Kids' Doc in Jos

Making the Bible Impossible (Part 3)

2012-01-06T17:40:00.001+01:00

Recap of previous two posts: The most important and thought-provoking book I’ve read this year is The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture by Christian Smith. In it, the author critiques a particular way of interpreting the Bible, a method he calls “biblicism,” which he sees as widespread in the evangelical world. In fact, he argues that biblicism is so problematic that it impossible to hold to it. In my first post, I summarized Smith’s 10-point definition of biblicism, which must be understood before the rest of his argument makes sense. In the second post, we looked at the main problem Smith sees, pervasive interpretive pluralism (PIP),and why it is particularly problematic for biblicism.

Obviously, different individuals and groups interpret the Bible differently to some extent. Is that really a problem? Smith argues that PIP is such a severe issue that it literally makes biblicism impossible. How does he support this claim? The first part of the question, which we’ll examine now, is whether the differences are so important and pervasive as to constitute a serious problem. The second part is whether there are not already adequate explanations for PIP, explaining it in within the context of biblicism.

Pervasive Interpretive Pluralism—How Serious a Problem?

I'm writing this from Miango, not far from Jos, as we are attending our annual SIM Spiritual Life Conference. The cattle and kids in the photos are just across the fence outside our window.

This year's conference speaker is focusing on the book of Hebrews. In the introduction last night, he mentioned in passing the "warning passages" of Hebrews,¹ which warn the hearers to continue in the faith lest they be condemned. The interpretation of these is controversial because some seem to address believers and imply that they can lose their salvation. The speaker last night told us that he does not believe that believers can lose their salvation, but said that for anyone interested, he had a paper we could read exploring six different interpretations of these warning passages.

This illustrates one of the problems Christian Smith sees with biblicism. It's fine to believe that the Bible is inerrant, he says, but how helpful is that given the extent of uncertainty and disagreement over its interpretation? Can believers lose their salvation or not? One group of scholars says "absolutely, yes, it's in the Bible" and another group says "absolutely not, the Bible clearly says so." If I understand Smith correctly, the issue is not so much the disagreement, but that both sides prove their contradictory positions from the Bible, and "since the Bible says it, that settles it," leaving little room for uncertainty or compromise. So what is the truth about eternal security? I'm not sure whether Smith's view of a better answer would be "we don't know," "that's not the right question," or something else.

Speaking of works like the paper above on six views of the warning passages, Smith says, "The inability of Bible-reading evangelicals to come to anything like a common mind about a host of topics is turned into published scholarly debates conducted under the guise of helpful theological orientation and education." As examples, Smith lists books such as

Four Views on Hell
Perspectives on Christian Worship: Five Views
Four Views of the End Times
Science and Christianity: Four Views

along with 30 others on subjects including the nature of atonement, baptism, hell, divorce and remarriage, free will, war, women in ministry, and many others.

Looking at the popular level or "folk" evangelicalism, Smith gives examples such as

A statement by John F. MacArthur Jr. that the Bible is “the only reliable and sufficient worship manual.”
Bumper stickers like “Vote Responsibly—Vote the Bible!” “God said it, I believe it, that settles it,” and “Confused? Read the Directions” [picture of Bible].
Books such as
- Bible Answers for Almost All Your Questions
- The World According to God: A Biblical View of Culture, Work, Science, Sex, and Everything Else
- Bible Solutions to Problems of Daily Living
- A Crown of Glory: A Biblical View of Aging
- Christian Dress and Adornment—Biblical Perspectives
Preaching based "on the assumption that a minister can select virtually any passage of scripture and adduce from the text an authoritative, relevant, 'applicable' teaching to be believed and applied by the members of his or her congregation."

Smith finds biblicism and its problems in the charters or statements of faith of mainstream evangelical institutions as well. For example, he cites from the Westminster Confession of Faith, "The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for His own glory, man's salvation, faith and life is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture." In other words, there is no part of God's counsel in any of these areas, including the broad area "life," that is not derived directly from the Bible.

But isn't it true that evangelicals agree on all the essentials of the faith, and disagree only on less important, peripheral matters? Smith says that not, and goes into some detail about the disagreements over what the Bible says about several specific issues, "because many biblicists seem accustomed to easily ignoring or dismissing the 'biblical' convictions of others who read the Bible differently than they happen to, or to minimizing those disparities by suggesting that they are only slight variations on what are commonly shared Bible-based interpretations and convictions. Yet the differences cannot be ignored, dismissed, or minimized. They are real and concern important matters."

The examples discussed in the book's next eight pages include church polity or governance; free will and predestination; the fourth commandment (keeping the Sabbath); the morality of slavery (as argued in the 19th century); gender difference and equality; wealth, prosperity, poverty, and blessing; war, peace and nonviolence; charismatic gifts; atonement and justification; God-honoring worship; and general Christian relation to culture. In each case, there is a wide disparity of interpretations among evangelicals of what the Bible actually says or what "good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture."

We could easily think of other topics such as abortion, divorce, the fate of those who reject the gospel or have not heard it, and homosexuality—Smith has just chosen a few examples to give us an idea of the scope of the problem. In Africa, the list would also include polygamy. Some of these topics will appear unimportant to any given person or group, but I doubt that anyone would claim that most are unimportant details of doctrine or Christian living. Many have very practical implications about how we should live our lives.

I think that Smith has established the point that PIP exists and is a serious problem. We all agree on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and most of us probably accept the Nicene creed. We doubtless agree on the importance of love, forgiveness, faith, faithfulness, prayer, seeking God's will, and many other core issues, but when it comes to many other areas where guidelines have been drawn from the Bible, there seems to be no agreement. So, if this pluralism is a problem, can it be absorbed or explained away within the bounds of biblicism? That will be the next topic.

¹ Such as "It is impossible for those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, who have tasted the goodness of the word of God and powers of the coming age, if they fall away, to be brought back to repentance, because to their loss they are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace" (Hebrews 6:4-6)

The Bible Made Impossible? (Part 2)

2011-12-30T22:41:00.001+01:00

The most important and thought-provoking book I’ve read this year is The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture by Christian Smith. In it, the author critiques a particular way of interpreting the Bible, a method he calls “biblicism,” which he sees as widespread in the evangelical world. In fact, he argues that biblicism is so problematic that it impossible to hold to it. In my previous post, I summarized Smith’s 10-point definition of biblicism and proposed that it can be summarized as the combined beliefs that the Bible is

Reliable and consistent: The Bible is inspired by God, without error, and therefore speaks with a single voice on any subject.
Sufficient: The Bible contains all we need to know about all areas of Christian belief and practice for all time.
Understandable: Given some common sense about how to read, and maybe some background on the Bible, we can with careful and prayerful study come to a true understanding of a Bible passage including its meaning for faith and action. Then we can take the truths we learn about different topics, sort and sift them, and come to a comprehensive understanding of any and every topic.

So what’s the problem? Consider that these claims, in combination, imply that sincere Christians who study the Bible carefully should come to basic agreement in most areas. If the Bible is reliable, consistent, clear, universal, and covers all we need to know, then we should all agree, right? The problem, says Smith, is that Bible-believing, born-again, Bible-studying Christians disagree on nearly everything imaginable, except that Jesus is Lord, risen from the dead, and our Savior. This situation is what Smith calls “pervasive interpretive pluralism.” He points out that it is useless to believe in the authority and inerrancy of the Bible on a given topic when Christians cannot even agree on what it teaches about that topic. What does the Bible teach about war and violence—pacifism, just war, or something else? What does it teach about economics, does it support distribution of wealth, free enterprise, or what? What about predestination and free-will? Baptism? Miracles and prophecy in the present age? The list is long. The main point of the book is that this pervasive interpretive pluralism (PIP) cannot be explained within the biblicist viewpoint, thus biblicism is fatally flawed.

There are several important points about what Smith is not saying here. Many arguments of Smith’s critics stem from the failure to understand these points.

Smith is not questioning the authority or reliability of the Bible based on the fact that there are disagreements over how to interpret it.
He is definitely not attacking biblicism simply because it leads to disagreements, as though other methods of interpretation avoid this problem.
He is not talking about “matters of conscience” in which Christians agree to disagree.

Rather, Smith is saying that (a) biblicism by its own principles implies that capable interpreters should converge on a single, authoritative, biblical teaching about any topic; (b) we do not see this agreement or convergence; therefore (c) something must be wrong with the principles of biblicism. He is not saying that every part of biblicism is wrong because of PIP, only that it cannot stand as an integrated whole. Don’t other schools of interpretation also lead to differences? Yes, but then, their logic does not necessarily predict agreement as biblicism does.

Though differences in interpretation are not unique to biblicism, they are particularly toxic within biblicist contexts. Because biblicists believe that the Bible is clear, consistent, and universal, disagreements tend to be seen as deviations from the one, inerrant truth. Because they believe that the Bible addresses every issue of faith and life with a single voice, every issue becomes a potential test of standing firm for the truth. Biblicists, those who hold to this constellation of beliefs, can’t just say “Well, the Bible isn’t clear on that,” “The Bible seems to say this in one case, but something different at another time,” or “The Bible seems to give some clues about that, but not enough for us to draw firm conclusions.” Thus, the differences of interpretation are magnified, leading to divisions, contention, and ultimately to the highly divided state of the evangelical church in America today.

What do you think? Is Smith onto something or making a mountain out of a molehill? Do evangelicals handle their differences well or do biblistic beliefs cause us to be overly dogmatic and divisive? Can we hold to a full, if nuanced, version of biblicism and still hold our beliefs lightly enough for unity? Leave your comments below!

In the next post, we’ll consider whether PIP is as big a problem as Smith thinks it is.

The Bible Made Impossible? (Part 1)

2011-12-30T22:33:00.000+01:00

The most important and thought-provoking book I’ve read this year is The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture by Christian Smith¹ (available in hardback and Kindle versions). In it, the author critiques a particular way of interpreting the Bible, a method he calls “biblicism,” which he sees as widespread in the evangelical world. In fact, he argues that biblicism is so problematic that it impossible to hold to it.

So, what is biblicism? Smith defines it as “a theory about the Bible that emphasizes together its exclusive authority, infallibility, perspicuity [being clear, easily understood], self-sufficiency, internal consistency, self-evident meaning, and universal applicability.” Expanding these points, he says it is a constellation of beliefs about the Bible including these (from pages 4–5, with some rewording):

The Bible is inspired by God and is inerrant.
“The Bible represents all God’s communication to and will for humanity.”
Complete coverage: God’s will about everything relevant to Christian belief and life is contained in the Bible.
The Bible is plain and can be understood by all (“democratic perspicuity”): “Any reasonably intelligent person can read the Bible in his or her own language and correctly understand the plain meaning of the text.”
“Commonsense hermeneutics: The best way to understand biblical texts is by reading them in their explicit, plain, most obvious, literal sense, as the author intended them at face value, which may or may not involve taking into account their literary, cultural, and historical contexts.”
We can understand the meaning of any biblical text from the Bible alone, without relying on “creeds, confessions, historical church traditions, or other forms of larger theological hermeneutical frameworks.” We can derive our entire theology from the Bible alone.
Internal harmony: All related passages of the Bible on any given subject fit together almost like puzzle pieces into a unified, consistent teaching about right and wrong beliefs and behaviors.
Universal applicability: What the Bible’s authors taught God’s people at any point in history remains universally valid for all time, unless explicitly revoked by subsequent scriptural teaching.
Inductive method: We can learn all we need to know about Christian belief and practice by sitting down with the Bible and, through careful study, piecing together its clear truths.
All the above beliefs lead to the Handbook Model: The Bible teaches doctrine and morals with every affirmation that it makes, giving us something like a handbook for Christian belief and living, a collection of divine, inerrant teachings on all kinds of subjects—including science, economics, health, politics, and romance.

I think we can make these more manageable by simplifying them into three broader beliefs about the Bible, i.e. that it is:

Reliable and consistent: The Bible is inspired by God, without error, and therefore speaks with a single voice on any subject. (1, 7)
Sufficient: The Bible contains all we need to know about all areas of Christian belief and practice for all time. (2, 3, 6, 8)
Understandable: Given some common sense about how to read, and maybe some background on the Bible, we can with careful and prayerful study come to a true understanding of a Bible passage including its meaning for faith and action. Then we can take the truths we learn about different topics, sort and sift them, and come to a comprehensive understanding of any and every topic. (4, 5, 9)

This all sounds rather ordinary in my neck of the evangelical woods. Of course, a bit of tweaking is needed: we understand that not every part of Scripture is as clear as every other part; we need to take into account symbolism, parables, poetry etc.; and we know that even sincere Christians may disagree on some minor points. Overall, though, these three summary points probably seem for many of us to represent our beliefs fairly well.

What do you think? Does biblicism in Smith’s terms reflect your understanding of how to interpret the Bible and use it to determine what we believe and how we act? Any parts you don’t agree with? (No fair reading the book before you answer!) In the next post, we’ll consider the major problem Smith sees with biblicism.

1 Christian Smith is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society, and the Center for Social Research at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of many books, including What is a Person?: Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up (Chicago 201); Passing the Plate: Why American Christians Do Not Give Away More Money (OUP 2008); Soul Searching: the Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (OUP 2005), Winner of the 2005 "Distinguished Book Award" from Christianity Today; and Moral, Believing Animals: Human Personhood and Culture (OUP 2003).

Kindle Books for Free Borrowing through Kindle Owners’ Lending Library

2011-12-03T12:44:00.001+01:00

Amazon has announced a new service for its Prime members, allowing them to borrow selected Kindle e-books at no charge, one at a time. ~~I am guessing that you can do this even if you do not own a physical Kindle and are using instead a Kindle reader for PC, Mac, Android etc.~~ It looks like you have to actually own a Kindle. The problem is that there is not a very handy way to identify the books you can borrow, so you have to browse through the lists. If you go to http://amzn.to/AmazonLibrary (where the navigation breadcrumb list will show “Books › Prime Eligible › Kindle Edition”) you can use the side menus to browse by author or subject, and you can limit the search by number of stars.

Since there are thousands of titles to search through, I thought I would contribute some of my discoveries for those who may have similar tastes and want to save the time of searching all the books. I list several books here and will put more in subsequent blog posts.

Once again, note that these are books available for free loan for Amazon customers who belong to the Prime program, in which you pay an annual fee ($80??) to receive free 2-day shipping on many products and, recently added, free streamed digital content (movies, I think, but I have not investigated since the bandwidth would be prohibitive here in Nigeria).

Freedom’s Stand by Jeanette Windle (4.6 stars, 34 reviews)

Jamil renounced a life of jihad when he encountered the life-changing message of Jesus Christ, but villagers and authorities in the hills of Afghanistan respond with skepticism . . . and even violence. Relief worker Amy Mallory is shocked by the changes in her organization—changes with dire implications for the women and children under her care. And concern for her former assistant, Jamil, weighs heavily on her heart. Former Special Forces veteran Steve Wilson faces off against the riots and corruption of Kabul’s upcoming election. He's looking for something that will give his life purpose but is confident that he won’t find it in Afghanistan.

My first thought from the blurb above was that perhaps the book was just Christian pulp fiction, but the comments seem to indicate that it is much richer than that, so I’d be interested in reading it. NB: This is the sequel to Veiled Freedom, which is not currently available for free rental, so you might want to read that book first.

Catching Moondrops by Jennifer Erin Valent (4.8 stars, 33 reviews)

It's the summer of 1938, and in the rural town of Calloway, Virginia, something is brewing --- something that 18-year-old Jessilyn Lassiter has felt before. Amidst romance in the air and the brilliant colors of summer sunsets, Jessilyn and her best friend Gemma know racial tension is on the rise. Six years ago, that tension exploded with burning crosses and white-robed Klansmen. Their hate-filled, public displays were reduced to a simmer since then, but the two best friends --- one white, one black --- knew it was about to bubble over again. When a black doctor sets up shop in Calloway's "colored" district, he fans the flames of the Klansmen's hatred, setting in motion a series of events that will change the people of Calloway and leave two mothers grieving for their sons. … I could write endlessly about the clever dialogue, colorful imagery and unique voice. And I certainly can't leave out the depth and attitude of the characters, the compelling plot, or the way the book takes you on an emotional roller coaster ride. Yet none of this does justice to the novel or its gifted author. Jennifer Erin Valent possesses writing talent that will surely have her name on bestseller lists for years to come.

As with some other books on the free lending list, this is a sequel so don’t be surprised if it feels as if you are missing some history if you read it on its own.

