Follow-up to the last post… here’s an interesting interview of Michael Gerson by Jon Stewart. (I would make it easy for you and embed the flash video here, but I just found out WordPress won’t let me.)

I read about this on the God’s Politics blog this evening…

Michael Gerson is regarded by many as one of the most talented (and controversial) speechwriters today. Having spent five-plus years as the top White House speechwriter, Gerson, a graduate of Wheaton College, is the man responsible for such memorable lines as the poetic “soft bigotry of low expectations” and the infamous “axis of evil.”

Gerson has a new book releasing this month, Heroic Conservatism. I don’t normally write about books I haven’t read yet, but the God’s Politics post got me curious.

According to the Washington Post (where Gerson is now an op-ed columnist), he writes in his book that “traditional conservatism has a piece missing—a piece that is shaped like a conscience.” In his own column, Gerson wrote earlier today that some conservatives are proposing a false choice between big-government liberalism and “freedom, reduced to a single principle of unrestricted economic choice.”

Gerson, an evangelical Christian, believes many of his fellow conservatives are drawing from the well of libertarianism. He proposes that Catholic social thought—which maintains the dignity of every human life, the importance of the family and community, and solidarity with the poor, among other things—would make a better foundation for those whose politics lean toward the right.

(As a side note, one aspect of Catholic social thought that conservatives especially resonate with—the sanctity of life—is also cause for discomfort among some of them. In addition to its opposition to abortion, this tenet of Catholic social thought maintains that war and capital punishment must also be rejected in favor of life.)

Focusing mostly on what Catholic social thought says about the poor, Gerson writes:

The difference between these visions is considerable. Various forms of libertarianism and anti-government conservatism share a belief that justice is defined by the imposition of impartial rules—free markets and the rule of law. If everyone is treated fairly and equally, the state has done its job. But Catholic social thought takes a large step beyond that view. While it affirms the principle of limited government—asserting the existence of a world of families, congregations and community institutions where government should rarely tread—it also asserts that the justice of society is measured by its treatment of the helpless and poor. And this creates a positive obligation to order society in a way that protects and benefits the powerless and suffering.

This obligation to protect has never, in Jewish and Christian teaching, been purely private. Hebrew law made a special provision for the destitute—requiring that a portion of harvested crops be left in the field to be gathered by the poor. The Hebrew prophets raucously confronted the political and economic exploitation of the weak.

Speaking as one who doesn’t feel at home among the labels or parties at either end of the political spectrum, I think both sides of the aisle (and everyone in between) would benefit from more thinking like Gerson’s.

I just finished reading a book called Serve God, Save the Planet by J. Matthew Sleeth.

Sleeth is a medical doctor. He had a nice home on the New England coast at one point. According to his publisher’s synopsis, Sleeth was living the American dream…

Until he became convinced that the growing number of chronic illnesses he was treating had something to do with the air people were breathing…

The water they were drinking….

The chemicals their bodies were absorbing from a host of sources…

He came to believe the sharp increase he was seeing in cancer among children and young people might have something to do with the environment we live in and the toxins we’re exposed to.

So, following his grandmother’s axiom that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” Sleeth made it his life mission to call others to more responsible stewardship of the environment. Before he began preaching to others, though, he and his family took stock of their own lives and reduced their environmental impact wherever and however possible.

This is not your stereotypical environmentalist book. Sleeth is an evangelical in every sense of the word. His main audience is the church. His passion is to demonstrate for those already dedicated to God how environmental stewardship is an essential element of the Christian life.

Serve God, Save the Planet is one of the most important books I’ve read in the past year. I finished it in about a day. Then I immediately started bugging my wife to read it. (Incidentally, she read it about as quickly as I did and liked it just as much.) This is one of those books that inspired us start contemplating the changes we would make to our own lives as a result of reading it.

What I found most intriguing about Sleeth’s book is that it’s not really about the environment. It’s about life in its entirety. Like any good doctor, Sleeth takes a holistic approach to the issue. He does not stop at the symptoms but presses deeper, until he uncovers the root cause of the problem. In this case, the main culprit is consumerism—our insatiable desire for more and more stuff, even (and often) at the expense of those who have little to begin with. That, Sleeth contends, is the root cause of the environmental quandary we now find ourselves in.

Plenty of parents will find themselves nodding in agreement as Sleeth describes the impact of our society’s TV addition, for example—even if their main concern is not the environmental impact of all that television watching. Televisions are, according to Sleeth, the third largest users of electricity in our homes today. So in addition to converting our minds to mush and exploiting our appetite for the latest high-tech gadget/equity loan/sports car/hair replacement therapy, the amount of TV we watch has a direct impact on our environment.

