News That Caught My Attention This Week (September 4-9, 2016)

Each morning I read through a few articles from a few newspapers and online sources. Here are a few articles of note that caught my attention this week:

“We’re the Only Plane in the Sky” – Politico publishes a long, but fascinating blow-by-blow account of what 9/11 was like from the perspective of those who surrounded and served President George W. Bush.

The story of those remarkable hours—and the thoughts and emotions of those aboard—isolated eight miles above America, escorted by three F-16 fighters, flying just below the speed of sound, has never been comprehensively told.

This oral history, based on more than 40 hours of original interviews with more than two dozen of the passengers, crew, and press aboard—including many who have never spoken publicly about what they witnessed that day—traces the story of how an untested president, a sidearm-carrying general, top aides, the Secret Service and the Cipro-wielding White House physician, as well as five reporters, four radio operators, three pilots, two congressmen and a stenographer responded to 9/11.

Pastor David Prince gives helpful comment on Andy Stanley’s comments this week about Christianity’s unnecessary dependence upon the Bible.

I was at the recent ERLC Onward Conference listening when Russell Moore was having a conversation about ministry and preaching with Andy Stanley. I was startled when Stanley said he preaches some sermons without ever quoting the Bible. He views these sermons as extended introductions. Stanley also said we do not believe Christianity because of the Bible, but because of the resurrection and eyewitness testimonies. A couple of years ago, Stanley said that preachers should stop saying, “The Bible says,” a position he reaffirmed during the conversation (Link).

The National Endowment for the Arts reports that adults aren’t reading much any more. Perhaps due to the explosion of video games and social media, American adults give less time and attention to reading literary works.

The percentage of American adults who read literature — any novels, short stories, poetry or plays — fell to at least a three-decade low last year, according to a new report from the National Endowment for the Arts.

In 2015, 43 percent of adults read at least one work of literature in the previous year. That’s the lowest percentage in any year since NEA surveys began tracking reading and arts participation in 1982, when the literature reading rate was 57 percent.

Social media and blogs (like this) have no doubt contributed to a dearth of reading much else. I could certainly stand to up my game in reading fiction (I read non-fiction quite often). But, I must admit, I’ve not found much in modern short stories and poetry very compelling. Perhaps if there was more significant and stimulating writing, reading would increase.

Thomas Friedman in an opinion piece in the New York Times this week likens us all to Noah, needing to save the animals on our planet.

we are bumping up against and piercing planetary boundaries — on forests, oceans, ice melt, species extinctions and temperature — from which Mother Nature will not be able to recover. When the coral and elephants are all gone, no 3-D printer will be able to recreate them.

In short, we and our kids are rapidly becoming the Noah generation, charged with saving the last pairs.

The suggested plan to save the elephants that have supposedly been evolving for 3.5 billion years is to make 50% of the earth legally protected space, unhindered by us grass-killing, plastic manufacturing beasts known as humans. Any clear biblical perspective on this issue would have to remind Mr. Friedman that Noah’s (and our) oldest ancestors, Adam and Eve, were called by the creator to “fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over . . . every living thing that moves on the earth” (Genesis 1:28). While that’s no call to be poor stewards, it’s equally not a call keep the earth from human dominion. Further, Noah himself was given the very same mandate to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth and upon every bird of the heavens and upon everything that creeps on the ground and all the fish of the sea. Into your hand they are delivered. Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you” (Genesis 9:1-3). Well then! Perhaps Mr. Friedman is right, we should all be like Noah now. Or perhaps Mr. Friendman should have just left Noah alone.

I regularly like reading most anything that Ross Dothan writes and this week he posits that Hillary Clinton may be a gift in disguise for the political elites in either party:

Hillary Clinton’s weakness and unpopularity might be a gift, of sorts, to the American future. Because she can’t put Trump away, it’s harder to dismiss Trumpism as either a pure joke or a pure evil. Because she can’t put him away, we have to take him seriously — and only by taking him seriously can we learn enough to make sure the next Trump isn’t far stronger, and far worse.

Unless, of course, she loses.

With the canonization of Mother Teresa last Sunday, Jacalyn Duffin, an atheistic hematologist, questions out loud why the ever changing “truth” of medicine is a sufficient means of critique for religious experience. She was not only involved in a medical inquiry by the Vatican regarding another canonization of which she had no explanation for the inaccuracy of her prognosis of a leukemia patient, supposedly supernaturally healed. While there is much discussion to be had about the so-called miracles attached to interceding to prospective saints in heaven, Duffin’s critique of modern medicine as dispensing “relativistic wisdom and temporal opinions” is unique in an age where for many atheists and others, medical science is often taken as infallible truth by which to judge all moral matters.

this ancient religious process, intended to celebrate exemplary lives, is hostage to the relativistic wisdom and temporal opinions of modern science. Physicians, as nonpartisan witnesses and unaligned third parties, are necessary to corroborate the claims of hopeful postulants. For that reason alone, illness stories top miracle claims. I never expected such reverse skepticism and emphasis on science within the church.

I also learned more about medicine and its parallels with religion. Both are elaborate, evolving systems of belief. Medicine is rooted in natural explanations and causes, even in the absence of definitive evidence. Religion is defined by the supernatural and the possibility of transcendence. Both address our plight as mortals who suffer — one to postpone death and relieve symptoms, the other to console us and reconcile us to pain and loss.

Respect for our religious patients demands understanding and tolerance; their beliefs are as true for them as the “facts” may be for physicians. Now almost 40 years later, that mystery woman is still alive and I still cannot explain why. Along with the Vatican, she calls it a miracle. Why should my inability to offer an explanation trump her belief? However they are interpreted, miracles exist, because that is how they are lived in our world.

David Brooks chronicles the downward spiral of Obamacare:

In 2010, the Congressional Budget Office estimated there would be 21 million Americans using the exchanges by now. Many supporters argued that the exchanges would eventually replace the current dominant employer-based system.

The promise of Obamacare was that it would foster competition and offer lower premiums while covering tens of millions of Americans without, as Obama often put it, adding a dime to the deficit.

Unfortunately, most of the exchanges are in serious trouble. As many critics pointed out at the time, the law is poorly designed to induce younger, healthier people to get into the system. The penalties attached to the individual mandate are too weak. The subsidies are too small. The premiums are too costly. The deductibles are too high. Many doctors aren’t participating in the networks.

Only about 12 million people are in exchanges. More important, the exchanges are attracting sicker, poorer people, who drain money, and are not attracting the healthier people who pour money in.

While he notes there have been positives from the Federal approach to health care, he also suggests that the whole process of passing the Affordable Care Act has led to a more divided society that will plague future presidents and generations. No one saw the one coming did they?

James Barron writes of the religious influences behind Donald Trump from many years past, namely the renowned power of positive thinking preacher, Norman Vincent Peal, and his successor, the Rev. Arthur Caliandro at Manhattan’s Marble Collegiate Church, on Fifth Avenue. Trump was a huge fan of Peal and supported his successor, attending the church (but not sure if he ever became a member) for the majority of his life.