Untouchable by Scott O'Connor (4.5 stars, 48 reviews)

It is the autumn of 1999. A year has passed since Lucy Darby's unexpected death, leaving her husband David and son Whitley to mend the gaping hole in their lives. David, a trauma-site cleanup technician, spends his nights expunging the violent remains of strangers, helping their families to move on, though he is unable to do the same. Whitley – an 11 year-old social pariah known simply as The Kid – hasn't spoken since his mother's death. Instead, he communicates through a growing collection of notebooks, living in a safer world of his own silent imagining.

Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum (4.4 stars, 268 reviews)

Family secrets of Nazi Germany are at the core of this powerful first novel told in two narratives that alternate between New Heidelberg, Minnesota, in the present, and the small town of Weimar near Buchenwald during World War II. Trudy is a professor of German history in Minnesota, where she's teaching a seminar on women's roles in Nazi Germany and conducting interviews with Germans about how they're dealing with what they did during the war. But her mother, Anna, won't talk about it, not even to her own daughter. Trudy knows, she remembers, that Anna was mistress to a big Nazi camp officer. Why did she do it? Was he Trudy's father? The interviews are a plot contrivance to introduce a range of attitudes, from blatant racism to crippling survivor guilt. But the characters, then and now, are drawn with rare complexity, including a brave, gloomy, unlucky rescuer and a wheeler-dealer survivor. Anna's story is a gripping mystery in a page-turner that raises universal questions of shame, guilt, and personal responsibility. Hazel Rochman

Did “2800 B.C. Assyrian Tablet” complain about decline of civilization?

2011-11-13T23:09:00.001+01:00

“The Earth is degenerating today. Bribery and corruption abound. Children no longer obey their parents, every man wants to write a book, and it is evident that the end of the world is fast approaching.” From an Assyrian tablet, written circa 2800 BC.

This quote is going around – I just saw it on Facebook. Of course, it’s an attempt to show how people of every age think that they are living in the worst times, perhaps the last times, with their morals and civilization degenerating.

The quote got me intrigued. First, was it an actual quote from the third millennium BC? Second, what does it tell us about the idea of the end of the world?

The quote appears to be a hoax or urban legend though with a longish history. Bartleby's Quotes gives two versions from sources in the mid 20th century but comments "Both of the above quotations would seem to be spurious." The quote has also been attributed to Socrates.

According to the Wikipedia article on the history of Sumer, writing of speech like this quote isn't recorded before about 2600 B.C. Also, the idea of people writing books would not fit in 2800 B.C. Furthermore, the Assyrian kingdom, according to the omniscient Wikipedia, didn’t begin until around five hundred years after the supposed date of the supposed tablet. So it’s pretty apparent that the quote is a hoax, or more charitably, a myth with lasting value.

But all that doesn't matter much, since people have certainly said such things in the past, and the world hasn't ended. Or has it? In our literal, modernist view, we take these predictions or worries as referring to the end of the physical earth or universe. But we know that such cosmic language is used for historical, local events, as we see in the Bible. If you're an inhabitant of some town and the Assyrians come through killing, burning, raping, and enslaving, then that is the end of the world, period. If your entire civilization becomes weak and is conquered or disappears, that is the end of the world.

It's true that the physical world has not ended, but that's small comfort for the millions of people whose cities or entire civilizations have disappeared. See Jared Diamond's Collapse for a few examples and their causes.

The practical point of all this is that we should not, perhaps, be too flippant about dire predictions. Our own civilization has not survived nearly as long as some others which are now gone and forgotten, and why should we expect to be an exception? We certainly can list plenty of scenarios which would represent “the end of the world” for millions or billions of people, and I think it befits us to live “in the fear of God” rather than in hubris.

Photo: ancient Mesopotamian ziggurat in Iraq; by Wikipedia user Hardnfast. Used under Creative Commons license.

Chickenpox parties via mail?

2011-11-09T22:25:00.001+01:00

Some stories have come out in the past couple of days about someone selling chickenpox-infected lollipops through the mail for the benefit of parents who are afraid to immunize their children but want to give them “natural” infection. (All references are at the end of this post.)

Apparently, the parents are so fearful of commercial vaccines, which use a weakened but still-living virus, that they are willing to use a crude, “wild-type” vaccination instead. Never mind that there is a fairly high rate of complications and a mortality rate in healthy children of about 2 deaths per 100,000 cases. If that many deaths were associated with a chickenpox vaccine, there would be an uproar, but apparently it's acceptable (or more likely, not understood) as long as it's “natural.”

I'm sure that nearly all the parents involved in this practice have simply not thought through all the implications. Virtually all parents would do almost anything for the well being of their children, and these are no exceptions. Their intentions are pure, I'm sure, but nature unfortunately doesn't care about intentions.

I've seen at least two children with severe chickenpox. One was a leukemia patient in remission and apparently with normal immune status at the time. She almost died but, perhaps due to outstanding ICU care at UCLA, she survived. The other patient was a Nigerian girl who was normal until she got chickenpox. She suffered a skin reaction over much of the body, becoming much like a burn victim. She died.

What about consequences to other children, especially those who cannot be immunized because their immune systems are depressed by cancer, HIV, or drugs? Chickenpox is highly contagious: “Household transmission rates are 80-90%. Second cases within the household are often more severe.” Chickenpox is not always just a minor illness. Uncommonly, there are serious complications even among otherwise normal children. (See the list below from CHOP, comparing the complications of the disease vs. the vaccine.) Worse, “among children with leukemia, the mortality rate of varicella is 7%.” It’s even worse if a pregnant woman is exposed at just the wrong time, in a window that gives the baby the virus but not the mother’s antibodies. “Neonatal varicella mortality rates can reach 30%.”

I assume that these parents are taking the greatest precautions to isolate their artificially-infected children from all other children, starting from the time of inoculation until they are non-infectious, but is that possible for all children, 100% of the time? Do they treat their children as carriers of a potentially fatal viral infection, or are they thinking of the mostly-benign course of disease in their own children without reckoning with the potential for contagion? In fact, if they think it’s beneficial to expose children to chickenpox, could they be just a little less than perfectly sure to isolate their kids?

What if one of these children plays with another unimmunized child whose father has had leukemia, or whose mother is pregnant? Besides this being unethical (think “Golden Rule” here, OK?), it seems to me that I would at least be inviting a civil lawsuit if not a negligent homicide charge if my child’s intentionally-caused chickenpox caused harm to someone else.

The whole thing makes me angry. Not at the parents—I can only feel sorry for them, having been made so fearful of vaccines that they will take these risks because they want to protect their children. Rather, it’s against the people making fame and fortune by selling fear. How do they justify this kind of thing?

References:

“American parents caught selling chickenpox-infected lollipops,” Telegraph, http://tgr.ph/rFT7Ik

Los Angeles Times, http://bit.ly/uRCd35. Notes that the chickenpox virus might not even survive the mailing, so technically not effective. And buying a virus from someone on Facebook? Maybe not a good idea.

Varicella on Emedicine, http://bit.ly/tAXX3c

In otherwise healthy children aged 1-14 years, the mortality rate is estimated at 2 deaths per 100,000 cases. The case-fatality rate in the general population is 6.7 cases per 100,000 population.

Among children with leukemia, the mortality rate of varicella is 7%.

Varicella during pregnancy can cause various adverse outcomes for mother and infant, depending on the stage of pregnancy. Neonatal varicella mortality rates can reach 30%

CHOP (Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia) parent pack, http://bit.ly/s4CXU1

Of 1,000 people with chickenpox:

About 100 will require medical attention

About two will be hospitalized

About 50 will suffer from infected blisters; in some cases the bacterial infection is caused by group A streptococcus (GAS). When GAS enters the bloodstream, it can lead to a mild infection or, less commonly, a more severe situation such as necrotizing fasciitis, also known as "flesh-eating bacteria," or streptococcal toxic shock syndrome (STSS). Necrotizing fasciitis destroys muscles, fat, and skin tissue. STSS causes a rapid drop in blood pressure and organ failure. About 1,500 people die from GAS in the U.S. every year; some of these as a complication from chickenpox.

Other complications from chickenpox can include dehydration from vomiting or diarrhea, pneumonia, or swelling of the brain (known as encephalitis).

Before the vaccine about 50 children died each year from chickenpox infection or its complications; many of these were previously healthy children.

The vaccine

Of 1,000 children who get the vaccine:

700 to 900 will never get chickenpox; of the remaining 100 to 300 who may get chickenpox, the disease is typically less severe.

About 200 will have redness or soreness where the shot was given

Less than 50 will experience a mild rash up to one month after immunization

100 to 200 will have fever, about one of whom will experience a seizure related to the fever

Our time with Emmanuel

2011-11-05T23:35:00.001+01:00

Emmanuel left us this week to go to a more permanent home, with Pastor and Mrs. Jege, who care for the boys at the SIM/ECWA City Ministries Care Center in Gyero, about 40 minutes from here along a barely passable road. Ema had stayed with us for seven weeks. A lot of people ask us whether he improved in that time. Yes, but the changes were very subtle.

In the last week or two, Ema just started to play a bit. I handed him a toy dinosaur and instead of immediately dropping it, he first tried to eat it (maybe it looked like chicken!) then turned it over in his hand, examining it for a while. A couple of times we got into an exchange of flicked & throwing a carton top across the table at mealtime, to Barb’s dismay. Once, when he was up in the middle of the night, I handed him my cell phone with the flashlight on, and he seemed to try moving it around a bit. Finally, he gradually started picking things up, more or less at random, and throwing them. Sometimes it was when he seemed grumpy, but sometimes for fun? My slippers ended up in the toilet one day when someone left the door open!

Most of the time, Ema just wandered around or sat in a chair. He might just sit or stand still, he might be doing his repetitive hand motions, or he might make noises for hours. One of his noises may be a groan but doesn’t seem to be very distressed; it sounds like a car trying to start with a low battery. Another noise was his laughter, easier to tolerate though even that could get to be a bit much after a while. It did seem to me that he liked to hear the birds singing and sometimes enjoyed music.

Sometimes he would get on and off my lap over and over. Once I counted and found that he did this 50 times in an hour. He also learned to bring me his cup when he wanted water. I didn’t usually give him much at a time, since he might throw it somewhere after drinking a bit, so he would come to me over and over to get more. Actually, it was probably sometimes more a game to him than because of thirst.

Though he never learned to go toward the bathroom when he needed to, he did learn to use the toilet when we put him on it. He did this so quickly that he must have had prior experience and just needed to be oriented to our western-style toilet. He never did get used to our brushing his teeth—it always took two of us to do it. I did learn how to restrain him a bit better by the end, but still got scratched and pinched—never bitten!—and it was traumatic for him. The funny thing was that within a minute of finishing, he would seem to forget all about it.

The need to brush his teeth was emphasized by the dental work he ended up needing. While Dr. Maxfield had thought he could work under sedation with ketamine, it turned out that it barely slowed Ema down, so he needed full general anesthesia. He had to have 3 teeth extracted, including both lower front incisors, and had seven fillings. Dr. Maxfield did confirm that Ema was 15-16 years old based on his teeth, though he still looks more like a 6 year old.

One thing I will miss is the times we would go out to the bench swing at 5 in the evening and enjoy a little quiet time. I would try to read my Kindle and Ema would either get on and off my lap or go wandering around a little bit. I’m sure he really did enjoy that time outside the house in some way.

The other thing I will remember and miss most is the times when he would be happy for some reason (we never knew why, though sometimes it was music), and would sit and laugh on my lap and enjoy being tickled, kissed and cuddled. I just hope that he will get a lot of that one-on-one time in his new home, and also that he will be protected from the bullying that is so common among school age kids, even more in Nigeria than in the US.

Sauron, Saruman, and the Man of Lawlessness

2011-10-11T20:20:00.001+01:00

I read the Bible aloud to Luke each night at bedtime. We started with the simplest picture Bible when he was very little and after many other versions have reached the New Living Bible. Anyway, last night we were reading 2 Thessalonians 2, where Paul warns about the “lawless one” who will do great signs and wonders, yet lead the world astray into evil. It made sense to Luke after we talked about Sauron and Saruman, the Force in Star Wars, and C. S. Lewis’ The Last Battle. Luke then asked what the Middle Earth elves represented in the Bible … getting us into a discussion about allegory.

Emmanuel is growing more social day by day. He is starting to enjoy being hugged and tickled, sitting on my lap while we sing and clap (well, I clap) … “Old MacDonald” animal sounds seem to make him smile. At the same time, when not sitting in my lap he spends most of the day wandering around or sitting in a chair. Sometimes he’s quiet, but today he was groaning for hours, interspersed with some periods of laughter. We don’t know whether the groaning reflects distress or is a form of “singing” or what.

Ema has also figured out that if he brings his cup and puts it down near me, I will give him a little water. Today it must have been sort of a game for him, because he kept coming for refills long after I thought he must have had enough. It’s great to see him doing something goal-oriented.

I think Ema has sinusitis so we started giving him amoxicillin today. Fortunately, he doesn’t even seem to notice that we have sprinkled the powder into his food, otherwise we might have a real problem forcing medicine into him.

Ema goes to the dentist

2011-10-05T23:14:00.001+01:00

We took Emmanuel to see the dentist today. Dr. Jay Maxfield is a retired American dentist who comes to Nigeria a couple of times each year to work in the dental clinic at Evangel. The way things work, we had to go to the clinic to see him before we could even make an appointment, so we went this morning.

Jay was busy with a patient when we arrived, but one way Nigerian culture differs greatly from American culture is in the concept of privacy, including in medical situations. It’s quite normal for staff and even other patients to go in and out of exam rooms while the doctor is seeing a patient. If you really want to be undisturbed, you have to lock the door.

So when we arrived, Jay called us in to see what we wanted. An older, traditionally dressed Nigerian woman was in the chair with Jay bent over her, working. For about 15 minutes we talked with Jay about Emmanuel, about the clinic, who is being trained, and so on. Jay pointed out that there was a new dental chair but no working light, so he was glad to have a good headlamp, an advantage the regular clinic dentist did not have. Meanwhile he was struggling to remove a difficult, broken tooth from the woman’s mouth as she grimaced silently. Ema was well behaved, just standing and watching.

When the broken tooth was finally out and it was our turn, Jay wanted to actually see Ema’s mouth to get an idea of what kind of work would be needed. To accomplish this, I sat in the chair myself and wrapped my legs around Ema’s, grabbed his arms tightly, and hung on for dear life, hoping that the struggling, screaming boy would not twist me right off the chair. Jay finally did get a good enough peek and Ema didn’t destroy the dental mirror, so the exam was a success.
It turns out that Ema has one abscessed tooth that could be causing him pain. You would never know it, but it could be part of why he doesn’t like having his teeth brushed. Maybe. But I think he’s going to keep screaming even after his tooth is fixed. Anyway, the plan is to use ketamine (a safe anesthetic commonly used here for children) in the clinic rather than the operating room, if we can, and work on Ema sometime next week.

After all that, we made a quick visit to the pediatric ward and small clinic, where I had not been for the past four years, just to see how things are as I am thinking about how to do some medical work again. I could actually face the ward & clinic without cringing, so I’ve made some progress. However, the situation with the whole hospital including pediatrics is not very encouraging, as it has deteriorated in some ways over the past few years and is now almost in crisis according to some. Would I work there again? I don’t know yet.

Ema uses a fork!

2011-10-02T19:59:00.001+01:00

We had waffles tonight, as usual in our home on Sundays, so I took the opportunity to see if I could help Ema progress a bit in his eating behavior. So far, Barb has worked a lot to get him to take food on a fork without grabbing it either off the end of the fork or off the plate. Today I started by getting him to grasp the fork (with waffle) along with me and put it into his mouth. To my surprise, by the end of the meal he had progressed to picking up the fork off the plate and putting it into his own mouth! I still do have to hold his other hand to keep it from grabbing, and sometimes he still tries to grab the food at the end of the fork, but overall he made good progress.

We really wish he was making any progress at all in toilet behavior. Also, tooth-brushing is still a really bad experience for all of us. We hope he will eventually adjust to it.

Ema also seems to be getting a little bit more social. Sometimes he likes to sit on our laps for a long time and hold or play with our hands, good progress though it makes it hard for us to do anything else. A few times he has even had spells of laughing, once when we had some active music on and once when Luke was being silly for him.

He also has long periods when he just wanders around moaning and flapping his hands, apparently disturbed by something—hunger, tiredness, boredom, who knows? He still gets up in the middle of the night and wanders into the living room, where he usually just sits quietly. Last night he was sitting in front of the laptop, which had blinking lights.

Besides being a bit more social, Ema is also becoming a little more curious and active. He still does "nothing" most of the time, but sometimes he touches things, especially when we're not watching. He threw his shoes into the empty bathtub last night, and pulled an empty 7-Up bottle out of a crate, proving that we do have to keep an eye on him 24/7!