Sleeth does an excellent job deconstructing common evangelical arguments against the prioritization of environmental issues. He does an even better job building a thoroughly biblical case for environmental stewardship and connecting the environment to other issues, like global poverty (more on that in another post soon).

In short, I can’t recommend Serve God, Save the Planet highly enough, and I can’t praise my former employer, Zondervan, highly enough for publishing the paperback edition (which, not incidentally, was published on 100% recycled paper).

I don’t feel like I can do justice to a book this good using my own words, so I thought I would share some of my favorite excerpts , in the hopes that you’ll pick up a copy and read the whole book for yourself…

On the theological significance of our “dominion” over creation (see Genesis 1:28)…

Dominion [or subduing, depending on your translation] comes from a Hebrew term meaning “higher on the root of a plant.” Dominion does not mean ownership or even unrestricted use. Implied in our dominion is our dependency on everything under us. Cut the root out from under a plant and the fruit above it will perish, despite its superior position.

On the relationship between consumerism and environmentalism…

Being pro-stewardship is not a case of valuing forests more than people; rather, it means valuing human possessions less, and God’s world more.

On the mechanistic way we sometimes view God’s creation…

We say that trees exist to make oxygen, or to give shade, or to be made into paper, and we assign them no further mystery. In other words, nature has purpose and value only insofar as it fulfills our material needs. Our worldview is so mechanistic that we ask questions like, “If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it make any sound?”The Bible answers this question: If a tree stands in the middle of the forest and is never seen by a human, it has meaning to God. The tree is there to glorify God and to give God pleasure. And yes, if the tree topples over one day, it does make a sound and God hears it. This biblical view is at odds with the industrial worldview, but I find it comforting.

A compelling (and disturbing) example of the relationship between environmental degradation and catastrophic “natural” disasters…

In October 2004, the Indian subcontinent was flooded by a deadly tidal wave. Such events happen and will continue to happen, but one of the reasons for the record number of fatalities in this case was no the wave but the fact that all the mangrove trees along the shoreline, which normally holds back the waves, had been cut down to make way for the white sandy beaches so loved by tourists.

On the relationship between the environment, consumerism, and global poverty (which Sleeth has seen firsthand during medical missionary trips to Central America)…

How does refraining from buying a teak chair for your deck constitute mission work? … Tides of rural farmers in Central America, South America, Africa, and Asia are forced to abandon lands they have worked for generations and flood the cities. They flee the mountains because their homes are being destroyed. As the demand for deck chairs, plywood underlayment, disposable chopsticks, and teak furniture grows, the trees in the third world are cut down. Poor families often do not own the land they have worked. They have no say and make no profit from the cutting of trees. Yet cutting down the forests around them changes their world. The topsoil washes away. The streams dry up. The trees God planted to hold the land in place are gone, so when a hurricane comes, the hillsides simply collapse and wash away.

On the amount we spend on health care each year (largely treating symptoms while ignoring the larger problem, Sleeth argues) and what we get for our investment…

Rounded to the nearest hundred dollar, every man, woman, and child spends $5,000 on health care annually. A woman’s life expectancy in the United States today is seventy-nine years. In comparison, Mexico spends about $500 a person on health care, and a woman’s life expectancy there is seventy-six years. That’s $400,000 in total lifetime expenditures for the American versus $38,000 for the average Mexican woman—a bundle of money for only three more years of life. Compared to a vast portion of the world’s people, Mexico has a posh health-care budget. Virtually no country in all of Africa has a budget of $100 per capita for annual health care. Americans spend more on dog and cat health care than Africans spend on human health care.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Don’t miss this book.

My wife and I bought weekend passes to Film Faith and Justice 2007 here in Seattle. I’ll be blogging about the highlights from each day. Here’s day one…

Tonight, we heard Shane Claiborne (author of The Irresistible Revolution). He spoke at our church in Michigan a couple of times, so it was nice to hear a familiar voice sharing some familiar stories.

But there was one story I hadn’t heard before, and I doubt I’ll be able to get it out of my head…

Shane was visiting churches in Iraq when he said to one of the pastors there, “I had no idea there were so many Christians in Iraq.”

The pastor replied, “You Americans didn’t invent Christianity. You just domesticated it.”

Then he said, “We pray for the church in America. We pray that you will be the people of God, that you will be people of peace.”

What does it say about us, when Christians living in one of the most dangerous places on earth feel compelled to pray — for us?

