous< Issue 014
Volume 4 No 1 February 1996 >next>
Issue 015 |
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A Balanced
Budget
In A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens described the end of the eighteenth century as “the best of times” and “the worst of times.” Were Dickens living and writing today, he could use the same words to describe the end of this century. Years of “growth and prosperity” suggest that there are reasons for optimism, yet increasing poverty, a loss of commitment to education, and a growing crisis in our healthcare system are but a few reasons for pessimism. Another reason for pessimism is that we have allowed simple words to paralyze our society and government.
Some historian in years to come might very well hold President Ronald
Reagan responsible for emphasizing the one word that most contributes to
paralysis, the one word that today stands in the way of improving social
conditions in our country. That
word is “budget.” In Love
Valentine’s Day is not a part of the Christian Calendar. But it’s a part of the McIver calendar—at least, it had better be! Thirty-eight years ago (February 13) Lawanna and I said our “I do’s.” Lawanna became an instant wife, pastor’s wife, mother and, within three years, mother twice again. That brought us back to reality—in a hurry.
About the time of our marriage I read and clipped the enclosed article.
I think I found it, appropriately, in Life
magazine. If my source is not correct it’s still about as close to life
as you can get! Laughter What could be more lovely than a good belly laugh? Even a nice little chuckle is not to be sneezed at. And a good joke is better than a hundred jeremiads. You know, those organ recitals in which operations are enumerated, wrongs are recalled, and troubles are mournfully rehashed.
Not to labor the point unduly, consider the considerable benefits of
mirth. Infallibility
in Ethical Perspective The doctrine of papal infallibility has been under attack by some Roman Catholic theologians since its proclamation by Pius IX and the First Vatican Council in 1870. The most extensive recent critical examination of it is Hans Kung’s 1972 book, Infallible? An Inquiry. Yet it is not the subject of the ecumenical dialogue which has been taking place as a result of the Second Vatican Council. Protestant theologians and church officials have tended to be silent. An ethical critique from a Protestant perspective seems all the more timely. The original definition of
infallibility which appears in Chapter 3 of the dogmatic Constitution, Pastor
Aeternus, of July 18, 1870, declares excommunicate anyone who states that
“the Roman Pontiff has the office only of inspection or of direction, but not
full and supreme power of jurisdiction over the universal Church, not only in
matters pertaining to faith and morals, but also in those pertaining to the
discipline and government of the Church spread throughout the whole world; or
that he has only a principal part and not the whole plenitude of this supreme
power; or that this power of his is not ordinary and immediate, both over all
and individual Churches and likewise over all and individual pastors and
faithful.”[i] One Small Kind Word for JFK In the past few months America--and the world--have been deluged with articles, books, and television documentaries revealing the alleged sordid details of the private, and especially, sexual life of former president John F. Kennedy. Indulging in its currently most popular blood-sport, the media has pulled no punches in its pursuit of scandal--some of it, quite possibly, true but some of it undoubtedly based on malicious hearsay and self-serving assumption. I have read and watched this material with mixed emotions. I have no defense to offer for Kennedy's moral failures, but I must admit to being depressed by the whole sorry spectacle. I find it sad to watch the image of a former American hero being gleefully destroyed. After his tragic assassination in Dallas, Kennedy was elevated by the American public--and by the world at large--almost to the position of a martyred saint. It was perhaps inevitable that his feet of clay should be painfully laid bare.
As a perhaps irrelevant interjection here, I would predict that much the
same fate awaits someone like Princess Diana, whose unexpected death so recently
produced quite unnatural paroxysms of grief in Britain and indeed almost
everywhere. Once the
sensation-seeking journalists and revisionist historians do their work, the
Princess will not fare well. She
too had feet of clay. Society's
Drug Problem Is Spiritual Up to now, our national wars against drugs, announced with much fanfare by successive presidents, have been uniformly unsuccessful. On the assumption that millions of people resort to drugs to make empty, unsatisfying lives bearable, it is clear that we are fighting wars against symptoms rather than causes. If we ever get serious about a war against drugs, we should understand that we cannot treat the problem successfully apart from the entire configuration of life among our tragically large underclass. This configuration of life includes poverty, physical abuse, discrimination, neglect, disease, unemployment, ignorance, and the depressing experience of living among the wretched ruins of large sections of our cities or in impoverished pockets of rural areas. Of course, a great many
people in the upper social and economic brackets also try to fill empty,
unsatisfying lives with drugs. These people, however, have access to
many kinds of aid beyond the reach of the forty or so millions among us
who are too sick, too old, too ill-educated, and too lacking in
self-discipline to cope with life without society’s help. The
Democracy of the Mob A current full-page advertisement in The New York Times heralds the dictator of North Korea, Kim Jong Il, as “the Lodestar for Sailing the 21st Century.” Son of the previous dictator, Kim Il Sung, he is praised (in the PR) for many virtues: · He is a “a man of great leadership, remarkable wisdom and noble virtues.” · He is “always with the popular masses, sharing the ups and downs of life with them.” · He is “equipped with all the qualities a great leader needs.” · His Credo: “I admire the people as a great mentor.” In
sum, Kim Jong Il joins the god-men of the 20th century (today called
“dictators”) who are said to embody in their persons the will of the masses.