Ema comes to the Blyth family

2011-09-27T23:12:00.001+01:00

Emmanuel (Ema for short) has been with us for 12 days now. For those who don’t know about him, he is 15 years old, looks like a very thin 7 year old, and is something like autistic. He was abandoned when he was two years old and lived alone in the bush for twelve years—we’re pretty sure he could not have made it without a little help from someone, but supposedly he just cared for himself. The whole story is described by SIM nurse Kelly Malloy’s “Emmanuel—Rescued After 13 Years in the Bush.”

Ema has no speech and does not appear to understand anything except perhaps his name, although he can hear. He shows very little interest in objects or people, but has already been making some progress in those areas. We'll talk about that more later on. In fact, he has virtually no activities other than eating and flapping his hands. Sometimes he laughs, other times he groans. Overall, though, he seems to be pretty contented. With that background, here is today’s story:

Our lives are changing somewhat now that Ema is here. I got up a little early since Ema was already in the living room; we have to listen for the slightest noise like a bumped chair to know he's out of bed. It was Barb's shopping morning so I stayed home with Ema instead of going to work. I can do the same work at home, anyway. But Luke's teacher did not show up, so I had to come up with some homeschool activities for Luke as well. I got to work about noon.

Ema's multi-purpose therapist Lynsey went to the house for a session at 3 pm, but it seems Ema was not in a mood to do anything. I gave Simon, Luke's physical therapist a ride to our house after work at 4pm, and we all worked through some new exercises for an hour. After that, I took Ema outside—a new routine to get him out of Barb's way while she cooks dinner.
We walked around the compound road once (while I read my Kindle!) then sat in a garden swing for half an hour while he just sat on my lap, pulled at my face and glasses, and was quiet for periods of time. I tried reading at first, but gave up and enjoyed the quiet, the clouds, and the cool breeze. Not many such beautiful afternoons here as this one.

Simon had dinner with us, with Luke chattering constantly throughout--he gets more voluble with guests around. Then we played a round of Carcassonne, taking longer than I had expected and pushing the kids 45 minutes past their bedtimes. I could barely contain Ema as we brushed his teeth--he's incredibly agile and strong when he wants to escape, and his limbs are so thin that it's hard to get a grip on them. One good thing, though, is that Ema goes to bed without any problem whatsoever. Anyway, they're finally both asleep and it's nearly time for us to follow. Even I the late owl am going to bed earlier now that we have Ema!

Are Religious Beliefs Inherently Irrational?

2011-06-08T08:39:00.010+01:00

This is a discussion that grew out of comments on an article I posted on my Facebook page. I've moved it here to the blog because the Facebook wall is not a good place for ongoing discussions. The original article was

Scientific Conspiracy Theories: A Veneer for Irrational Beliefs | The BioLogos Forum

Science involves a great deal of humility, because most new ideas, even clever ones, turn out to be wrong. Science is predisposed to disbelief....

about which I commented "Interesting, short post on "denialism" in science, such as those who deny that HIV causes AIDS. Doesn't really address how these movements get started or how they're maintained despite massive, contrary evidence. I didn't find the comment section very useful, so you can save some time ..."

A comment by Michael Peraino sparked the discussion about whether religious beliefs are another form of baseless irrationality. I'll include the existing comments in this post, and then we can continue further discussion in the blog comments.

Michael Peraino I am curious, what is the difference between irrational beliefs that are pseudo-science and those that are religious? Both are based on shaky evidence and seem to cause a devotion to waste time on a subject that those that don't share the belief find bizarre.

Mike Blyth Ah, I expected you to say something like that. Well, you may not like religious beliefs or think they're grounded, but they don't at all fit the category discussed in this article, which is basically defined by a small minority position on a scientific question held against strong evidence and supported by weak if any evidence.

Most religious beliefs are in a different domain than (natural) science and are thus not in conflict. Certain ones such as creation stories or theories of illness causation may be contrary to science but their adherents do not try to twist science to prove them, but simply accept them. "Creation science" is the one example I can think of that, the way it's seen by many, fits in this category of scientific conspiracy theory.

Susan Evertz Mike, really liked your article, "Scientific Conspiracy Theories.."

Michael Peraino I actually thought the article was just fine, perhaps placed on that site to elicit my exact question. I don't agree with your different domain assertion. After all, the natural world would be far different with a deity than without. There is a conflict and most people realize that if they think about it and are honest with themselves. If it were the case that adherents would keep the two separate and admit that they check their brain at the door when they go into church/temple, no problem. This is not the case however and the evidence is the number of people that believe in creation but do not believe in evolution by natural selection and this is due to an effort by evangelical groups in particular to discredit science. I know you are not one of those, but don't you find that as science shows us the amazing truth of the universe that we formerly relied on myth to explain, we must question what is use of keeping these 'beliefs' around? Intellectually, are you really comfortable stating that you just don't need any evidence to believe in your particular faith? To me, that is exactly the same as the folks in the article.

David Blyth Michael (both of you), let's ignore religion for a second and get back to the original question. How do movements like this get started?

IMHO, there's not any one cause - it's a collection of different issues. These include (but are not limited to):

Seeing is believing. "I didn't see man land on the moon so they didn't."
This threatens my key value. "HIV can't cause AIDS as it reflects on my view of African Morality." BTW, denial is a stage of many types of grieving - it's not just limited to religious objections.
I don't trust authority. "The US government withheld information on JFK's assassination so all US commission reports are wrong." This gets into a grey area (sometimes the US government is in fact wrong) but it's a fallacy to believe that the government is wrong all the time when they're only wrong some of the time (no one's perfect).
Ego. AKA, pushing your own agenda. "Polio vaccine causes autism".

And so on. Birds of a feather flock together, so possibly the denial movements get started when

Members of Group "A" (seeing is believing) meet to reinforce each other
Members of Group "A" are also members of Group "B" (I don't trust Authority).
The two groups feed off each other and start a grass-roots movement.
The grass-roots of A & B run into the astro-turfing of Group "D" (pushing your own agenda).
And a major ground-swell is born.

Just an idea....

Michael Peraino: David, your logic is sound. I just think it should be extended :). Michael Shermer just released a new book that I would love to read on his research into what causes belief in the brain. The religion aspect is important because in context, that is the stated purpose of the website. The source of anything must always be examined. It is not that I simply wanted to take a pot shot at religion. I do assert that it should be a topic of debate and just as we should defend our beliefs in other areas, religion should not get a free ride. I would hypothesize that the same reasons you stated above can be traced through the beginnings of every religion.

David Blyth => Michael P....

David, your logic is sound.

It can happen from time-to-time... ;)

I would hypothesize that the same reasons you stated above can be traced through the beginnings of every religion.

My brother and I are probably in the same religious ballpark (fancy that!) but I've always been interested in the origins of religion. Even if there is no God (or gods), why do humans believe in any religion?

What evolutionary advantage is gained by believing in religion? Humans have been doing so for at least 25,000 years so so. Why are we doing it?

Michael Peraino: David, I think that you answer most of your questions. Your brother and you have similar religious ideas because, more than likely, your parents passed them to you. Likely, if you were born in a Muslim country, you would be Muslim. Why should this be so?

I think there are evolutionary actions at play in religions. Certain traits exist in the surviving/popular religious that have enabled them to win out over others. Some of these would be 'unquestionable belief', promise of an afterlife/meaning for this life, and strong dislike/hatred for non-believers/different believers. Primary infection starts young and since it is passed by those in a position of trust, the ideas stick long after the rational mind has dismissed the ideas as nonsense. Strong social stigmas are in place to keep the faithful faithful.

Bill Beckon: I haven't read Shermer's book, but I doubt he will find a clear cause for religion in the brain (although a predisposition, quite likely). Rather, the origin of religions is most likely through social evolution, arising as humans began to live in larger groups than the small bands of related hunter-gatherers for which our brains adapted. Those larger groups generated new group selection pressures that exactly predict the nature, and even the specific theologies of religions. In short, religions were an inevitable outcome of the invention of agriculture.

David Blyth: Michael P,

Your brother and you have similar religious ideas because, more than likely, your parents passed them to you

...Perish the thought that we had good parents. ;) No, seriously. Dad's still a very intelligent thinking scientist and deeply religious man. Mom was a very intelligent feeling artist - opposites attract - and deeply religious woman.

But onto the origins of religion....

IMHO none of your ideas are good reasons for why the _first_ people who got religion got religion. What was in it for them?

I think folks got religion because humans perceive something odd in how the universe is constructed. See also Roger Penrose, who has some atheistic ideas up this alley.

Michael Peraino: As the species evolved to develop brains that were capable of more than what is required to fulfill our base needs, we began to wonder about such things as why we are here, where did we come from, what are those glowing dots in the sky at night? What was in it for them? Same as today, it answers questions and it makes people comfortable to have answers. That is still one of the big marketing ploys of modern religions. Come to us, we have the answer.

Just a note, I wasn't making a value judgment on your parents :). I was just stating that most get the religion of their family, culture and epoch.

Bill Beckon Michael doesn't have a brother, David.

David, Michael's answer is the usual one, but there is another, I think more powerful factor. Religion is a group selected trait, like militarism. It benefits the larger group at a cost (or at least risk) to the individual, enabling the group to have a competitive advantage compared to other groups. Once one group adopts militarism, then other adjacent groups must also, or they get wiped out. The same with religion except that with religion, you can get wiped out by conversion as well as conquest.

David Blyth: Bill, Michael certainly has a brother. So do I.

On "how did religion start". I've heard similar theories before and find them very unsatisfactory. That is, I have problems with them even if I assume that there is no God.

-- end of comments on Facebook --

NB: I may be rather strict in vetting comments to this post, since it's a topic that can quickly attract a lot of comments and expand outward. So please keep comments to the issue of the inherent rationality or lack thereof of religion in general and not, for example, on why one religion is better than another, why revelation trumps reason, and so on. Fine topics, but not for this post.

Security Musings

2011-02-15T22:30:00.002+01:00

Jos has been in the news somewhat, especially at the end of December and beginning of January, but for the wrong reasons: more violence. You may have heard of the multiple bombs that exploded on Christmas Eve and of the communal violence that ensued. In our own neighborhood, as in most of the city, things have been completely quiet, to the point that it’s hard to believe that burning and killing is going on a few miles away.
That’s life in the city, I suppose: one part can be suffering while the rest goes on as usual. Well, not quite as usual in the case of Jos—there has been a great increase in tension and polarization even in areas not directly affected. A few weeks ago, we tried to go out for dinner at 6:30 PM but discovered that our three first choices were all shuttered up, and virtually no traffic was on the streets. A map has also been sent out showing us “no-go” areas of the city, which divided increasingly strictly.
The unrest has been controlled for the past two or three weeks, although some incident broke out today; we haven’t learned the details yet. Part of my role in such situations is to facilitate communication among the members and leaders of the various missions, which keeps me fairly busy when peace breaks down. Peacemaking efforts are all the more important, even as they become more difficult.

A New Reason for Variety

I took a different route home from the office yesterday. It only added a minute or two to the travel time, which is just six or seven minutes in the first place. It was the first time I had varied my routine for this purpose, though. Our mission’s security committee, including me, has for the past few years routinely included the advice to make one’s daily routines unpredictable by varying the time, route, mode of transportation, and so on. It’s one of the basic precautions against kidnapping and targeted robbery.
I had no particular reason to do this yesterday—no missionaries or other expatriates have been kidnapped in Jos—but I thought I might as well get into the habit, especially as unrest and lawlessness have been growing in the country over the past few years. My time of leaving the office is already unpredictable, so I’m fine on that count.

A New Reason for Bible Memorization

At our SIM office morning devotion yesterday, this week’s leader, a Nigerian brother, made each of us in turn quote a Bible verse from memory. He said he was going to continue that for the rest of the week. I don’t really like that because, though I know plenty of verses, I can never think of one on the spur of the moment. Still, I thought it was a good idea and would help us all to improve our focus on God’s word and hammer it a bit more solidly into our hearts.
The kicker, though, was when the leader said, “Do you know why I want you to practice your verses? You could get stopped by hooligans and have to prove that you’re a Christian, otherwise they could beat or kill you. With all that anxiety, you might have a hard time remembering, so you should practice. One of the guys on my street had that happen, but fortunately a neighbor came to his rescue.” That’s certainly a compelling reason for memorization, isn’t it?
This has made me think that we should really work with Luke on memorizing the Lord’s Prayer and 23rd Psalm, which are often used in this way by the gangs. We as Turawa (white people) would not be targeted, but Luke could be. I think I’ll also add a verse I read today, Psalm 71:4, “Deliver me, O my God, from the hand of the wicked, from the grasp of evil and cruel men.” Unfortunately, I think the irony would be lost on these evil and cruel young men, even if I could remember the verse at the right time.

Christians Oppose Koran Burning: An Open Letter to Our Muslim Friends

2010-09-09T11:04:00.004+01:00

This is a response to the blog article Florida Burning by Muqtedar Khan on altmuslim.com. The article is worth reading in whole, but the overall idea is that the idea of burning Korans (as planned in a small church in Florida) is torture to Muslims. Khan says,

I am amazed at how millions of Americans who are decent and honorable can watch this happen. No matter how ugly the act the constitution permits this, is not an acceptable excuse. The constitution does not permit this. The constitution forbids cruel and unusual punishment. For Muslims this is worse than torture.

I am a Christian, active in my faith, and can assure you that the vast majority of Christians, including the more religious and conservative ones, are completely opposed to burning Korans and to any other actions that are insulting or provocative to our Muslim friends. We recognize that this would not only be imprudent, but contrary to our faith.

Many Christian individuals and leaders have spoken out already, as you will see if you just Google “Christian leaders oppose Koran burning,” check out blogs and Christian sites or even Facebook.

For example, Chuck Colson, certainly a prominent Christian leader and spokesperson, has said, “I find Jones’s plan to burn the Koran foolish and contemptible.” Dr. John Rankin, president of the Theological Education Institute, has not only spoken out against the planned burning but has called on the President to oppose it, and is organizing a counter-demonstration. See revjohnrankin.blogspot.com. The Vatican called the plan “an outrageous and grave gesture against a book considered sacred by a religious community.” Time magazine features an article “Gainesville Turns Against a Book-Burning Pastor.” There are many, many more such statements easily found.

Therefore, I think it is important for our Muslim friends to look at this incident in context, as the plan of one pastor in one small church in a country of 300 million people, who is vigorously opposed by almost the entire Christian church and most of the nation.

I very much appreciate the introduction to your piece, where you say,

If Muslims react with anger and indiscriminate violence to a proposed Qur'an burning, then one of promoter Terry Jones’ goals will be fulfilled. Be patient, encourage everyone to be patient, let Terry Jones enjoy the monopoly on barbarity for a while.

It is also quite insightful that you reflect on the fact that this dreadful plan is in part a response to past behavior of some Muslims:

In the past few years alone so many churches have been desecrated in the Muslim world, many missionaries were murdered, nuns stabbed to death and the worst of all, the 1500 year old Buddhas of Bamiyan were intentionally dynamited.

Extreme and hateful behavior on either side makes it difficult for those who would live in peace and share our beliefs in true dialog rather than with swords, book burnings, and bombs. Thank you for your sensible advice and counsel, “Recognize this provocation for what it is and ignore it. And remember do not let this become a source for anger and hatred towards Christians.”

You, our Muslim friends and neighbors, may have the impression that not enough is being done. However, do not believe or say that Christians or Americans in general are just standing by and watching this happen. That belief plays into the hands of those who would incite hatred and violence between us. We understand and agree with the sentiments of “Do not insult their Gods, lest out of ignorance they insult Allah.” Please, as Muqtedar Khan says, do not be manipulated by those who want to use the incident for their own ends.

God groaning from within the heart of the world

2010-05-26T13:24:00.007+01:00

“Christian prayer is at its most characteristic when we find ourselves caught in the overlap of the ages, part of the creation that aches for new birth.

“And the strange new promise, the point at which Christian prayer is marked out over against pantheism and Deism and a good deal else besides, is that, by the Spirit, God himself is groaning from within the heart of the world, because God himself, by the Spirit, dwells in our hearts as we resonate with the pain of the world.”

From Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense by N. T. Wright.

Finding free books for the Kindle reader

2010-04-22T19:10:00.005+01:00

As I write this, the Kindle version of The Joy of Pregnancy is free at Amazon and the rating of 4.5 our of 5 stars by 25 users makes me think that it would be worth considering—if I wanted a book on the topic! I didn’t download that one, but I did download G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and Skye Jethani’s The Divine Commodity: Discovering a Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity, all for free!

