Thinking about the Bailout

Capital Commentary did a good job this week with some thoughtful reflection on the beginning of the Obama presidency.  Here a bit of what was written.  You can catch the rest via the link.

"In his inaugural address, President Barack Obama promised to harness old and true values to new instruments in order to face new challenges and remake America. He urged struggle, sacrifice and risk-taking. The speech was short on inspiration and free of acrimony. The president chastised individual villains for their greed but also urged his audience to assume a collective guilt for failing to make “hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.”

The faces of the audience registered exuberance and ambivalence. Eager to celebrate, the speech offered them few invitations to do so. There was much to celebrate as an African-American took the oath, bringing to a climax the long trajectory from slavery to emancipation, through segregation to Brown v Board of Education, and from the dream of Martin Luther King Jr. to the hope symbolized in Barack Obama. But the president let the spectacle speak for itself. He stood at the podium symbolizing the distance his country has traveled but he offered the assembled multitudes only blood, sweat and tears. Surely some racist barriers crumbled, surely the moment redeemed some past agonies, and surely future generations will affirm January 20, 2009 as a seminal moment in America’s remaking. But how does that redemption speak to, let alone face down, the “tyranny of the urgent” presented by the economic crisis?"

The Obama Economic Plan

As we look at the stimulus package a good place to go to ask questions about the best path to take is an organization called Cardus.  Cardus is a thinktank that seeks to ReThink, ReSearch, and ReBuild.  The budget analysis they do reflects the Canadian budget, but the themes of both the U.S. and Canadian budgets overlap.  So take a look and use the Cardus document for reflection and conversation.

A New City

In his book Cities of God Rodney Stark gives us a picture into the cities of the Apostle Paul's day. The picture is grim.  People die at such an alarming rate that new people from the countryside have to come into the city if cities are going to survive.  The cities are dirty places filled with disease and just a general nastiness.  Cities are unsafe. No one goes out at night without an armed guard.  People in the cities are so often maimed that you described people who had the same name by their deformities so you knew who you were talking about.

Given how horrific cities are (Think the movie Bladerunner) I would assume that like Bladerunner (I know, I'm talking about the "original" ending to the movie) that hope would come in escaping city and finding the pristine wonder of the country and nature.  However, the Bible goes in a very unexpected direction.  Instead of having people escape the city when the end of time comes, the Bible speaks of a new and renewed city.  A place where there are none of the horrors of the present city, but instead a place free from death or crying or mourning or pain.  

I can't help but wonder what people who lived in the horrors of the cities thought when those words of Revelation reached them.  

I also wonder why God chooses not to return us to the garden of eden (given the nastiness of cities, why not run back to nature as so many want to do in our day).  As the old song puts it, "we've got to get back to the garden."  Instead of a garden we get a city.  Could it be that God loves cities?  Could it be that God's word to us is if he can take a place as horrible and nasty as the cities of Paul's day and make them new, then he can do it with anything?  Even us.

Simple but profound

3 And by this we know that we have come to know him, if we keep his commandments. 4 Whoever says “I know him” but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him, 5 but whoever keeps his word, in him truly the love of God is perfected. By this we may know that we are in him: 6 whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked. 1 John 2

These words have struck me over and over again. If we are going to say that we belong to Christ we need to walk in the way he walked i.e. to live as he lived. God's love is perfected or made whole in us as we live this kind of life. Simple, but profound.

An unintended funny

I was doing some study in Ephesians 5 which talks about Jesus making the church without spot. I thought a bit of Greek would be a good thing to figure out just what spot might mean in background, classical usage and so on. When I checked out the word in the Greek I got a bit of a smile. In the accusative case the word from spot in Greek is spilon :)

Lost Luggage

I thought this was a fun insight from an article in Harpers:

Air travel is like death: everything is taken from you.

Here's the context:

On the day of my flight to Moscow, I was late to the airport. Check-in was already closed. Although I was eventually let onto the plane, my suitcase was not, and it subsequently vanished altogether from the Aeroflot informational system. Air travel is like death: everything is taken from you.

What did you do at the office today?

For those who follow the world of politics, here's what President Obama did on his first full day in office (apparently he didn't sleep in after all those Inaugural Balls).

1. Halting the military tribunal process at Guantánamo Bay.

2. Phoning Arab leaders to discuss the Mideast situation.

3. Freezing salaries for senior White House staffers and implementing semi-strict guidelines to stop the K Street revolving door.

4. Embracing openness and an end to “secrecy.”

5. Meeting with top military advisers to plan the Iraq drawdown and the reboot of the Afghanistan war.

6. Convening his economic advisers to discuss the stimulus.