What does it say about us, that Christians who have experienced real peril look at us and pray that our faith will be undomesticated?

And what does it say about me, that I pray so little for the church in Iraq — a church that’s in danger of disappearing?

I just finished Erik Mirandette’s book The Only Road North. (If you’re not familiar with Erik’s story, read this article from the Grand Rapids Press.)

The Only Road North begins with a warning, letting you know just what kind of book this is:

My story offers no resolution and has no ending. It is not nice or neat, but it is real… After a long and trepidant road we will finally arrive before we started, with more questions than answers, completely and totally unsettled, but ever searching, ever hopeful.

You may be thinking: Most 23-year-olds haven’t lived long enough to write something like that.

Then again, most 23-year-olds haven’t been arrested (repeatedly) for helping refugees in Morocco. Or motorcycled their way across the African continent.

And most 23-year-olds haven’t had their bodies riddled with hundreds of nails from a suicide bomber standing just a few feet away and detonating pure hatred. But that’s what happened to Erik two years ago this month.

I wouldn’t say I “enjoyed” Erik’s book. I don’t think you’re supposed to. Even at the story’s most exhilirating moments, you know something terrible is just around the corner, waiting to happen. You wish you could, by sheer force of will, stop Erik, his brother, and his two friends from going to Cairo… from going to that market…

But you can’t.

So what should you expect from reading Erik’s book? That depends. There are places where the writing could have been better. There are places where the writing is brilliant, too. But that’s not really the point. I can only wonder what kind of courage it takes to relive a story like this, so people like me can read it.

You may be looking for a nice story of a good Christian kid. Someone who’s “on fire for the Lord.” For whom every day with Jesus is sweeter than the day before…

In that case, you might want to choose another book.

Erik goes almost breathlessly from living the frat boy life in Colorado to helping missionaries in Morocco. There doesn’t seem to be a clear “Damascus road” experience between the two. But if you’re like me, you might take comfort in being reminded that God doesn’t always wait for us to get our act together before he decides to use us.

You may be in search of answers. You won’t find many in Erik’s book. But you might be comforted by the fact that someone who’s been terrorized by unspeakable evil has the same questions, the same doubts as you do. You may discover from reading Erik’s story that doubt is not the opposite of faith; it’s not the opposite of hope…

…in which case I promise you, The Only Road North will be worth every page.

from The Liberator, by Rob Lacey…

The macabre scene moves slowly up Skull Hill. They get there and the Roman Death Squad shove a cocktail made of wine with myrrh into Jesus’ face. He takes a sip but spits it out, flat refusing to drink the stuff.

They pin Jesus to the rough crossbar leaving him to die. Him and the two hardened criminals — one on either side. Jesus says, “Dad! Don’t hold this against these people — wipe their slates clean. They’ve got no idea what’s going on here!”

The Death Squad rip his clothes off and start playing gambling games to see who “inherits” the clothing mementos.

Time check: Friday 9 AM. One of the soldiers grabs the multi-use Offence Placard, writes up Jesus’ “crime” and then pins it just above his head. It reads, “Jesus: King of the Jews”.

The other two victims with him — the terrorists — one on either side of the central focus point, Jesus… bite back their excruciating pain and add their jibes to the mix… “Aren’t you supposed to be The Liberator? Get liberating, won’t you? You need it and we need it!”

But the other guy calls across, “Don’t you have no respect for God? You’re getting what you had coming to you, but this guy’s done nothing wrong. So shut it!”

The second career criminal turns to Jesus and says, “Jesus, don’t forget me when you sit on your throne, okay?”

Jesus answers him, “I’ll tell you today — no lie — you and me, we’ll be in paradise together.”

Time check: 12 midday. It goes dark, totally dark, for three full hours right across Judah. Nothing except the chilling sound track of three men inching toward Death. Later, about three in the afternoon, Jesus freaks those still left there by shouting, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” Translation: “My God, my God, why’ve you abandoned me?”

Some of those within earshot hear the “Eli, Eli” bit and get the wrong end of the stick, saying, “Listen, he’s trying to connect with Elijah!”

Knee-jerk reaction for one guy was to offer some soured wine to the sufferer, hoisting a soaked sponge of the stuff up to Jesus on a stick. Others are going, “Whoa! Hang on. Wait to see if Elijah’s going to turn up like a one-man SWAT team and rescue him.”

Jesus shouts on out one more time and finally allows his spirit to be torn out of his broken body.

He cries out, “Dad, I trust you with my spirit!”

His last words.

He dies.