You don’t have to own a Kindle in order to read free (or purchased) books in that format. Amazon offers free readers that work on PC, Mac, Blackberry, iPad, and iPhone (no Linux yet). Just go to the Free Reading Apps page or, if that link is broken, go to Amazon, click on Kindle and then on Kindle Store, and you should see the links in the menu to the reader apps.
There are many ways to find free books for the Kindle. For one thing, it can read books in the unprotected Mobibooks format (mobi or prc file extensions) which you can find easily online (just search for “free ebooks”). The quality of these varies, of course.

Amazon also “sells” many Kindle books free (cost = $0.00) or nearly free (cost = $0.01 to $0.99). Many of these are public domain titles that you can get free elsewhere anyway, but sometimes even those are better-formatted in the Amazon store than elsewhere. A quick way to find some of these, anyway, is the link to Free Book Collections on the main page of the Kindle Store – Books page. Examples include works by G. K. Chesterton, Jane Austen, Leo Tolstoy, Willa Cather, and so on. Just reading these could keep you going the rest of your life.

Amazon also offers some current books free in the Kindle version for short periods. The book on pregnancy is an example. One way to find them is to go to the Kindle store, do a search (publisher, title, author, subject, or whatever), then sort the results by price. See blog post “How to Find Free Christian Kindle eBooks” by Jeff Brewer.

You can also check the Limited-time Promotional Offers link found inside the Free Book Collections page. Be sure to notice, on the left side of the page, the list of topics to choose from. The cover images (you can exclude a book by its cover) and rating system (stars) can help you glance through the list quickly looking for the one or two candidates you might want to read. You can filter the list to show only books with a certain number of reader-review stars, if you want, by clicking on the appropriate line under “Avg. Customer Review.” Although this saves you from seeing all the poorly-rated titles, it also means you won’t see the ones that have not been rated at all.

Another tool to help you find the best titles in the shortest time is the “Sort by” tool at the top-right of the Amazon listing. Choose “Bestselling” and see which titles in your search are being downloaded the most, or “Avg. Customer Review” to see which have received the most stars, while not excluding titles that have not been reviewed. Of course, both the sort feature and the customer review (star) filter are invaluable when searching for any items on Amazon, not only Kindle books.

Another method for finding bargain Kindle books is to check the hourly-updated Bestsellers list, also on the main page of the Kindle Store. Since lots of people are interested in getting free books, those titles tend to end up on the bestsellers list for a time. Going even further, you can get news feeds for the Bestsellers and use your news reader (I like Google Reader) to show you the latest titles in a brief list format that contains the title and price.

A final warning, though. Someone recently pointed out to me that the real price of a book is generally the time you spend reading it. It’s tempting for us bargain hunters to collect free books, but it’s not a real bargain to spend several days of free time or study time reading a book just because it is free! Still, there are so many classics available free that perhaps a side effect of the ebook trend will be that we begin reading and valuing those more highly instead of only looking for the latest titles.

Fun with 3-D glasses

2010-04-08T01:08:00.001+01:00

We saw How to Train Your Dragon in 3-D at a theater today, and kept the 3-D glasses to experiment with. (Luke will be happy to use them as sunglasses when we return to Jos.) Next time you see a 3-D movie, keep those glasses and try some things to see how they work.

If you’ve played with polarized sunglasses or polarizing photo filters before, you might have some expectations, as I did, about how these glasses would work. For example, you might expect the left lens to darken a blue sky at one angle, and the right at an angle 90-degrees from the first. Try it and see. Try these other experiments, too, which work best when looking into a fairly bright, featureless view such as the sky or bright wall.

Put on one pair of 3-D glasses, then look through another pair, just as if you were wearing two pairs one in front of the other. Do you see any difference when looking through the right or left eye?
Rotate the glasses you’re holding, keeping the bows pointed toward you (i.e., keeping the lenses in the same plane as the ones you’re wearing). Any differences?
Now flip the second pair of glasses back-to-front so that you’re looking through them as if they were on a person looking at you. Again, close one eye and then the other, and look through the both pairs of lenses. Do both right and left lenses still appear tinted?
With the second pair of glasses still back-to-front, rotate them 90-degrees as in the second step. What happens now?
Bring the back-to-front glasses very near one of the lenses you’re wearing, and view a bright scene while rotating the lens.
Wearing just the one pair of glasses, look into a mirror, again closing one eye and then the other.

Have you figured out what’s going on? I’m catching on to the way circular polarization is used, but I still don’t understand why there it makes such a difference whether you look through the lenses in one direction (front-to-back) or the other (back-to-front).

Recent articles on the conflict in Jos

2010-04-07T04:27:00.004+01:00

There was another incident in Jos yesterday, with at least one person killed (one article says three). Apparently, the fighting was stopped quickly by the police. In my browsing today, I found a few interesting articles relating to the situation.

Muhammad Al-Ghazali writes in an article in the Daily Trust that the press is prejudiced against Islam, overlooking all the non-Muslim terrorists, among which he includes the “Christian” IRA in Ireland and George Washington fighting the British. He points to the attack this week by a Christian taxi driver who drive his car through a barrier and into a plane at the Calabar airport, seeming to wonder why this incident is not considered as Christian terrorism. (Reuters reported that the man “was heard yelling that all Nigerians were sinners and must repent or perish.”) Al-Ghazali blames Christians for starting the fighting in Jos in January and says that the Muslims were simply retaliating when they massacred a whole village in March. The main point of the article is not very clear, but it appears to be that Nigeria is suffering because the press (and leaders?) are “skewed” against the North and Muslims, thus unable to think fairly about the whole country.

The leader of the Ahmadiyya sect in Nigeria, Dr. Mashuud Adenrele Fashola, was interviewed in the Daily Champion. He discusses the causes of the crisis, laying the blame mainly on the failure of the Nigerian government to provide adequate security to its citizens. While saying that the matter is not religious but “is the fight over material things” (the usual issues of indigene-vs.-settler and herder-vs.-farmer), he does highlight the importance of religion as well. He says that religion is supposed to unite and guide, having the “objective of developing in us, righteousness, love, understanding, brotherhood, self-less sacrifice, kind-heartedness and service to humanity.” He calls on religious leaders on both sides to stand for justice, including handing over wrong-doers to the authorities rather than protecting them.

In Jihad Watch, Hugh Fitzgerald has written a long commentary, “That ‘Communal Violence’ In Nigeria, That ‘Civil War’ In the Sudan.” As expected, he takes the opposite viewpoint from Al-Ghazali’s above, and condemns the press for failing to recognize or report the jihadist context of the conflict in Nigeria, Sudan, and elsewhere. Thus the news reports are at pains to call the conflicts in those areas anything but religious. Fitzgerald, of course, believes that they are religious at the core, and that neglecting this fact is dangerous. He goes back to Dan Fodio, the famous Muslim reformist and jihad leader, and to the Biafran war, which he claims was also a Muslim-Christian struggle (any comments on that?).

Finally, there is an interesting report Global Restrictions on Religion published by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life some months ago. The report looks at two dimensions of restrictions on religion, “social hostility” and “government restrictions.” The report says, “The Pew Forum’s Social Hostilities Index is a measure of concrete, hostile actions that effectively hinder the religious activities of the targeted individuals or groups.” Nigeria is an example of a country where there is high social hostility though little government restriction of either Christianity or Islam. In fact, Nigeria is rated as the second highest in social hostility (after Somalia) in all of sub-Saharan Africa, and 15th highest out of all 198 countries ranked. It would be interesting to compare these results with similar measures from, say, 40 or 50 years ago. I wonder whether some of the reluctance to accept the religious dimensions of the current conflict result from viewing the issue from a perspective of several decades ago rather than today’s (more polarized?) situation.

Examples of how countries were rated on the two indices

		Social Hostility
		Low	High
Government Restrictions	Low	Japan, Brazil	Mexico, Nigeria
	High	Viet Nam, China	India, Pakistan, Egypt

Good news from Jos –- peacemakers help defuse a conflict

2010-04-03T18:48:00.001+01:00

Our friend Danny McCain, in his blog Serpents and Doves, tells a very encouraging story of how a crisis was defused last week in Jos. It seems some youths at a football match attacked a young man of the other religion, sparking groups of youth on both sides to gather and prepare for fighting. A pastor who has been involved in peace-making efforts, however, was able to get in touch with the leaders of both Christian and Muslim youth and convince them to restrain their “boys.” He was able to do that because he had developed relationships with both sides over the past months, had “moral capital,” and was trusted. What a great story, and exactly what we need to keep praying for regarding Jos and Nigeria. The alternatives are too horrible to contemplate.

Watching the World: The debate over the existence or possibility of moderate Islam

2010-03-23T05:04:00.001+01:00

Everyone probably understands by now that most Muslims are not extremists and are interested in living out their lives in peace. A debate continues, though, over whether there is enough flexibility in the core theology and politics of Islam itself to create (or sustain, depending on your point of view) a "moderate" form, "a version of Islam that does not teach that believers must make war against unbelievers and subjugate them under the rule of Islamic law." This piece by Robert Spencer is a useful addition to that debate. Spencer is answering critic John Guardiano. Actually, I don’t think that Guardiano’s critique is that interesting, but taken together with Spencer’s reply and the references to Daniel Pipes and others, there is enough here to introduce you to the debate in an informed way.

Does moderate Islam exist? A reply to John Guardiano (March 2010)

See Jos, Nigeria and surroundings on Google Earth

2010-03-14T16:49:00.001+01:00

(reposted from my old blog site; first posted 5 Oct 2008)

Until earlier this year, you would not see much if you looked for Jos on Google Earth. It was barely more than a smudge on the very low resolution satellite photos. That has changed, though — now you can count the trees in our yard and see the lines on the tennis court by our house. By loading the Jos data file for Google Earth I’ve made, you can see (in Google Earth) many of the main places in Jos and surrounds: the university, the old, burned out market, the zoo, Hillcrest school, Miango, Bezer home, and many other sites. (Unfortunately, the elevation information isn’t accurate, so you won’t see many of the hills in 3-D.)

If you already have Google Earth installed on your computer, you can simply click on the link above and choose to run the file with Google Earth, or to save the file somewhere and then click on it later to load it into Google Earth.

If you don’t yet have Google Earth, you can get it (free) athttp://earth.google.com/download-earth.html. I think it’s about 12 MB in size. The program runs best on a high-speed connection, since it’s constantly downloading photo views as you move around, but you can probably get some use from it even with a dial-up connection.

Once you’re up and running with the Jos data file, you can use the sidebar controls to turn on or off the various features. For example, you can turn off all the roads, or turn off everything and then select individual features to see. You can double-click on the place marks to go directly to them. Use the mouse to drag the view, the shift-right-arrow and shift-left arrow to rotate, and the shift-up-arrow and shift-down-arrow to tilt the view. You can zoom with the mouse wheel or the page-up and page-down keys. Check the complete list of keyboard shortcuts or view the users’ guide.

Two warnings: first, Google Earth can be very addicting! You can go view the landscape and sites anywhere in the world. Want to see what Kabul looks like? Just type “Kabul” into the search box and off you go. Zoom, pan, tilt, view the hills and roads … and before you know it your evening is gone. The second warning is that all this does take up bandwidth. It probably won’t make a difference unless you’re somewhere like Nigeria where the connections are very expensive. The good news is that Google Earth saves the images onto your computer, so you can go back and see them again without having to download them again.

Have fun!

Ushahidi to map conflict in Jos, Nigeria

2010-03-10T16:14:00.001+01:00

I’ve been interested in Ushahidi for some time now but had never gotten around to installing it. If you haven’t heard of it yet, Ushahidi is a web-based, community-oriented tool for mapping events. It has been used for tracking civil unrest, events related to the recent earthquakes in Chile and Haiti, and so on.

I finally did set up a test installation a few weeks ago, just in time for the latest outbreak of violence around Jos. You can see it at here. The killings this week were south of Jos. I still have not figured out how to connect email to the Ushahidi server, so it is not receiving alerts or sending them out. Also, there is no mobile phone connection so it’s not receiving text alerts. Anyone who wants to help set these up would be welcome.

I have also set up a news feed to gather from many sources news stories related to the conflict centered in Jos. I’ve used Yahoo Pipes to pull in the headlines from CNN, Reuters, al Jazeera, AllAfrica.com, and so on, then extracted the ones dealing with the Jos situation. You can view the stories or use the (RSS) news feed to put the headlines into your favorite news viewer such as Google Reader.

Pray for Christians under attack in Jos

2010-03-08T23:43:00.003+01:00

Another massacre raises the stakes as Nigerian Christians face temptation of hatred and revenge

“Be alert and always keep on praying for all the saints.”

In the early hours yesterday, a large group of militants attacked settlements near Jos, killing at least 500 people, largely the elderly, women, and children, who were unable to run away. The victims were hacked to pieces, burned or bludgeoned. The inhabitants were mostly Christians of the Berom tribe, and it is widely assumed that the attackers were Muslim Fulanis. While religion is far more important in this conflict than the major news services will admit (they prefer to characterize it as a dispute over resources), there is no doubt that tribalism is also a major factor.

Two months ago, during widespread riots in the area, a similar incident was reported not far from this one (Massacre at Kuru Jenta/Kuru Karama; see especially the update at the end of the article). That time it was Muslims who were the victims and, again presumably, Christians were the attackers.

The causes of the conflict are very complex, and certainly go beyond a simple jihad by the northern Hausa-Fulani Muslims against the Christian tribes of Plateau state. While the news media apparently want to deny the importance of religion, some Christian groups speak as if the fighting is a one-sided persecution of Christians. Neither is true.

As Barb and I have been speaking in our supporting churches in California, we have asked people to pray for the situation in Nigeria and especially around Jos. We need to pray in particular that the government will carry out its divinely-appointed responsibility of enforcing law and order, protecting the innocent and punishing violence.

There is a bigger threat to Nigerian Christians than persecution, however. It is the temptation toward hatred and violence. This, I believe, is the threat we should should be fervently praying about. After the January riots, I wrote a blog entry titled Time to Condemn Murder, saying that Christians, especially leaders, must unconditionally condemn the killing of innocents.

There are some voices calling on Nigerian Christians to follow the commands and example of Jesus in forgiving and loving their enemies. The message is not popular, and the voices are a minority, but they are there. In “KAIROS” NIGERIA: A Prayerful Call to Nigerian Christian Leaders (2006), prominent Christian leaders called on the Church to confront this problem head on and to avoid the trap of violence, saying

Christians killing Muslims is most certainly not the way of the Cross! Only we, Christian leaders, can prevent it.

Is this [call for revenge] not precisely what calls for Bible-based and Christ-centred leadership from us? “Fire for Fire” is not a quotation from the Bible. “An eye for an eye” was what the Law of Moses taught, but we are New Testament Christians. Should we not rather cast our vote with the Jesus Christ of the Gospels? Have we really tried Him and found Him wanting? If that is so, why do we still continue to be Christians? The real question is whether we think Jesus Christ wants us to win them or to kill them!

Professor Danny McCain, at the Byang Kato Lecture Series at Jos ECWA Theological Seminary last month, said,

I believe it is time for there to be a resurrection of our Christian prophets. They must declare unambiguously what God says about obedience and the consequences of disobedience. And they need to be specific in what it means to obey Jesus’ teachings about violence, retaliation and forgiveness. …

I believe it is time for our pastors and Christian leaders to become concerned about our combined Christian testimony and teach our people that every action and reaction they take is confirming or reversing the image of Christianity in the minds of our Muslim friends.

Reflections on the Christian Responses to Three Jos Crises (2010)

Professor McCain’s paper is very valuable reading not only for Nigerians but for Christians everywhere who are faced with or concerned about persecution. He not only spells out the biblical position on injustice, defense, revenge, and violence, but also gives suggestions about how we should respond, including

We must rely on authorities for justice and not take it into our own hands
We must be willing to suffer unjustly rather than disobey God’s commands
We must develop genuine relationships
We need positive actions, not just defensive dialogue
We must engage in practical training, especially for our youth, in how to respond to violence

The violence in Jos is an example of how our battle is not against “flesh and blood” but spiritual powers. We certainly need to pray for peace and for physical protection of the Christians there, but we also need to be aware of the spiritual battle for the hearts of Christians, and we must pray that they will be strengthened to obey and to shine as a witness to the Gospel and not as another example of a cycle of violence.

Watching the world: Which way is Turkey going?

2010-03-02T19:10:00.002+01:00

This entry marks something of a new side of this blog, as I comment on articles and issues in our current world and not necessarily in Nigeria.

