Threads from Henry's Web

Author: henry

  • Race and Obama’s Success

    I have watched the stories about Geraldine Ferraro with some interest. She was one of the pioneers, suffering a loss in 1984, but nonetheless being part of a historic candidacy. Though I have at times thought the Clinton campaign wants to introduce race into the campaign, they have at a minimum done so subtly. Ferraro seems to have gotten caught in a fairly innocent set of observations. I think she has a right to discuss the issue of becoming a candidate because of her pioneering effort. Nonetheless I think she is wrong that Barack Obama’s success is due to his race. In part, I suspect this is because she is thinking more of 1984 than 2008.

    I recall the Howard Dean campaign and its early successes in 2004. There was a great deal of excitement over this liberal governor from Vermont. Many young voters were involved, and new voters were being brought to the table. Here was a man who was talking their language and they went out to support him.

    I don’t have solid studies on this point, but I think a major downfall of Howard Dean’s campaign was that he didn’t have sufficient discipline. Off the cuff remarks got out of hand, and he began to appear to be a loose canon.

    Enter Barack Obama this year. Many of the same people support him. His first victory is in Iowa, where the African-American vote is negligible. But Obama and his campaign stay disciplined, remain on message, and with occasional exceptions fail to provide the kind of fodder for the press that Howard Dean did. One of the reasons for press friendliness is simply that the Obama campaign has been more disciplined.

    Also ignored in all the arguments over the size of states that each candidate has won, and whether they are red or blue, is the Obama campaign’s success in getting out the vote and in getting people to caucuses. That again is simply good campaign practice and discipline. Out of the remaining three candidates, Obama has demonstrated the best handling of campaign management, I believe.

    So there’s a great deal other than race here, and there’s a great deal more than rhetoric. I would like to add that there are worse traits in a candidate than the ability to communicate and motivate. Bringing the country around to one’s ideas is important. There’s a good argument to be made that the Bush administration failed to communicate the need for the Iraq war to the public, and thus failed to keep them on board. In a democracy, continued public support is an essential to the success of a war, just as much as military personnel and equipment. That failure to communicate may have been critical. I tend to think that the reason such communication failed is that the war is such a bad idea, but in reality, good PR can make up for some very bad ideas.

    Does race play a role, however, in Obama’s success? I would guess that there is a role. I know that I believe it would be a good thing for us to have a president who is not a white male. Nonetheless, that is the very last in my list of considerations. I would only give consideration to race if I was dealing with two candidates who were otherwise evenly balanced in my mind. Then I’d tend to weight my choice in favor of diversity.

  • Voter Ignorance about the Iraq War

    The Pew Research Center has published a poll, reported on CQ Politics that indicates amongst other things that only 28% of the voters can pick the number of casualties we have incurred in Iraq to the nearest thousand (4,000 as of the poll time).

    Here’s where I tend to feel more of an affinity for war proponents than I do for that vast body of sheep whose interest in the war and support for it vary according to the latest news stories. I can understand how one can think that we ought to finish the job and make things work. Of course I can understand my own position, which is that we have defined a task for our military that they can never finish, and we should therefore realign our expectations and act accordingly. What I can’t understand is how the war can become unimportant to so many people.

    I’ve watched it fade as a major campaign issue. Now we find that only 28% have a solid idea of how many casualties. Most of the rest underestimated the number of deaths. As a veteran I realize that people tend to forget wars after they are finished. There was a huge response to those of us returning from the first gulf war, though that started fading in a few months. But what we cannot afford to do is to forget about the fact that our young men and women in uniform are fighting and dying for us over there right now. (AP reports the current number as 3987 as of yesterday.)

    That should be our first concern, more than personal comfort, our economic well-being, or a variety of social issues here at home. I heard one commentator, whose name I forget, say that the Republicans tend to make economic issues into security issues, while the democrats tend to make security issues into economic ones. Barack Obama has been doing the latter with the war, assuming that if we aren’t spending the money in Iraq, it will be available for a domestic agenda. Though on balance I support Obama, on this he’s likely wrong.

    The reason I think we need to get out of Iraq is because we’re spending lives and resources without adequate return. But we are going to have to spend some lives and resources somewhere. We need to improve intelligence capability, especially training people in the languages and cultures of the middle east. We need to train more troops for quick strikes hunting terrorists. We need to spend more money on security here at home.

    But all this is a digression on my part. The critical thing is that the American people need to remember and keep paying attention to what is going on in the world, because whether I’m right or wrong about what we should do, it is important to be thoroughly aware of this issue. The lives of those who have volunteered to defend our country shouldn’t be a secondary issue.

