The Bosque Boys

The hypocrisy?

The double standard?

The juxtaposition of the Duke athletes emerging from thirteen months of hell against the "scarred for life" Rutgers basketball players?

Will the Imus affair have a chilling effect on speech in the public square?

No comment.

Rick Weiss of the Washington Post has written a surprisingly even-handed account of the embryonic stem-cell funding bill just passed by the Senate. The president promises a veto.

As I have pointed out before, we are not alone in our fight against radical Islamists. Here is an embed account of fighting by British troops in Iraq. Link from Instapundit.

Doubting Thomas was convinced by the wounds (or scars) on the risen Christ. When I am tempted, because of the worldliness of the church or the unChristian actions of Christians, to doubt the faith, I think of those men and women who have faced persecution bravely. They embody the truth that God works in the lives of human beings.

Today we can remember Watchman Nee, the most famous modern Chinese Christian martyr. Through years of imprisonment the communists failed to break him. Story here.

Johnny Hart, of BC and Wizard of Id fame, died recently. Here is an interview done a few years ago by the Presbyterian Layman. You'll need to follow the link to the article.

According to CBS, President Bush will veto legislation to provide Federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research, if the bill makes it out of the Senate. The bill is similar to one he vetoed previously.

Good for Dubya. Not only has adult stem-cell research shown more promise, but taking innocent human life is immoral.

Here's something odd. According to the Pew Forum, a recent survey indicated that the preferred candidates of white evangelical Republicans were Guilliani and McCain. Huckabee and Brownback, who would seem more natural favorites, have not gotten much traction with these voters. Nearly a quarter of white evangelical Republicans do not yet have a favorite.

My speculation: White evangelical Republicans want to keep the Democrats out of the White House worse than they want ideological purity in their own candidates, and do not think Brownback and Huckabee have a chance. As I've said before, if Guilliani or McCain can convince evangelicals that they will nominate conservative judges, evangelicals will pull the lever for them in spite of their personal marital history and other positions.

My conclusion: with nearly a quarter of these voters undecided, and the support of the others probably not very deep, there is still an opening for someone like Fred Thompson to gain white evangelical support if he is perceived to be capable of beating Hillary or Obama.

I wrote the following in July--but little has changed since then:

If someone had come to me ten years ago and told me that there were some excess human embryos laying around in a freezer somewhere, the waste product of a completed in vitro fertilization procedure, and we could use those terminal embryos in an experiment that might lead to advances toward curing diseases, I am almost certain that I would have said (without hesitation): "Go for it!"

But it is not ten years ago. Unfortunately, I have listened long and hard to nearly a decade of debate, and now I am unflinchingly ambivalent.

I grew up believing that "life began in the womb." "Life begins in the Petri dish" takes some getting used to. After almost a decade, I still wonder: if the embryos are human life, why are we allowing so many to be created and then frozen and eventually destroyed? Isn't that a much bigger problem than experimentation?

But I also hear the voices who are troubled by the larger issues in this debate. I believe in the sanctity of human life. I agree that there are dangerous precedents in what we do here. And I wonder about the long-range implications of the genetic engineering aspect of this process.

In this debate, I have been most swayed by my negative reaction to what the proponents have said. Today on C-SPAN [July 18, 2006] Tom Harkin was trying to explain how "potential human life" was not as valuable as "real human life." Listen to a politician for a while, and you start to realize how fraught with future peril this process (how slippery this slope) really is.

On the other hand, Orrin Hatch and Gordon Smith (two GOP stalwarts of conservatism) are set to vote for the Harkin-Specter bill today.

A few things worth considering:

1. There is no "federal ban" on embryonic stem cell research. This is a debate about funding. Shall we as a community spend our common funds in this particular way?

2. There is too much hype and politicization. Our sick friends and relatives are not being held hostage by this policy decision. No one is going to "get up and walk" in the foreseeable future, if this bill passes and the President signs it into law.

3. Many researchers and entities are working on embryonic stem cells. Big states and other nations are coming up with big dollars to move this along. The federal money is mostly symbolic (and political).

4. It is true, according to reputable opinion polls, that a large majority of Americans favor federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. But that does not mean that a presidential veto circumvents the "political process." A presidential veto is the political process. All the people elect the president, and we expect him to execute the duties of his office to the best of his ability and, as Lincoln said, "with firmness in the right as God gives [him] to see the right."

5. There is precedent for localizing troubling national moral issues. The federal government has often punted on intractable moral questions (e.g., slavery, temperance, sex). A decision not to fund embryonic stem cell research with federal money because of the lack of moral clarity is a compromise not at odds with our history.

More on the politics of stem cell from last November (late October actually) here.

A few months back, I read with great interest the Okie Gardener's post and subsequent discussion concerning the "growth" of Calvinism and the future of American Protestantism.

The conversation made me wax nostalgic about my dear old church in Southern California and my all-time favorite pastor: John Calvin Powell.

John Powell has pastored Calvary Church in West Hills, California, for two decades. He earned his Masters in Divinity at Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary in Mill Valley. A native of Whitney, Texas, John Powell attended Howard Payne University in Brownwood, Texas, and earned his Bachelor's degree from the University of Houston at Clear Lake before the call to ministry led him to the Golden State.

An aside: I am a native Texan, but I grew up in Southern California. Following my high school graduation, I returned to my Texas roots for a stint at Baylor University in Waco, after which I returned to the San Fernando Valley. After living and working in Southern California for a decade, I returned to Baylor to continue my education.

Texans are funny people. I heard Shelby Foote once say that he "found Texans much more likeable in Texas than out of it. When they are away from home, they brag about Texas. When you come visit them in Texas, they assume you can see for yourself." There is a Texas nationalism and pride unlike any other state in the Union. A Texan out of Texas truly is a Texas expatriate.

If you are in California, a good place to meet Texans (or Okies or Arkansans et al) is in a Southern Baptist Church, which are much more abundant than you might think. The great "Okie" migration of the middle twentieth century transported all kinds of cultural institutions westward; they were blown out there with the wind.

My friend John Powell is an evangelical, which means he believes in the centrality of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the importance of living out your faith, a high regard for the Bible as the inspired word of God and the necessity of conversion.

The historical John Calvin, however, exerts much more influence over Southern Baptists than they generally care to admit. Pastor John often discussed theology with another bright Texan on his staff (who considered himself a Calvinist); they would bat back and forth the ideas of unconditional election, limited atonement and irresistible grace.

Powell often ended the argument with this jewel: I will continue to preach the Gospel to as many people as I can, and I will trust that God will forgive me for saving the souls that I was not supposed to.

It is a good line and a good philosophy, which transcends theology.

You can find information on Calvary here, but don't look for any information on the site about John Powell; it just isn't there. Pastor John never went Hollywood.

The Episcopal Church, the U.S. branch of Anglicanism, is splitting over the issue of same-sex sex. Now, it appears that the world-wide Anglican Communion may itself be split by the U.S. and Canadian liberal positions. Story here.