Turkey is of great importance to Europe and the West, though I rarely pay enough attention to what's going on there. A major tension is between its idea of a secular government on the one hand and Islamist forces on the other, striving for an Islamic republic. Of course, Turkey is trying to join the EU and is strategically located on the border between Europe and the Middle East. The article Crisis in Turkey by Daniel Pipes explains this conflict and highlights the recent events also covered in the NY Times article today, "Army Ebbs, and Power Realigns in Turkey."

Though Turkey has a secular (not Muslim) constitution and is supposed to be religiously neutral, there is still considerable hostility not only toward those who would spread the gospel there, but also toward historic Christian communities that have lived in the area since before Islam even began. See The Persecution of Christians in Turkey and Compass Direct News for more information.

(Map from Compass Direct News)

Magic, the occult and power struggle in Nigeria

2010-02-23T02:55:00.001+01:00

This article by Johannes Harnischfeger describes the deadly seriousness of the occult (witches, magic, witch hunts, and so on) in Nigerian society. It also reflects the decay of the country's morale. The support of sharia law in northern Nigeria is seen as in part an attempt by Muslims to respond to the resurgence of the occult with its destabilization of the existing order.

Friend Paul Todd comments, "An interesting paper and a lot that is transferable northwards. I have been looking at Pentecostalism and seeing how various scholars have pointed out just how Pentecostals address some of these same issues. My impression is that this is something SIM missionaries, with the exception of Titcombe, and ECWA as a whole have failed to do. I also came across the same author in a paper he wrote arguing that one of the main reasons for Islam spreading in Gombe State, is that the Christians have failed to agree among themselves about land & ethnic issues. Muslims are thus free to exploit the Christian divisions to their own advantage. Definitely a perceptive scholar, who is worth keeping a look out for."

State Decline and the Return of Occult Powers: The Case of Prophet Eddy in Nigeria
Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft
Volume 1, Number 1, Summer 2006
E-ISSN: 1940-5111 Print ISSN: 1556-8547
DOI: 10.1353/mrw.0.0024
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/magic_ritual_and_witchcraft/v001/1.1.harnischfeger.html

Time to Condemn Murder

2010-01-30T23:37:00.000+01:00

True followers of Christ must unite to condemn murder. While the Church has sometimes divided over what constitutes “just war,” acceptable “collateral damage” and defensive measures, there is no room for argument or controversy when it comes to condemnation of murder, the intentional killing of those who are innocent.

In the past week, as I’ve followed the news of the fighting in Jos, I’ve been feeling almost ashamed of being known as “a Christian” in Nigeria. Not that I am ashamed of Jesus Christ, or of being his follower. I am not ashamed of my true Christian brothers and sisters who also love and follow Christ—indeed I am proud of the way they have stood firm in their faith while enduring violent persecution, in many cases to the point of death. Nor am I ashamed because some of my fellow Christians have forcefully defended their homes and their families. Although there are voices arguing for radical pacifism, I don’t think that way myself or expect the Church in Nigeria to be pacifists.

No, what appalls me is the image of murder and atrocities by some who call themselves Christians. What appalls me is stories of women and children being hacked and burned, people dragged out of cars and beaten to death. Any given story may be true or only a rumor, but having gone through similar riots in 2001 and 2008, I know beyond doubt that such systematic violence and murder does occur.

As in 2001 and 2008, the rioting last week began in Jos. The origins were disputed. As the conflict spread from Jos to outlying rural areas, horrifying reports. Not just stories of “gangs of youths” fighting each other, but people slaughtering whole groups of innocents. A missionary reported youths setting fire to huts and “cutting down” the residents. Another person in a nearby area, concerned about the workers on her farm, wrote

According to reports, all of the Muslim houses in Kuru were burnt, and most of the Muslims were killed. Only a few are still alive. … At Kuru, there was not a fight between groups, as had been the case in Jos. Muslim inhabitants were rounded up and shot or burnt in their houses. As I said, I have yet to see for myself, but I received the same report from both Muslim and Christian staff and have no reason to doubt its veracity. Only that I am not sure of the details of the exact number killed. (emphasis added)

Eyewitnesses in the report published by Human Rights Watch describe the murder of women and children—burned in mosques and homes, shot, cut in pieces by machetes. A Christian pastor who tried to intervene was beaten.

Are these stories true? It is possible that the specific stories are biased or untrue. It is almost certain that various groups manipulate the news to their own advantage. However, specific incidents and numbers of people killed are beside the point. The murder of even a single child is reprehensible and must be condemned.

It would be extremely simplistic to say that these atrocities were caused by religious differences. It is more accurate to say that political, tribal, and religious fault lines in Nigeria often intersect in a sort of “perfect storm.” In Kuru, it was outsiders who allegedly invaded and destroyed the Muslim community, not local Christians, who reportedly had met with their Muslim neighbors and agreed to avoid violence.

True followers of Christ must unite to condemn murder. While the Church has sometimes divided over what constitutes “just war,” acceptable “collateral damage” and defensive measures, there is no room for argument or controversy when it comes to condemnation of murder, the intentional killing of those who are innocent.

We must not allow ourselves to be distracted by side issues such as who started the violence, what the issues were, or what aggravations caused people to hate. Nor can we afford to excuse or overlook murder because of the heat of battle. If such killings had been carried out by soldiers in warfare, the soldiers would have been guilty of war crimes. How, then, can anyone say that the complexities and passions of conflict reduce the seriousness of these atrocities?

Condemning “violence” or “retribution” or “hatred” might be controversial. Judging specific actions of violence might be complex. Condemning murder, however, should not be difficult. It’s what Americans would call a “no-brainer,” something that is clear, simple, and uncontroversial. We would all say, “oh, the people who do such things are not real Christians, they are just using religion for their own ends.” Fine, let us make that pronouncement clearly and unambiguously.

It is true that the violence is two-sided. Christians have been the victims of similar atrocities and slaughter. I deplore the violence against Christians and I believe that the international media have often ignored it. We need to work harder to protect and support our Christian brothers and sisters who are persecuted. That, however, is a separate issue with no bearing on whether we stand up to condemn murder.

In discussing these ideas, a common reaction is “yes, but….” Yes, but this is a conflict going back centuries. Yes, but the conflict will not be solved until the underlying causes are dealt with. Yes, but we have not finished investigating the facts. Yes, but the Muslims started it, and did worse things to us. Yes, but Christians were only retaliating. Yes, but feelings are still too raw for us to take a public stand.

All these comments are valid, but they demonstrate why we need to focus on a simple statement: killing the innocent is always wrong. Yes, that still leaves the boundary of innocence to be defined, but certain classes such as small children must always be included. "Murder of innocents is always wrong and we condemn it" is not a statement that needs any deep debate nor does it need conditions attached. How about simply asking all churches to affirm "You shall not murder?" Yes there will always be hard cases—e.g., is it right or wrong to kill a fleeing attacker?—but getting into all that should not obscure the urgency of a clear statement.

I also want to make clear that I am not in any way accusing Christians or churches of condoning, much less encouraging, these crimes. As far as I know, no church leaders have approved of such violence. The archbishop of the Anglican Church in Jos said, “it is not in accordance with the gospel to use violence to settle issues.” In any case, I have not the slightest right to judge.

I am simply appealing to all Christians, particularly in Nigeria, to declare loudly and clearly that murder is sin, and that those who commit or advocate it are placing themselves outside the community of Christ:

“Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life in him.” (1 John 3:15)[1]

“But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars—their place will be in the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death.” (Rev. 21:8)

Massacre at Kuru Jenta/Kuru Karama by Carmen McCain. See especially the update at the end of the article.

Nigeria: Protect Survivors, Fully Investigate Massacre Reports Human Rights Watch

Nigeria: Religious Hate Explodes, Shaming Both Christians and Muslims

Statement by Anglican Archbishop

Tragic News from Norma

Human Rights Watch report

“KAIROS” NIGERIA: A Prayerful Call to Nigerian Christian Leaders

[1] The main point of this verse is about hating brothers, i.e. fellow Christians. However, the strength of the appeal against hatred is in the fact, taken to be self-evident, that “you know that no murderer has eternal life in him.”

Thoughts on the recent religious-tribal warfare in Jos

2010-01-28T22:03:00.002+01:00

In Kuru Karama, a former mining village and Muslim enclave in a Christian district south of Jos, [Nigeria,] attackers who killed more than 150 villagers disposed of the bodies systematically. Corpses were stuffed in water wells, pits, and sewer and irrigation canals, while others were burnt. Community leaders and health workers have put the death toll at more than 550. Source: SMS role in Nigeria slaughter, Herald Sun, Australia.

Violence erupted again in Jos and nearby areas on January 17. From reports, it was the worst episode to date. We are still on home assignment in the USA, but were watching the news closely and keeping in touch via friends on location. Part of the reason for our concern was that Luke is still in Jos, living with our friends and neighbors Rick and Brenda Naatz. We were grateful to learn that none of our missionary friends were injured; expatriates are not targets in this ethnic violence but sometimes are in danger by being in the wrong place a the wrong time.

Ever since we went through the similar riots in 2001, Barb and I have been concerned about many issues, but let me mention two important ones here.

First, it is unfortunate that the international community and media give little attention to these crises. It is a given that since they occur in Africa they will not be at the center of the news, but an ongoing ethnoreligious conflict in a country of 130 million people, divided nearly equally between Christians and Muslims, should be enough to raise some eyebrows. We hope it will not be only in retrospect, after some Rwanda-like disaster down the road, that people will say, “if we had known, we would have tried to help….”

Second, and more important, we are deeply concerned about the absence of a clear and strong condemnation from Christian leaders of hatred and murder—not necessarily a condemnation of all violence but at least of the killing of innocent people. There are those who oppose it, of course, and many have risked their lives to try to stop violence. The archbishop of the Anglican Church in Jos said, “it is not in accordance with the gospel to use violence to settle issues.” Still, we have heard little condemnation of outright murder.

One of our friends, Carmen McCain, wrote

While we can say that people who kill others are not truly Christians, I have, with my own ears, heard Jos-based pastors advocating violence against Muslims (as well as some very admirable pastors who stress non-violence and forgiveness.)

Carmen’s article, which I recommend, talks about this reticence for both Muslims and Christians to take responsibility for their own group’s actions. As Christians, we can’t control what Muslims do but we can try to influence our brothers and sisters. In the debate about terrorism, people often ask why, if the great majority of Muslims do not approve of such violence, we do not hear stronger condemnation of it from Muslim leaders. It is time for Christians in Nigeria to consider that same question about ourselves, and to say clearly and forcefully that there is no place in the Church for those who practice or advocate murder.

Massacre at Kuru Jenta/Kuru Karama by Carmen McCain. See especially the update at the end of the article.

Nigeria: Protect Survivors, Fully Investigate Massacre Reports Human Rights Watch

Nigeria: Religious Hate Explodes, Shaming Both Christians and Muslims

Statement by Anglican Archbishop

Tragic News from Norma.

Human Rights Watch report

Jonah Jang and the Jasawa: Ethno-Religious Conflict in Jos, Nigeria. This is a long and comprehensive look at the political roots of the crisis.

Questions from a student to a missionary doctor

2010-01-04T22:54:00.002+01:00

A student doing research on medical missions has written me to ask some questions. I figure I’ll answer them here, in case anyone else is interested and to make it easy for me to answer similar questions in the future. So here are your questions, Ji Kwon, and my (brief) answers:

What is the nature of work of a pediatrician and a missionary?

Well, those are certainly two different questions, maybe because you’re asking about “a pediatrician and a missionary” as if it is one career title. I’ll separate those two pieces in the rest of your questions.

A pediatrician is a doctor who has specialized in taking care of newborns, infants, children and/or adolescents.

I’ll answer assuming you are asking about Christian missionaries, since that’s what I know about and can answer. A missionary can mean lots of things, but a quick summary might be that a Christian missionary is someone whose career or job is in some way focused on proclaiming the good news of Jesus and the way he taught. Usually we use the term for someone working in a culture other than his or her own, but that’s not always true.

At the end of his ministry, Jesus handed over his ministry to his disciples, telling them “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” This statement is often taken as the fundamental charter of Christian mission and contains several main points:

Go – we’re directed to the world, not to stay on one location only
Make disciples – Disciples means followers, people who live like Jesus. This is important, because it means that we are called not just to make people “Christians” who identify with a religion, but people who live out the teachings of Jesus. Obviously, that is a lot harder and more wonderful mission than making “converts.”
God’s kingdom message is for all the peoples of the world, not for East, West, rich, poor, or any other group alone.
Baptizing them – Baptism is an outward sign both of turning back to God (repentance) and of a formal commitment to life in the family of believers in Jesus. In this context, I think it also represents the fact that good news of Jesus begins with the fact that every person needs to turn from his or her own sin and receive God’s forgiveness and spiritual life which he made possible through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
“teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you” – this restates and emphasizes the point about making disciples; it’s not about making converts, but people who know and obey the way of Jesus.

What sorts of requirements are there in order to be a pediatrician?

I’ll answer this for the USA, but requirements in other countries will be somewhat different.

Graduation from medical school, typically four years of university following a four-year undergraduate degree.
Completion of advanced training (residency) in pediatrics, generally three years long. This involves on-the-job training in the main areas such as caring for sick newborns, adolescent health care, infectious diseases, neurology, cancer, allergy, genetic and congenital problems, child development, cardiology, and so on. It also includes lots of work with hospitalized children (including those in intensive care) as well as outpatients and healthy children. See here for the official details.
Passing the exams and licensing that go along with medical school and residency.

What sorts of requirements are there in order to be a missionary?

The main requirement, of course, is that you yourself be a believer in and disciple of Jesus. In the broad sense, all disciples are missionaries. In the narrower sense, though, of those whose job or career is proclaiming the gospel in a different culture, it depends on the organization you work with. Some people are sent by their own churches alone, some by a denomination, some by another organization, while some people simply go on their own.

We work with Serving in Mission, and you can see an overview of our requirements for service here. All missions require (or should require!) their members to have basic Christian beliefs, knowledge, and a life that shows a commitment to discipleship.

Depending on the organization, country, and type of work, it’s common for other requirements to include

Academic preparation for the job (teaching, medical, technical, or whatever). Many organizations require at least an undergraduate degree or equivalent for most position. Many if not most long-term missionaries either have a graduate degree when they apply, or obtain one along the way.
Adequate education in Bible and theology. This varies with the group and the position, but often a year or more of college-level Bible and/or theology studies are required.
Evidence of the personal qualities needed for living in cross-cultural situations in general, and in the selected culture in particular. This can include psychological profiles, cross-cultural training programs, learning how to learn a new language, and so on.
Approval and support of one’s local church.
Willingness to raise the needed financial support, unless you’re applying to an organization that has the resources to support you directly.

How did you decide to become a pediatrician?

I’ve always had an interest in medicine and thought about becoming a doctor. I started off on a career of psychology and counseling, but then switched to medicine. When it came to choosing a medical specialty, I chose pediatrics because I liked children (doubtless the most common reason!), saw that it was upbeat compared to a lot of areas of medicine, and because it was clearly important for international health care.

What made you to decide to become a missionary?

Probably the most important influences were my parents and the church where I grew up. My parents, mostly by example, taught me to be interested in the world outside our borders and to care for the needy. The church was very involved with missions and gave young people a chance to interact with missionaries and to get experience themselves.

What is the most challenging factor about your career?

The most challenging part of being a pediatrician in Evangel Hospital was the limited resources. Coming from medicine in the developed world, it was very hard to work in a setting where not only advanced technology but even basic infrastructure and health-care training were lacking, and where the most basic medical treatments such as oxygen and antibiotics were often beyond the financial means of the patients.

How do you overcome the challenge?

Partly by learning how to do with less, partly by find ways to make more resources available, and partly by having to live with lower expectations. However, I can’t say I really overcame the challenges as much as coping with them.

Is your job what you imagined it to be when you first started your career?

In many ways, my career as a third-world pediatrician was what I expected. Probably the biggest difference is that I had not imagined the degree of obstacles caused by corruption and inefficiency at so many levels.

Do you plan to stay in that career until retirement?

Well, over two years ago I took a leave of absence from Evangel Hospital and medical work. I may return to some aspect of health care, but I doubt I will return to the same position (full-time hospital pediatrician) I was in for the previous 16 years.

If so, why? If not, why not?

Partly because my personality, learning-style and working style are more suitable for an IT position (or combination) and partly because I simply got burned out in the position I had … a whole other topic.

Could you please tell me good things and bad things about your career?