  • I, I Alone, Am Left

    The devotional I posted today for my wife’s devotional list has this title. I think it’s a good lesson.

  • Tyndale Bible Toolbar

    I have started using this, and yes, it does work with Firefox under Ubuntu. See my introductory notes here.

  • Moderate Christian Blogroll Updates

    For the same reason that I haven’t been blogging until the last couple of days, I’m way behind on submissions to the Moderate Christian Blogroll and Aggregator. I promise I will get to those submissions by early next week.

  • Experiencing the (Baptism of the) Holy Spirit

    Experiencing the (Baptism of the) Holy Spirit

    This is a topic where I tend to make just about everyone uncomfortable. Long time readers may recall a previous discussion of speaking in tongues, and my own experience of it. Those who expect me to be intellectually oriented and rational are uncomfortable with mystical experiences, and many who are comfortable with the mystical experiences are deeply troubled by my tendency to analyze.

    But the fact is that I am one person, i.e. the same person who examines data about the historical Jesus and expresses skepticism of some of the details recorded in the gospels also claims to experience the risen Jesus in a personal way. So when Adrian Warnock started talking about the experience of Holy Spirit baptism, I decided to say a word or two.

    I’m not going to defend my particular theology in this post, but let me simply state that I believe that Holy Spirit baptism can, and ideally should occur at the time of one’s baptism in to the Christian faith. Nonetheless in the book of Acts we have numerous instances where the two experiences are separated. I believe nobody comes to Christ in the first place without the work of the Holy Spirit, but the idea of the baptism of the Spirit involves one personally experiencing and being transformed by it.

    At the same time I want to guard against the notion that this experience is singular, that one checks off the boxes of conversion, then baptism in the Holy Spirit, and then one has attained. I don’t like the idea of Christians who have “attained.” I think they tend to fall quickly into pride. I know I would, so if I ever get to the point where I believe I have attained, it will be the surest sign that I haven’t. I know I’d fall straight into spiritual pride without passing Go or collecting my $200.

    I do remember a specific experience at the time of my own baptism at age nine. I was in Mexico with my missionary parents and had to convince them and a Spanish speaking pastor that I knew what I was doing. It was the strong conviction that had come on me that made me able to do so. They were very skeptical.

    But I want to discuss a later experience, that came when I was working in the church. This happened several years ago. I was trying to get material written for the early stages of Pacesetters Bible School, and I would be interrupted frequently. But one week almost the whole church staff including the pastor was going to be out of town on a mission trip, and I was looking forward to a week of writing with few interruptions. It was not to be.

    One of the things about “mystical” or “spiritual” experiences that I have noticed is that they do not occur for my convenience. My Monday of that week happened as I had hoped. I got a great deal done. On Tuesday I was praying through my prayer list. I had an extensive prayer list, and was quite systematic about praying for the people on it. Having checked off my list, I felt that I had done my part in praying for the congregation.

    Included on my list were all the college students and all the church leaders. As I began praying through the list that day I was interrupted by a voice. Now all the more intellectual folks and those who are not Christians are permitted here to doubt my sanity. I generally just assume it’s loosely attached. But I did hear a voice. It said, “Stop.”

    So I stopped a moment and then started to pray for that person again. Again, I heard “Stop!” Then the voice began to question me about these persons. What were their gifts? Regarding the students it asked me what they were studying, when they would be finished, and what their ambitions were. For the church leaders it asked me what their specific roles were.

    Now the fact is that I didn’t know most of this stuff. They were on the staff or on committees, or they were students, so their names were on my list. I didn’t have a clue as to who they were personally. Then the voice asked me, “How do you expect to function as a teacher in the church if you don’t even know what these people are supposed to be doing?”

    Good question! But I’m a stubborn person. I argued with that voice for the remainder of the week, from during the morning Tuesday through around noon Friday. By noon Friday I was pretty much done. I think I had a mild idea of how Elijah must have felt when God said, “What are you doing here?” (1 Kings 19:9)

    What happened at noon on Friday? Finally I admitted that I needed to change the way I did business. I was all in the books. I planned curriculum according to what I thought people (in general) needed to know. I didn’t really want to know the people themselves. That was messy and took up too much time.

    It was a transforming moment in ministry for me. I may be insane to argue with a voice for several days. Each day I returned to the office intending to work, and it didn’t happen. When I shut down and went home, things went back to normal. But that insanity was transforming. People noticed the difference. They would ask me, “Who are you and what have you done with Henry Neufeld?” The main obvious difference was that I started taking a personal interest in people’s lives, their call, and their work in the church. I started to try to meet those needs.