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The Station Tucked away in our subconscious minds is an idyllic vision in which we see ourselves on a long journey that spans an entire continent. We're traveling by train and from the windows, we drink in the passing scenes of cars on nearby highways, of children waving at crossings, of cattle grazing in distant pastures, of smoke pouring from power plants, of row upon row of cotton and corn and wheat, of flatlands and valleys, of city skylines and village halls.
But uppermost in our minds is our final destination--for at a certain
hour and on a given day our train will finally pull into the station with bells
ringing, flags waving, and bands playing. And
once that day comes, so many wonderful dreams will come true.
So restlessly we pace the aisles and count the miles, peering ahead,
waiting, waiting, waiting for the station. The View From a Padded Cell The view from a padded cell? There isn’t any. I lay on my back on a mattress. The ceiling was padded. The walls were padded. There was no view. My suicide attempt had failed. The gas had exploded and set fire to the house at 214 Brookview in San Antonio. The San Antonio State Hospital would be my home for the next three months.
It was cold (December 16, 1962). I
had only a mattress to cover with. I
was naked. NO clothes because I was
dangerous to myself. Vouchers:
The Wrong Medicine For The Ills Of Public Education One of the most distinctive elements of the Religious Right’s attack on public education is the demand that parents be provided with “vouchers” to cover the tuition costs of private schools so their children may obtain an “alternative” education to that provided by the “government” schools. This nostrum operates under such slogans as “choice,” “fairness,” and “competition,” but in fact voucher plans are, as religious liberty expert Edd Doerr stated on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, “pure snake oil.”[i] Granted, public education suffers from numerous maladies and a host of reform-minded “physicians” are prescribing cures for them through their books and consulting services, but those who promote voucher plans are nothing more than educational quacks. In fact, the Religious Right can be expected to be content only if the public schools were rendered extinct, and private or “Christian” schools replaced them as the primary educational structure in our country. What complicates the discussion is that “school
choice” advocates populate other segments of American society as well. Conservatives and libertarians who adhere to other faiths
besides evangelical Protestantism or whose religious commitment is minimal are
also enthusiasts for this. For them
the ideas of “deregulation” and “privatization” are not only applicable
to the economic sphere but also to the realm of education. By far the best known of the works espousing this viewpoint
is Politics, Markets, and America’s
Schools, by John E. Chubb and Terry M. Moe.[ii]
These two scholars, whose book appears under the imprint of a respected
Washington think tank, marshal an impressive body of quantitative data to
demonstrate that competition in a market system of control will motivate schools
to be more responsive to the needs of their current and potential clients.
The American educational system, they believe, would
be greatly improved (in the sense that student achievement would rise) if
overbureaucratized, government-run schools were replaced by autonomous,
market-driven ones. Public schools
should be forced to compete with private schools for tax dollars by offering all
parents publicly funded “scholarships,” or tuition vouchers, which they
could "spend" at any school they choose. Where’s
the Booze in the Drug War? No
sane person doubts that the war on drugs launched in the Reagan Administration
has been lost, that $16 billion a year is wasted, that thousands of young lives
have been tossed on the ash heap of the criminal justice system. It
doesn't take a Carrie Nation mentality to see that what is socially acceptable
is easily ignored. While parents and politicians rage against the evils of
marijuana and the devastation of crack, pills, and heroin, the lives they claim
are minimal compared to booze. It
is estimated that the annual cost to America of alcohol abuse tops $40 billion.
The Surgeon General says the nation averages 100,000 deaths a year due to
alcohol abuse. More
than half of the people entering America's prisons are there because of problems
related to alcohol and drugs. Woman's World
My world is made up of Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, Mondays Washing, ironing, cooking, cleaning, churching Mending clothes, turning down radios, wiping noses and bottoms Answering telephones and door bells Letting dogs in and letting dogs out Taking children to and bringing children from Fixing food, making beds, mopping floors Rejoicing,
crying, listening Women Keep Promises,
Too!
People both within and without the church have been expressing amazement
over the rapid growth of Promise Keepers, the Christian men’s movement that
was founded by former college football coach Bill McCartney in 1990, and which
drew a little over one million participants in 22 cities in 1996.
Men involved in this movement are finding the inspiration to live
righteously as honest and loving husbands, fathers, and friends.
They are learning to take responsibility for their families, to be
faithful to their wives, to care for their children, to avoid pornography, to be
involved and responsible members of their churches and communities, and to
regard people of other races as their equals.
In all of this, Promise Keepers offers a bracing antidote to the poison
of male irresponsibility that evidently has become pandemic in American society.
What can one say in response but what everyone seems to have said
already, namely, that PK is doing a vitally good work in the lives of many
people in the church today?
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