Saving lives. Sometimes doctors joke about going to work to “save lives,” because for most of us it’s not something that happens very often (depending on the specialty and position, of course) and because there is such an abundance of medical resources. But every day in a third-world hospital we see the direct connection between our work and saved lives—not only deaths avoided but also health and productive lives restored.
Seeing children come in very sick one day, and going home perfectly healthy a day or two later.
Being able to provide medicines and care to bring back health to children with HIV.
The smiles and happiness of parents when their children are healthy.
Children are basically fun and friendly.
Africans are very relationship oriented.
Having children die. Even though my pediatric training was largely with the sickest children (cancer, liver transplants, congenital heart disease, severe prematurity and so on), we had far fewer deaths than in my work in an African hospital.
Preventable deaths. It’s bad enough that some children inevitably die, but when it’s due to mistakes, shortages, mismanagement, and so on, it’s even harder. Often parents don’t bring their sick children for medical care until it’s too late, and sometimes severe problems are missed by the medical personnel.
Lack of resources, as I talked about earlier.
Being in a health-care institution but having little input in how it is run.
Realizing that most of the work we do is necessary only because people don’t have the basics – food, education, sanitation, clean water, immunizations, and simple health care.

Technorati Tags: missions,medicine,medical,pediatrician,career,pediatrics,Africa,Christian

Christmas in Nigeria

2009-12-15T18:25:00.002+01:00

What is Christmas like in Nigeria? Well, Nigeria is a big country with many cultures and climates. But you can get some idea of Christmas in Nigeria from my older blog, at Christmas in Nigeria. I wrote it in 2005 and since then many Nigerians have added their comments and stories about Christmas, so take a look!

Chestnuts

2009-10-10T17:50:00.003+01:00

Last week we walked through the park called “Parson’s Pleasure” on our way into Oxford town. It’s one of the Gertz kids’ favorite places to play, a grassy spot bordered by part of the river and shaded by lots of trees. This time of year, Lisa told us, Naomi, Josiah and Ethan love gathering and playing with the “conkers” that had fallen from the trees. They were trying to gather more than their friend, who allegedly had over 100.

When we got to the park and the kids gleefully set about their search and gather operation, I said, “Hey, these are chestnuts. There sure are a lot of them. I’ve always wanted to try eating them.” The kids did not want to relinquish any of their precious store, so I gathered some conkers of my own. When we got home, I looked online to find out how they’re prepared for eating. Actually, it’s not hard: you cut an X into the hard skin, bake them for a short time, and pop the edible part out of the skin. (See How to Prepare and Eat Chestnuts).

We kept waiting for a rainy day when we would need some indoor diversion, but we still haven’t had a rainy day in our two weeks in Oxford. So finally, on Tuesday, Barb and Lisa went ahead and followed the instructions to roast the chestnuts. They were ready after dinner, maybe a little too ready since it was smelling like smoke, and Barb started getting them out of their tough skin. It was harder then she expected, as the insides seemed to stick rather than pop out. I tasted a pinch of the inside, which looked and felt like a dry potato, and it did taste something like a tuber, certainly nothing very interesting. A little bitter. In fact, a few seconds later, rather bitter. Actually, as the taste lingered, quite unpleasantly bitter! Yuck! Steve tasted one also, with the same reaction.

Chestnuts, the tasty kind

Back to Google: “bitter chestnuts.” Had I misread the instructions, missed a step? I soon saw links to “horse chestnuts,” saying that they were similar to chestnuts, but bitter. They are inedible and actually poisonous. Oh yes, and they are popular in Britain for the children’s game conkers!

Meanwhile, Barb had just kept eating the horse chestnuts. She says, “Everyone was just saying they were yucky, but I thought, ‘That doesn’t prove anything….’” By the time she was convinced that it was not a good idea, she thought she might have eaten about four. Steve, being rather sensitive to health issues, was also worried about the amount he had eaten, too.

OK, Google again for more details about horse chestnut toxicity. It can’t be all that bad, right? Yes and no. Apparently it is not a common problem, since we didn’t find a lot of warnings or anything about treating poisoning. The information was mostly that the seeds are indeed toxic, but “rarely result in death in humans.” Rather, “symptoms associated with horse chestnut poisoning may include vomiting, diarrhea, headache, confusion, weakness, muscle twitching, poor coordination, coma, or paralysis.”

I wasn’t concerned at all about the little taste Steve and I had taken, but what about Barb, if she had actually eaten four of the things? We called the medical hotline (a nice feature of the British National Health Service) where a nurse took down all the information including whether Barb was conscious and breathing, then said she would have to research the issue and get back to us within an hour. Final answer, yes, horse chestnuts are toxic, but you’d have to eat a lot of them to get really sick.

Horse chestnuts

So, that was our evening’s adventure, funny in retrospect. Actually, how had I done such a thing? The glaring mistake was that I had unthinkingly assumed that these things were in fact chestnuts, based on a vague memory and on the fact that they looked like the chestnuts the web pages showed. I’d never even eaten one before! Rather alarming actually, looking back, but no one was hurt and we probably learned our lesson well.

45 Languages in One Church

2009-07-02T20:53:00.002+01:00

Barb and I went to another wedding yesterday. The groom, Akim Dalyop, has been one of our neighbors since we arrived in Nigeria 18 years ago. What we appreciated most about this wedding was its simplicity. Most Nigerian weddings are big, expensive affairs. Before the couple can marry, the groom has to pay a bride price (often symbolic, sometimes more), then somehow raise money for the wedding and all its associated parties. Friends are expected to help once the big time actually come, but still the burden can be pretty heavy and many young people have to postpone marriage for years simply because of the expenses.

Many churches have recognized this problem and are finding ways to solve it. Some perform group weddings or weddings during the regular Sunday service. I've heard (but not verified) that ECWA has discouraged couples from having "send-forths," gatherings before the wedding which serve a social purpose but add to the expenses.

The wedding yesterday was an example of moderation. It was joyful and meaningful but not elaborate and ostentatious. It was not too different from a Sunday worship service, except that it centered on the couple. The sermon--normal length for a church service--was about the importance of transparency and trust between husband and wife, a topic I've never heard preached before, and one that is much needed. The usual flock of photographers were absent, so not causing such distractions as are common. There was no big reception, rather, the guests were served snacks in the courtyard of the church after the wedding. (We were told it would be disrespectful of God's house to eat in it.)

There were no fancy decorations, either, but what caught my eye were the banners along both sides of the sanctuary. There were 45 in all, and each one displayed "God is good, he's so good to me" in one of the Nigerian languages spoken around Jos. I'm guessing that each language was spoken by one or more people in the church of about 1500 members. Now that's diversity! It's also a reminder of the need, even in 2009, to continue translating the Bible and Christian literature into Nigerian languages that don't have them yet. Though many if not most people in these language groups also speak a common language such as Hausa, Yoruba, or Pigin English, nothing compares with having God's word in your own heart language.

Mr. Hezekiah and Elizabeth

2009-06-01T06:22:00.001+01:00

Aisha had unexpected visitors today. Mr. Hezekiah is the new director of Pro-Life Evangel, the crisis pregnancy ministry attached to Evangel Hospital. He and his assistant Elizabeth came to see how Aisha is getting along.

Mr. Hezekiah related the encouraging story of two young women who came to the Pro-Life office this week. They are six and seven months pregnant and in crisis, seeking sanctuary and help at Pro-Life. Both women are typical in that they are not married and their fathers have kicked them out of the home, not wanting to have anything to do with their "renegade" daughters or their unborn babies.

One of the dads told Mr. Hezekiah, "Oh, I'm a Christian. I know about God's love and forgiveness, but I just cannot forgive my daughter for what she has done. If we were living in our village, our neighbors would have killed her. No, I can't forgive her."

Mr. Hezekiah talked with both women individually about the wrong they had done and about God's forgiveness and love. Both women prayed for forgiveness and gave their lives to Christ. Glory to God!

Forgiving is hard. But when we forgive, we are working with God to extend his hand of love and grace. And then, reconciliation and restoration can take place.

How Many (21st Century) Missionaries Does it Take To Change a Light Bulb?

2009-05-25T20:00:00.013+01:00

Meta-note: Unfortunately, it appears necessary to explain that this is tongue-in-cheek, as some readers have taken me seriously, a fact that itself makes me worry. My friend Tom Campbell informs me that America is in a post-ironic age. If that's true, it might explain some things. Anyway, if you do not think that there is anything funny about a [wordy] theological-cultural meditation on changing a light-bulb, then read no further! Of course, I may have simply mangled the potential humor, for which I apologize in advance.

Last week someone forwarded me one of those humor pages about how many Baptists (Unitarians, Mormons, Presbyterians, etc.) does it take to change a light bulb. In

a bit of serendipity, I was reminded of a recent editorial I read on the same issue--changing light bulbs--in missions. Here it is to provoke your thinking:

Note: This question probably would never have been asked in the “old days,” as (1) most missionaries didn’t have electricity and (2) if they did, someone would have simply changed the light bulb without even thinking of the broader implications. The answer below reflects the advances of the past 30 years.

Changing Light Bulbs: It's the Journey that Matters

Photo by Bitzcelt on Flickr.com

It just happened again--the light in the chapel burned out. I knew we had a spare, and jumped up to fetch it, when a quiet voice from the back pew asked, "what is the rush?" That started me thinking about our whole approach to light bulbs in the [...] Mission. I saw that there were some things to examine before grabbing that new bulb and plugging it in. First, we must get in touch with our own brokenness. We, too, are like that cold, dark, bulb. We may be burned out. Though our purpose is to shine forth with God’s love, and to burn with passion for worshiping him, our own weakness, coldness, and pride constantly battle against that purpose, and the light may grow dim. Until we deal with our own deeply broken selves, in need of God’s redemption, we will never be able to change the light bulb or, if we do, it will be a useless exercise in our own strength. Resist the temptation to deal with the surface issue of the light bulb—take some time to reflect, journal, and meditate until you begin to understand what is driving you. Impatience? Self-importance? Need for control? Only after having opened ourselves to our own brokenness and inner pockets of darkness, can we face with honesty the question of whether and when to change the bulb. Second, we need to look at our use of language. Is it right to say that the light is “broken” or “burned out?” Does that not imply a privileging of a modern, Western, perspective with its meta-narrative of power and control? Worse, does it not imply that the light bulb is simply there for our convenience, rather than an element in a richly-textured cultural matrix? What about the words “light” and “bulb” themselves? Obviously, they betray the utilitarian Western mindset, implying that the core purpose of the entity is to produce light (again, for our convenience) and wrongly focusing on the externality of shape (“bulb”).[1] This sees the bulb’s identity as static and externally imposed, totally ignores the existential aspects of the individual light bulb’s story, its journey, its dynamic identity and implies that it is somehow worthless, simply to be tossed on the trash heap, just because one phase of that journey is finished. This, then, brings us to the next issue: is it actually desirable to change the bulb? From whose perspective? Yes, it’s easy for us to jump ahead with our quick, Western fixes. We’re always hurrying, hurrying to fix things, as if our own busyness can lighten a dark world. That light bulb, though, represents the intrusion of colonialism into traditional cultures, cultures more familiar and comfortable with the natural rhythms of light and darkness, ready to gather and tell stories, build relationships during the quiet evenings. In our rush to change the bulb, we risk diminishing or even violating that deeper dimension of culture. The decision is not one to take lightly upon ourselves, however. After all, it is the people around us, those we serve, who should decide. Do we really understand their perspective? Have we walked in their shoes? Have we given the majority world a chance to speak?[2] We need to “develop a greater posture of listening to others” in humility, not imposing our own Western or organizational values. “We need to learn to be undefended in our leadership” and create a space for the powerless ones to have a voice. Have we really, truly listened to those silent voices, or are we deafened by the cacophony of violent voices of those with this world’s power, the ones who trample the weak, who want to use a new light bulb only to further their own exploitative power? We will simply mention a few other issues in passing.

Paternalism. Who is in charge? What does changing the light bulb say about power and relationship?
Dependency. Missionaries around the world have been changing light bulbs for generations. Have we created a situation of dependency? How can we show a servant spirit in this matter without worsening any dependency?
Sustainability. Sure, it’s easy to come along and change one light bulb. But who is going to change it when we’re gone?
Gender issues. How does the bulb’s status impact the empowerment of women?

Clearly, the important issue is not the end (whether or not to change the bulb) but the journey, who we are becoming (our authentic identity is not that of “light-bulb-changers”), and how the journey impacts those around us.

References and further reading

Ferriere, Audu Wong. “From campfire to neon lights: the destruction of a traditional culture in southern Pyrexia.” Int. J. Photoanthropological Studies, 1 April 2009 Jaggerwart, M. J. “O, say, can you see? Artificial illumination and the American colonial project.” J. Technology and Transformational Identity, 4 July 1776. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] The racist connotations of this light-dark dichotomy are so blatant as not to need discussion. [2] “Majority world” means all the world’s people who are not Westerners. Since they all tend to look and think differently than we do, it’s convenient to lump them into one category, thus making them a majority.

Needed: One Wrapper

2009-05-21T20:54:00.001+01:00

I guess people really do mean different things when they refer to a wrapper. I usually think of a wrapper as being the whole outfit made from a 6-yard piece of brightly-colored Nigerian wax, batik cloth used in dressmaking. It includes a wrap-around, ankle-length skirt, a matching blouse, and a head tie made of whatever cloth remains.

So, when I was told that Pro-Life Evangel needed help to buy the contents of a basket for each new woman entering the hostel, including a new wrapper, I felt a pang of jealousy.

I wrestled with my dark feelings. A new wrapper costs quite a lot of money. I can't afford a new one very often. And they want to give those girls new wrappers? It didn't seem fair. But that was because I had the wrong assumptions.

Over time I gained new insight. I did occasionally contribute 6-yard pieces of dress fabric. Then one day I discovered that, in fact, the 6-yard pieces I was giving the hostel were being carefully cut into three equal pieces, hemmed on the two raw edges, and becoming the wrap-around, ankle-length skirts for three women, not a complete outfit for one, as I had supposed.

Now I take pleasure and satisfaction in spending a few minutes here and there to hem two-yard pieces of cloth into wrapper skirts for women who sometimes come to the hostel with nothing but the clothes they are wearing.

In the past week ...

2009-05-20T23:55:00.001+01:00

It's not the beginning or end of the week, but I'll still just mention some of our events and doings in the past seven days.

We finished reading Pippi Longstocking as our after-dinner book.
Aisha is sleeping through the night about half the time.
A frog is living under the fridge in our hall.
Luke is obsessed with Middle Earth, castles, archers of Rohan, and silly putty.
Barb spent a morning in the hospital getting Aisha's shots.
I spent a day in the hospital getting a small abdominal hernia repaired--wonderful to be cared for not only by experts but friends.
We had a farewell potluck dinner--five of the seven missionary families are leaving in the next two weeks.
Barb took clothing to the crisis pregnancy office, and learned that they had just had two young, destitute women come into the program.
Our cat is pregnant again (OK, that didn't actually start this week)!
I talked with Shaba Adams, a convert from Islam, about the dissertation research that he is doing and how I might give technical help.
Luke and I played Stratego for the second time ... a game I used to love when I was about his age. Luke won.
Barb and I enjoyed an Italian movie, "Bread and Tulips."
We also spent an evening looking for old friends on Facebook. Happy to find some, it's fun to get reconnected. Examples:
- one friend from high school (39 years ago) found me and added me as a friend. It turns out their family also knows another missionary right here in Jos.
- we found one of Barb's college friends (King's college in New York), who is now connected with the same church and Christian schools in San Diego where I grew up and my mom taught.
We're proud of our kids and the great job they are all doing raising our grandkids. Hope to see all of them before the end of the year.

A'isha's Grandma

2009-05-06T22:28:00.002+01:00

By Barb [A'isha is the baby girl we've been caring for over the past three months, since she was 3 days old. She came to us through the crisis pregnancy program of Evangel Hospital.] She came alone this time, minus the entourage of family members that accompanied her on her first Sunday afternoon visit six weeks ago. This was A'isha's grandmother's second visit in nine weeks. I'm told that she is going to be the one to raise A'isha, but no one knows when. Six months? More? She is matronly but looked lovely in her pale green embroidered lace, her head completely covered with a filmy shawl to match. She had called me on her cell phone when she pulled up at our gate, so that I could restrain our dog while she unloaded three bulging, black bags of fresh produce and presented them to me, apologizing that she couldn't find bananas for sale on a Sunday. Her offering also included 5,500 naira ($37) to cover the cost of powdered formula for A'isha. I brought the grandmother a glass of cool sekanjabin (a minty Persian drink) and we settled down to examine Baby A'isha, weigh her by picking her up, and remark at how well she was growing. Within fifteen minutes, the visit was over--grandmother had climbed back into her car and was gone.