    Now this seems fairly obvious in hindsight. Isn’t that simply good people skills? But at the time I didn’t exercise that variety of people skills, and due to my knowledge in other areas, and basic teaching skill, people put up with me anyhow. It took this spiritual encounter–in my view an experience of baptism–completely being overpowered–by the Holy Spirit to get me on track.

  • Eliot Spitzer Should Resign

    . . . oh, he did.

    I was a little slow on posting on this, but as I have said about David Vitter and Larry Craig, public officials who fail to live up to their publicly proclaimed standards should not be trusted with their public office. All of these men failed to do so. Craig and Vitter seem to be surviving for the moment. Spitzer has resigned, which I regard as a good thing.

    While I am an advocate of grace as a Christian, I also think that we should expect a high standard on the part of our leaders. If they cannot maintain that standard, they should be removed from such offices. There are people of integrity who can lead. We as voters should not be satisfied until we get them in office.

  • Why I Quit Trusting Creationist Writers

    I’ve mentioned several times before how I migrated from young earth creationist all the way to theistic evolution, and even to the point of objecting to the term “theistic” in front of evolutionist. I am a theist, but the theory of evolution is a scientific theory, and should remain the same whether one is a theist or not.

    Now the question people often have is just why I made all these changes, and how I decided which authors to trust, considering I am not myself a scientist. Well, there’s a good illustration today on The Panda’s Thumb, which shows how it worked for me. In this case, Casey Luskin builds a quote out of a late page, and combines it with a piece of one from much earlier, in order to make the author say something he didn’t say.

    It doesn’t matter whether you’re a scientist or not, that should make you wonder whether the writer in question can be trusted. For me, the experience took more time. I had read creationist books all my life, and then suddenly I read books by the actual scientists, and I found that evolution was something different than I had been told in case after case. I can now pick up a creationist book and look up certain items in the index, and I know I’ll find misinformation. For example, “punctuated equilibrium/a” will almost guarantee that I find an error.

    One of the reasons creationism maintains such a high popularity in this country is that it is supported by Christian writers and speakers. For many Christian lay people, the fact that something is espoused by a trusted Christian leader is regarded as sufficient reason to consider it valid. Unfortunately, many of these Christian leaders are, in fact, embracing carelessness, or perhaps even negligence in fact-checking. For those who are trained in the appropriate scientific fields, I can even say embracing and proclaiming falsehood.

    As I say with everything, each person needs to check and recheck and not simply accept the word of an authority figure. This applies to all areas of life, but right now I think it particularly applies to science because there is so much misinformation out there. I wish I could say that all of this was sincere error, but recently I’m reading of more and more cases where it is hard to make that case.

    Whatever the motivation, however, careful checking for yourself, and careful checking of your authorities is critical.

  • Back in Action

    . . . more or less.

    I had a fairly annoying encounter with the flu, and in the middle of that had an as yet unidentified medical problem that sent me to the emergency room. All in all this combination cut my blogging (and my writing for print) way back for a couple of weeks, but I’m going to post a bit today, and a bit more tomorrow and my regular work is coming back online even faster than that.

    Thanks to anyone who is still watching after the hiatus. Note to all: Good medical insurance is really, really helpful when things get off track.

  • Thinking about the Servant – Isaiah 50:4-9a

    I made a mental connection this morning while reading the lectionary passages for Palm Sunday/Passion Sunday. I’m not certain just how valid this is, but I thought I’d write about it. There are multiple views of the servant passages in 2nd Isaiah. Some see each passage separately, with some being prophecies of the Messiah, and others not. Others see a collective Israel that occasionally gets specified down to one individual.

    This passage, seen as Messianic by many Christians, is one that is frequently identified with the voice of the prophet himself, the writer of 2nd Isaiah. He has a message to give, it comes from God, and he is to present it in spite of opposition. (As an example, see Joseph Blenkinsopp, Anchor Bible: Isaiah 40-55, pp. 319-323.)

    Earlier in the day I wrote a devotional emphasizing that Philippians 2:5-11 addresses us collectively as a church (“you” is plural) and not merely as individuals. It seems to me that the collective and the individual commands are much less distinguished in scripture, i.e. the tasks to be performed by God’s people and those performed by God’s person tend to blend into one another. Thus an extremely “clean” interpretation is not particularly desirable. The focus can shift freely.

    I should note that I am already quite invested in a collective interpretation of the servant passages, with Jesus Christ presented in the New Testament as the ideal Israelite, not to mention ideal person, but I think this connection kind of gives me a better feel for how this works.