A'isha

2009-04-28T22:12:00.002+01:00

Facebook is a great tool, but one of its disadvantages is that once you start using it, you may tend to neglect your blog. After all, if all your friends are reading the news on Facebook, what's the point of putting it into the blog? So, even though we've had a new foster baby since she was born 9 weeks ago, you wouldn't know unless you've been following our Facebook posts. I'll definitely have to try to keep on top of this blog as well as the fast-moving target of Facebook. (By the way, if you would like to add us as a friend on Facebook and we don't know you too well, please put a comment in your friend request since I generally don't accept what look like random requests.)

A'isha came to us via the crisis pregnancy program at Evangel. We don't know much of the story of her mother and family, just that someone was needed to care for her for a while. She's been a delightful baby—everyone remarks how cute she is. The biggest challenge we've had with her is that it takes a long time to feed her and get her back to sleep at night. One or the other of us is usually up from 1 to 2 hours for each feeding (yes, I'm taking my turns too!). Fortunately, she's transitioning down to only one feeding each night. For the first 6 or 7 weeks, though, we were pretty exhausted.

Luke

Luke is doing quite well, especially with his reading. We always read a Bible story at bedtime, but lately he has been asking to read one aloud to us from his easy Bible. It's so encouraging! He's also getting captivated by books in a new way. Until this year, it was hard to get him to listen very long (although we did read all but he last book in the Narnia series). Now, though, we're reading from 30 minutes to even more than an hour after dinner every night, and Luke usually asks for more. We've read Jungle Book, A Wrinkle in Time, Stowaway to the Mushroom Planet, Carry On Mr. Bowditch, a Hardy Boys mystery, and others. We also often find him asleep in bed with his head in a book (not that we want him to lose sleep, mind you). This new love of books proves he's a real Blyth!

Abigail's Story

2009-04-19T15:34:00.003+01:00

by Barb Blyth

Abigail? Who is Abigail? The note Luke brought home from Hillcrest school said that the National Honor Society was sponsoring a food drive for the benefit of Abigail, an HIV-positive widow with eight children whose home was torched in the Jos crisis of November-December 2008. Later, at Bible study, Jean Garland told us about one of her best friends, Abigail, who turned out to the same woman, someone strong in her faith that Jesus had saved her and that God pays close attention to the needs of widows and orphans.

Abigail was fifteen when she married. After the wedding, she discovered she was the second wife. It wasn't long before her husband, a taxi driver, took yet another wife.

This family would have been horrified to be known as anything but Christian. They certainly were not pagan, Muslim, idolatrous, or superstitious animists. But Abigail's husband was not a faithful husband. One by one, he infected all three of his wives. Over time the first wife died, the third wife likewise, then the husband, leaving Abigail to care for her own eight children plus the other orphaned children in the family.

Life was hard, but Abigail believed God was taking care of her. She had her own simple little home. She and her infected children regularly went to the Spring of Life center to collect their anti-retroviral drugs.

Then on November 27, 2008, the first day of the Jos crisis, some Muslim neighbors burned down her house. Abigail and her children escaped with the clothes on their backs, but everything in their home was destroyed. Even so, God has convinced Abigail of his care and compassion. Hearing of her plight, Christians in other countries have sent funds to replace some of her loss.

I think Abigail was astonished when one of the perpetrators, the only one released from jail, came to her and asked for forgiveness. He said he couldn't sleep because of the evil he had tone. More surprising still was that Abigail told the guilt-stricken man that she forgave him and that God was taking special care of her and her children because she was a widow.

So I will help and I will join the NHS food drive. Thursday afternoon I will drop off the carton I have filled with rice, milk powder, sugar, tea bags, bouillon cubes, soap, vaseline, and maybe some lollipops as a treat for the kids.

Who is Abigail? Now I now.

Why we were drinking hot chocolate at 3 am

2009-04-05T21:16:00.002+01:00

All the neighbors' dogs were barking along with ours when I got up at 2:30 to feed A'Isha, our latest foster baby (girl), now six weeks old. It's not too unusual to have a temporary pandemonium like that, since any one dog barking sets off the others, and the guards walking around at night often start our dog Dusty on a howling spell. But as I picked up A'Isha from the drawer where she slept in the living room, I heard a tapping on our gate.

Now, no one should be coming to our gate in the middle of the night. So I quickly followed our protocol by turning off the lights and making sure our doors were locked. I thought it was probably not an intruder so I didn't go as far as to turn on the compound alarm, but I was a bit jumpy. I took the baby to Barb then got my cell phone as the handiest light, and listened as the tapping continued and got louder and a car honked outside our fence. Still no one identified himself.

Well, it turned out that it was just the hospital driver trying to rouse one of the hospital residents. Maybe she was not home, perhaps already at the hospital. Luke thinks the driver was actually banging on her door, not our gate.

Anyway, the result was that all four of us were up in the middle of the night. I sat down at the table to cool down while Barb fed the baby, and Luke came out to join us. Not to miss a chance for "family fun," he said, "Why don't we have hot chocolate?" We did, or Luke and I did, and what started out as another stressful incident ended up being one of those build-a-memory family fun times.

Give Moms a Compliment, not Advice

2009-02-28T12:59:00.007+01:00

A friend of a friend wrote

It never ceases to amaze me how many ideas people have of the different ways you can ruin a baby (holding too much, too little, sleeping with them, not sleeping with them, feeding too much, too little and on and on). It is amazing anyone makes it to adulthood or any sort of happiness the way people boss you around about mothering.

Yes, this really is amazing and is one of my pet peeves. It seems to be a universal phenomenon. Maybe it's an imperative built into societies to help babies survive ... an innate urge to save the baby from peril. Now, Barb has taken care of 21 babies in 22 years and has six grandchildren. In Nigeria, her age and experience usually count for a lot as far as respect goes. Yet, total strangers will accost her in the market or on the street, and tell her, even scoldingly sometimes, "that baby needs a hat," or blanket, "she is too cold!" This may be on a sweltering day when what the baby really needs is just a diaper, but Barb is not about to go that far. (One of the most common newborn problems I would see in the clinic was heat rash; somehow the even fact that the baby is sweating profusely doesn't prompt moms to remove one of the four or five layers of clothing.) Anyway, I digress. The point is not whether a given practice is good, but why people (ok, is it everyone or mostly women?) feel compelled to boss mothers around with dire warnings of danger to their babies. I suppose in a traditional culture like Nigeria, people want to enforce the norms. In the US, it seems to be the new, the different, and anti-authoritarian that is promoted. I mean, who is going to write a best-seller or be invited to a talk show giving the dull, orthodox advice, "Don't worry, you're baby is going to be fine as long as you love her and trust your instincts and your pediatrician (or family doctor)?" Actually, that advice may now be bizarre and radical enough to get you onto a talk show. As a father and pediatrician, my advice to my own daughters now raising families was not to read so many books about how to raise children, since many are contradictory, based totally on personal opinion and anecdote, and generate anxiety rather than knowledge. I'm sure there are still some good books that provide a lot of helpful information without being ridiculously dogmatic ... I just don't know what they are since I've been away from American pediatrics for 20 years. If you're a grandparent-to-be, you might look for one such book and give it to your daughter or daughter-in-law, but don't flood her with books on the latest fads and controversies. Everyone else should just give new moms a break and a compliment!

Rikkos

2009-01-23T23:18:00.006+01:00

Sitting on a concrete block in the ruins of the burned out church yesterday, listening to the members singing songs of praise and devotion in English and Hausa, I felt closer than I ever had to the events of the New Testament church. I have been reading the book of Hebrews for the past two months, noticing the emphasis on suffering in passages such as

Remember those earlier days after you had received the light, when you stood your ground in a great contest in the face of suffering. Sometimes you were publicly exposed to insult and persecution; at other times you stood side by side with those who were so treated. You sympathized with those in prison and joyfully accepted the confiscation of your property, because you knew that you yourselves had better and lasting possessions. So do not throw away your confidence; it will be richly rewarded. You need to persevere so that when you have done the will of God, you will receive what he has promised. Heb. 10:32–36.

The church in Rikkos was one of the worst-hit during the religious violence at the end of November. The pastor was killed, the church and clinic burned, and the houses of many members burned as well. In just the ECWA denomination across Jos, two hundred homes were destroyed and at least twelve people killed.

The ceremony yesterday was to present 100 wrapper dresses to the women in some of the worst-affected families. SIM has been involved in relief efforts from the beginning, and one of the first projects was to fund this clothing for women who had little or nothing left. The dresses were sewn by widows working with the City Ministries arm of SIM/ECWA, which helps train and employ those in need. So the money was used twice: both to provide clothing for the victims and to provide income for the widows (whose husbands had died but not in the riots).

As I greeted the women on behalf of SIM, I read to them from the Hausa Bible the passage above. But it wasn't news to them: they had already been singing songs expressing the same ideas, such as "I will go with Jesus anywhere, no matter the roughness of the road."

So here, in this setting of destruction resulting from hatred and persecution, I felt I had been transported back to first century Ephesus or Rome. These women, who had lost so much, were still singing and rejoicing in the Lord, thanking him, and so grateful for the small gift of a single outfit of clothing. When there were not enough wrapper dresses for all, some of the women gave their new ones to women who were even worse off.

Six of the women told their stories of persecution. One told how her Muslim neighbors were weeping for her as the Muslim mob surrounded her house to burn it and kill her. She told them not to cry, because she was going to be with Jesus if she died. Eventually the neighbors helped persuade the attackers not to kill her, then they hid her in a Muslim compound during the next few days of violence, standing against the mob of people outside who were shouting for her to be handed over to them.

I thought about the fact that for Christians, a martyr is one who is a witness to the faith even at the cost of his or her life. A martyr (from the Greek word for "witness") is not one who dies in battle, or kills himself in a suicide attack designed to kill and terrorize others. A martyr is one who stands for the truth, following the example of his Lord who knew and accepted the hostility of the world against the truth. Yesterday, listening to the women sing for 15 minutes continuously "I bring you thanks, God, all I have to give you is my thanksgiving," I knew I was among the saints and martyrs.

The relief project is now focusing on providing children's school fees, reconstructing burned churches, and providing housing for the widow of the pastor who was killed. Donations to this project are welcome and can be sent or given online to any SIM office earmarked with project number NG96038.

Daddy, I had another bad dream: a long way from peace on earth

2008-12-24T23:24:00.004+01:00

This Christmas Eve, even as we think of peace on earth, we are getting a view on a small scale of the way fear and hate are perpetuated between peoples. Luke woke up in the early morning hours and called me to come. When I sat down on his bed and asked what the problem was, he said he'd had another bad dream. "What was it this time?" I asked. "Remember how M. was talking yesterday about the Muslims going into Christian's houses and killing them? I dreamed that a bunch of people came at me and killed me with rocks." I didn't have a bad dream myself, but I, too, slept fitfully, disturbed by the sound of many sirens and wondering what was going on. Violence breeds fear and distrust, and even though the children don't march in the streets shouting slogans and brandishing pretend guns, they catch the fear, and the distrust of the Other gradually becomes a part of their identity. Luke went shopping with Barb today, too, since school is out. He wanted to go and meet all his "friends," the shopkeepers and merchants who know him and greet him. They were happy to see him, and one of the Hausa vegetable sellers even phoned another one, who had traveled to another city, so that Luke could greet him too. I didn't think of it until now, but we should take this opportunity to point out to Luke that those men are Muslims, but are kind and friendly to him. Maybe we can help in a small way to stop the deadly cycle.

Mini-review of "An Affair of the Mind" by Laurie Hall

2008-12-23T09:28:00.009+01:00

I was looking through my book reviews on Amazon and realized that I should be sharing at least those reviews of the best books. I do have a backlog of books I would like to blog about and encourage others to review, so I'll have to get busy on those. Meanwhile, here are my brief comments on An Affair of the Mind by Laurie Hall. As a network administrator, now and then I encounter evidence of how widespread and pernicious internet pornography can be, and I want to do what I can to fight it. I'm sure there are by now a good number of first-person books describing the effect of pornography and sexual addiction on the spouse and family, but so far this is the only one I've read. Whether or not it's the best, it is definitely worth reading. My comments on the book:

The author writes from the heart, avoiding superficialities, intellectualization and spiritualizing. Her journey has not been smooth or easy ... this is not a success story with a fairy tale ending. I have to disagree, however, with the reviewers who think it is too pessimistic and without hope. The progress seen by the end of the book (which is certainly not the end of the story) is marked and more representative of the healing in addict families than is a quick, happy ending. Good insights on forgiveness, especially regarding the pain that it involves. After reading this book, I found myself wondering whether it should be required reading for pre-marital counseling. Given that the problem is so prevalent, would earlier awareness of the issues promote their resolution before the sexual addiction and family patterns cause such destruction?

A new blogging platform for Africa: Maneno

2008-12-19T14:00:00.005+01:00

Yesterday, reading WhiteAfrican.com, I was alerted to the existance of a new blogging site for Africa: Maneno (which means "words" in Kiswahili). By "blogging site" I mean something like Blogger or WordPress, a place where anyone can create a blog. What is the point of a new site or platform when other good ones are available? There are several advantages:

The site is designed from scratch with the goal of making pages load fast over the slow connections that most of us have in Africa. There really is a noticeable difference.
The site is easy to use. (Actually, I'm not sure it's any easier than Blogspot, but the authors are working to keep it simple.)
Maneno is multilingual. Other sites do allow you to type your blog entries in your own language, but Maneno has the added feature of an easy interface that lets any member translate any blog post into another language, sort of a communal approach to making the entries themselves available in other languages. Of course, it's the African languages that are the focus.
Maneno recognizes that many users in Africa do not have access a computer, so the site is exploring ways to allow people to access it through mobile phones and other relevant technology. (Blogspot also allows posting by mobile phone & email ... will Maneno be better in some way? Probably it at least will be slimmer.)
Maneno is focused on Africa. Unlike Blogspot, which is a place for any and every type of blog, Maneno is more topical, describing itself as striving "to provide a communication and development platform for Sub-Saharan Africa."

If you live in Africa and write about life and culture here, or if you're interested in reading the blogs and commentaries of those who do, you should definitely have a look at Maneno.

High tension bees

2008-12-14T21:22:00.006+01:00

Wednesday morning I was at work in the office and Barb was shopping on the main street when I heard someone saying that crowds of people were running away from the main street area (just 1/2 mile away). Gunshots were heard. Some people ran to the compound next to the office, seeking shelter. Why were they fleeing? No one was sure.

Given the tensions after the recent riots that killed hundreds of people, this qualified as an "event" to be investigated and reported up the chain. Was there a new outbreak of violence in the center of town? A bank robbery?

Chris Cowie walked over to the compound to investigate while I phoned our driver, who was taking Barb on her shopping errands. I could hardly hear the driver because of noise and a bad connection, but I heard him say that nothing was really wrong though people were excited.

Later, Barb told me that people had suddenly been running down the street, and that soldiers had quickly arrived and tried to restore order. One of them may have shot into the air. The owner of the grocery store where Barb was quickly shut the doors and brought down the security door.

Accounts varied at first, but by the end of the day they converged on the story that bees had been responsible. In one version, just one bee stung someone and triggered the frenzy. In another, some people tried to smoke out a hive of bees not realizing they had another exit, so the swarm came after them.

Bees here can be dangerous, so it's not surprising people started running. But the way the events played out shows how high the tensions still are here. People are going about their business, but in the back of everyone's mind is the thought that things could turn violent again. I know I feel that way, not even having witnessed any of the violence this time, so how much harder it must be for those who saw their houses burned or their friends and families attacked and maybe killed.

See My neighbor, my killer, my neighbor, my savior , by our friend Carmen, for the best first-hand description of the recent crisis.

Photo by Axel Bührmann and licensed with Creative Commons Share-Alike license.

Bluetooth inventor needed for aging Baby-boomers

2008-12-09T23:12:00.002+01:00

OK, I'm not that old yet, but along with how ever many million other baby-boomers, I'm moving along the timeline. I already notice it's a little harder to hear sometimes: my son tells me my phone is ringing, and I have trouble hearing people in noisy conditions or in rooms with poor acoustics.

I'm already getting unhappy in big gatherings like our monthly potlucks with loud background music, when I can't hear people talking, or, rather, can't understand what they're saying. I know I'm not the only one, since others voice the same complaint. So, my idea is, why not invent a Bluetooth system that lets you use those in-the-ear phone thingies to talk to the people around you in noisy gatherings? Since the technology is already in place (phones, ear adapters, tiny Bluetooth transceivers and so on), it seems that it could actually work.

Bluetooth would work well for talking with the people nearby because it has a limited range and you wouldn't be hearing everyone in the room. Some kind of selection mechanism would be needed, perhaps, or maybe it would be more natural just to be able to hear everyone in a defined range as in normal conversation.

Meanwhile, my sister suggests I should take up sign language. Sounds like a good idea to me!

Jos Crisis Follow-up

2008-12-08T09:18:00.000+01:00

It has been ten days since the violence erupted in Jos. The city is quiet but tense and rumors still abound. A relief agency has registered 28,000 "internally-displaced persons," people who have lost their homes or been forced to move because of the violence. Barb, Luke and I have spend the past several days at the retreat center in Miango, since SIM requested all the missionaries at Evangel to leave. Today and tomorrow are a major religious holiday commemorating Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son Ishmael, and large rallies are expected, including one on the polo field next to Evangel.

The first few days were especially tension-producing for us. Part of the stress of these situations is trying to deal with conflicting information, rumors, and recommendations. Where is the fighting, which way is it moving, are police forces getting control, what roads are safe to use?

It's hard to decide how cautious to be. It's not good either to be rushing from your home at every sign of unrest, nor to be over-confident to the point that you don't leave until it's too late to move on the streets. I felt guilty about leaving Evangel for a safer site; the situation didn't seem so bad to me a few hours after it began, but we got instructions to leave immediately, so we all did. That left the Nigerian medical staff to cover the hospital, and they were at more risk than we were.

Being on the security committee, I was constantly in touch with others, monitoring the situation and making decisions with the other members. One night was especially hard, as things had been quiet for a day or two, but there were rumors of serious trouble ahead. Some of us were connected by Internet, others by radio, and I was pretty tense after hours of trying to assess how serious the threat was, who might be affected, and what we ought to do about it.

Someone compared this crisis to what it was like after a big earthquake, and I think that's a good example that you in California will understand. It's hard to find out what's happening, you don't know whether there might be major aftershocks that will affect you, and a truck passing or any little vibration can make you jump. For me, it's sounds like gunshots or sirens that make my heart jump. These days in Miango have helped all of us relax.

Should we "Keep Christ in Christmas" or let him go free?

2008-12-08T00:21:00.000+01:00

In trying to keep Christ in Christmas, do we end up trapping him there?

Our Christmas "tree" the first year we were in Nigeria, 1991

I'm not the Grinch or Scrooge, really I'm not. I love the pageantry and beauty of Christmas, the coziness, the winter themes, the mystery of incarnation, the announcement that the Kingdom has broken into our world, the carols, the special foods (snowballs cookies and Swedish fruit soup are my favorites). The Christmas before we moved to Nigeria, I used two whole rolls of slide film trying to capture the beauty of the embroidered Christmas banners at our home church.

I wonder, though, if we haven't carried things a little too far, at least in North America. Consider these points:

The nativity was not celebrated in the early Church. One of the earliest references to such a celebration was in AD 200 and spoke of a group in Egypt celebrating it on Jan 6. Christmas itself, as a major celebration of the nativity in December, didn't start until the fourth century when Constantine set it to coincide with the existing pagan celebration on December 25.
The nativity story is not an especially prominent feature of the New Testament, taking up only about 65 verses out of nearly 8000 (0.8% of verses). In fact, the story takes less than 3% of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, the two Gospels where it is told. In contrast, the passion and resurrection are given over 600 verses, nearly 10 times as much. Even the Sermon on the Mount has twice as many verses.
From the New Testament record, the early proclamation of the gospel, while including the importance of the incarnation, did not include or at least did not emphasize any of the nativity details.
A conservative estimate would be that most churches spend at least one month a year focused on Christmas, and that they probably spend twice as effort and emotion in that month as in any other.
As far as I can tell, at no point in history has Christmas been primarily a worshipful celebration of Jesus' birth. Considering its lack of Christian roots, this isn't too surprising. Various reformers including Martin Luther, Oliver Cromwell, New England Puritans and Congregationalists, and the Church of Scotland (until 1958) opposed the celebration because of its excesses, lack of biblical support, and pagan origins (or, in Luther's case, Roman Catholic origins).

Again, I'm no Cromwell and don't think that grouchily condemning Christmas practices is going to help matters. It seems to me, though, that it might be useful for Christians to think about some of these issues and look at some possible negative impacts of the way the Church relates to Christmas:

The sentimentalization and romanticization of the story lead at best to a distorted view of the Christian message, and at worst to its dismissal as an inspiring tale. Knowledgeable Christians should be able to sort out the needle of the biblical story from the haystack of tradition, but I don't think we can expect that of everyone else.
Christians' efforts to make Christmas more religious are often counterproductive, being seen by the rest of the world as shrill, ungracious, or laughable. There are times when we will cause those reactions by proclaiming and living the truth, indeed we expect to be a bad smell to the world sometimes, but why pick a battle over Christmas, which has to be one of the least of all the issues on which the Church needs to be prophetic?
An example of the ridiculous position we have put ourselves in is found in a chain-email I just received: "Jesus is better than Santa Claus," a little message with a point-by-point comparison of the two, such as "Santa lets you sit on his lap, Jesus lets you rest in his arms." I agree that Jesus is better than Santa Claus, and this message might use the Christmas season to provoke some people to think about that, but isn't it really breath-taking that, in defense of "the real Christmas," we have sunk to comparing Jesus to Santa Claus?
Even people who want to focus on the nativity story are in trouble. Maybe some rare souls manage it, but I think most of us have trouble maintaining balance amidst the stresses, materialism, rush, expectations, performance, parties, and all the rest that goes with the season.
All of these points lead to the concern, expressed in the title of this blog, that the overall effect of our emphasis on Christmas may be to "trap" Jesus in the manger rather than helping people experience him as the risen Savior and the Lord of all creation.

By now, you're probably sure that I really am the Grinch after all. Why not just relax and enjoy? In fact, that is exactly where I think we should begin, though I'm not sure what the best solutions would really be. So what I suggest is

Relax and enjoy Christmas. Have fun at the parties. Sing about Santa Claus, holly and ivy, ships a-sailin' and all the rest.
Stop worrying about the paganism and commercialism of Christmas. Live as you should live at any other time, of course, but don't be offended by what you feel is "desecration" of the "real Christmas." Christianity is not about celebrations and special days, even "Christian" ones, so it's not really possible for them to be desecrated. I'm pretty sure that Jesus is not concerned about people "not celebrating his birthday."
Along with not being offended, don't let yourself feel, or be manipulated into feeling, guilty about how you do or don't celebrate. Romans 14:5-6 apply here: "Some judge one day to be better than another, while others judge all days to be alike. Let all be fully convinced in their own minds." By Christmas Eve, I'm usually so tired and over-filled with Christmas that I can't contemplate it any more ... and this year, I'm just not going to worry or feel guilty about that!
The Christmas season can be an occasion for sensitively sharing the Gospel, especially if we can use it to get beyond the manger. People who know nothing of Christianity may be naturally curious, giving us a chance to explain more.
Don't try to impose Christ on Christmas. It's a great time to remember the nativity story, but that's our meaning of Christmas, and has never been everyone else's. The Kingdom of God is not strengthened by our trying to dictate how the culture celebrates its holidays.

I'm not advocating that we Christians abandon the connection of Nativity with Christmas. It is part of our tradition and carries deep meaning for many of us, even if we may need to add a little balance to our thinking. However, if we really want to observe Nativity as a holy, Christian day (and I've already said that it's not central to our faith), the only solution I can see is to choose another day of the year, August 1 would be fine, and make that our Nativity day. That day could be celebrated in our churches and homes completely free untangled from Christmas as a commercial and cultural event.

Anyone want to join me for the celebration next August 1?

Notes:

History of Christmas: see article by Ben Best which includes quite a bit, though he doesn't give his sources, and Wikipedia article.

Cherub and stars Christmas card by BridgeBuilding.com

Billboard photo by Megadem on Flickr.

Jos Crisis Update

2008-12-03T15:07:00.000+01:00

This news update from the SIM director here in Jos reflects what is going on for us. I've been quite busy in the past couple of days, especially yesterday and last night, trying to assess the information and communicate with SIM and other missions about the best response.

Jos is still very tense after rioting last Friday and Saturday. There are rumours of reprisal attacks and some reports of armed personnel attempting to enter the city. Presently the police and military have control of the situation and we pray that there will be no further violence. Many of the SIM personnel are moving out of Jos for the weekend which is also a Muslim holiday. Hillcrest School has closed till next Wednesday. There are ten to twenty thousand displaced people in refugee camps around the city. SIM is providing food for one of these refugee camps. SIM has a funding project for relief, medical care and rebuilding destroyed church facilities as a result of the crisis. Donations are welcomed to this project and can be sent to any SIM office earmarked with project number NG96038.

The other missionary families on Evangel hospital compound are leaving today or tomorrow to spend a few days at Miango until this all blows over. We're not sure yet whether we'll stay or go.

Black Friday, Jos Style

2008-11-30T23:38:00.001+01:00

It's been quiet all day, but now just as I start writing this, more gunshots ring out in the night not too far away. We're under a curfew and the police and military have orders to shoot violators on sight.

The riots started early Friday morning, and as in 2001 we woke to the sounds of shooting and, when we looked outside, saw billowing smoke in several places. Unlike September 2001, it seemed pretty calm around the hospital, with no refugees fleeing over the walls onto our compound or gangs of youths pursuing them.

By 10 am or so, though, we were ordered to leave the hospital compound, which was considered too close to the trouble, and to move to another compound about 2 miles away. We quickly gathered a few things and joined the convoy, five cars moving up the streets nearly deserted except for some youths at roadblocks and defending their neighborhoods.

Throughout Friday and Saturday, things remained unstable. In many parts of town, whichever group was the majority was attacking the minority: beating, killing, burning homes, shops, and places of worship. Those attacked, men, women, and children, fled wherever they could for safety, sometimes onto the compounds of our missions and friends, or any place that seemed a bit safe.

Being a member of the crisis management team, I spent much of Friday and Saturday helping to assess the situation and determine our response. My specific task was setting up Internet-based communications (a chat room, Skype chats, Skype-to-phone text messages, and a situation summary wiki page). Along with radio communication (phones were not working), these proved very helpful.

By Saturday evening, it seemed that the police and military had things pretty much under control in the areas near the hospital, so we moved back. Since then it has been pretty quiet. Barring any change tonight, we'll probably go back to our regular schedules tomorrow, though Hillcrest school is closed at least until Wednesday. I'll probably spend a good chunk of the week in debriefings and assessments of what happened and what we can do better next time.

Maybe I'll talk a little in the next blog entry about some of the emotional stresses and turmoil of these situations and their aftermath. It's important to emphasize that our family and co-workers were never under any physical threat or even discomfort -- we had a fine time Friday and Saturday with our friends on the other compound! Electricity, water, food, beds, and even Internet all day long. Our situation couldn't even begin to compare with the plight of hundreds or thousands of people in Jos who were injured, killed, lost loved ones, or made homeless.

Technorati Tags: Jos,Nigeria,riots,2008,violence,crisis

Thanksgiving Day

2008-11-27T23:25:00.001+01:00

For the first time since we came to Nigeria, we actually had a holiday on American Thanksgiving day. Well, not a true holiday, but we had the day off since travel was restricted due to local elections and most offices were closed. Luke and I watched a couple of old Voyager episodes as Luke has suddenly become a fan. When he told me I should finish watching it for him as he was going outside to play, I decided that was enough!

Most of the rest of the day and evening I was researching computer security stuff, specifically whether and how one can browse safely on a public computer such as those in cybercafes or airports. There are lots of solutions offered, but so far there doesn't seem to be any one that is secure enough to trust in a hostile environment, though a couple come close. (See the recent entries in my other blog, Computer Doc in Jos.)

Barb says this Thanksgiving she had less work to do than any previous one, since she just had to roast a chicken to take to the evening potluck. Usually, even for a potluck, she adds more and more dishes like sweet potatoes, corn with sesame seeds and chili peppers, a pie or two, on and on.

The Thanksgiving potluck itself was at the Fretheims' house not far away. David, Saralynn and Timothy came with us, too, so it was a good family time. There were nearly 100 people and plenty of all kinds of yummy food (though I didn't see my favorite, the corn like Barb makes). I enjoyed talking to fellow SIM missionaries Jamie and Corrine, who work with the Gidan Bege street kids projects. Now that I'm full time in the SIM office doing computer things, sometimes I feel rather useless compared to when I was taking care of sick kids. So, when I hear first hand about all the things that other SIM missionaries are doing on the front-lines, I'm encouraged to think that I have a small part in keeping their ministries going. (See Saralynn's account of the day, including an adventure with Timothy at the dinner. And Thanks, Saralynn, for the picture!)

Have you noticed the conjunction between Venus and Jupiter in the evening skies? Isn't it great? I didn't know which two planets they were (didn't think Venus ever stayed up so late) but just checked. They get closest on December 1 and will be right near a crescent moon, so don't forget to catch a glimpse if you like the stars.

2008-11-13T08:37:00.000+01:00

I'm giving up maintaining my own blog site at http://www.ecwaevangel.org/blog, mainly because I don't want to spend the time keeping the software up-to-date and debugged. Here on blogger.com, I can just use the existing tools and focus on writing. I will be pulling over the old entries as time goes by, meanwhile, check that old blog for our stories about life in Nigeria, pediatrics at ECWA Evangel Hospital in Jos, and all the rest.

Don't get malaria in the US!

2008-10-19T23:24:00.000+01:00

If you have to get malaria, you might be better off getting it in Nigeria than in the US. I've been in North Carolina this week for the SIM International Workshop on Information Technology. A couple of my old friends, who now live here, told me about their niece (I'll call her Anita) who had recently been to Africa and now had been sick with malaria-like symptoms for some time. By the time they were telling me, Anita had been admitted to the ICU and the doctors were still puzzling over her condition. An infectious disease specialist had been called in but there was still no diagnosis. All the tests, including those for malaria, had been negative. We talked about the probability that Anita had malaria ... that's just what people get when they're in Africa. Sure, you can argue about how much malaria there is in a given setting, or how likely it is when someone has been on preventive drugs, or what other tropical diseases are possible, but malaria is still one of the biggest risks for travelers. Furthermore, it's often hard to diagnose by lab methods as the parasite can be hard to find in the blood. Malaria is a dangerous disease, particularly in those who are under five years old, pregnant, or not already "semi-immune." After repeated episodes of the illness, people get a degree of immunity so that they tend to be protected from the severe, potentially fatal forms such as cerebral involvement, severe anemia, and shock. Even that protection starts to be lost after a few months of being away from malaria zones. British medical journals reminder remind readers now and then of the seriousness of the risk of malaria in travelers. I don't remember seeing quite as much info in American journals, perhaps because there are fewer immigrants and travelers from Africa. Three days after my friends told me about Anita, I heard that her doctors had finally reached a diagnosis: malaria. The parasite was found in her bone marrow, which means she had to have at least a bone marrow aspiration if not a biopsy, painful procedures. Up to that point, according to my second- or third-hand information, she had been treated with antibiotics but not anti-malarial drugs. I don't know how complete the story was that I heard -- and certainly these medical stories tend to get muddled and distorted especially when passed along by non-medical people. Still, it does highlight a big difference in the way malaria is treated in Nigeria compared to the US. In the malarious parts of Africa, the general approach is to treat high-risk people when they get symptoms of malaria, until or unless the diagnosis can be excluded. Effective, cheap drugs are available and simple oral treatment with various two-drug combinations is usually successful. Two of those combinations in Nigeria are Co-artem (artesunate and lumefantrine) and and Artequin (artesunate plus mefloquine). The most common American approach, in contrast, seems to be to treat malaria as a highly exotic disease which only specialists can diagnosis and treat, and to insist on a clear laboratory diagnosis before treating it. I'm not sure why this is, though perhaps it's partly because the simple, effective drugs are not available. Partly, though, it's just a different philosophy of treatment. In Nigeria, if I am faced with a child who likely has giardia, it would take several days, inconvenience and maybe $12 to make the diagnosis. Meanwhile, the patient would remain ill and might be lost to follow up. On the other hand, for $4 I can treat the illness. Even though I may treat some patients who do not need it, nearly everyone ends up ahead. The result of all this is that I encourage family and friends, when returning from Africa, to take a box of malaria treatment home with them. Then, if they get sick with what seems like malaria, they can contact a doctor who is familiar with malaria, and consider starting treatment. I don't recommend simply treating oneself without contacting a medical professional, since other serious conditions could be missed, treatment of severe malaria might be delayed, and a doctor familiar with the drugs should prescribe them. It certainly doesn't hurt to have the simple, effective drugs available and ready to be used on a doctor's advice, though. Finally, the best treatment is prevention. When traveling to malaria areas, be sure to take effective an preventive drug and avoid mosquito bites. When you return to your home, be sure to continue the medicine for the recommended time, since the malaria parasites can stay in your body for some weeks and need to be suppressed until the last one is gone.