Hampton Roads Publishing Company Blog

This sincere column makes hard reading, not because it shakes my beliefs but because it is difficult to see someone suffering and know that nothing that can be said can help.

My own extensive communications with what I call The Guys Upstairs give me a very different idea of the afterlife — and this life! — than Whitehead expresses here, and leaves me without the doubts tormenting him. One hopes that time will bring its peace to him and to all who suffer loss and find it unaccountable.

A Grief Observed: Remembering Carol
By John W. Whitehead
July 13, 2009

“I will turn to her as often as possible in gladness. I will even salute her with a laugh. The less I mourn her the nearer I seem to her. Admirable programme. Unfortunately it can’t be carried out.”–C.S. Lewis

When his wife Joy died in 1960, C.S. Lewis’ life crumbled. “If my house has collapsed at one blow,” the famous author and Christian apologist writes in the early pages of A Grief Observed (1961), “that is because it was a house of cards. The faith which ‘took these things into account’ was not faith but imagination.”

From there, Lewis, in his remarkable book, questions the nature of the “good” God in which he once believed, coming to the conclusion that what we humans see as good is meaningless in the eyes of God. “If His ideas of good are so very different from ours,” Lewis writes, “what He calls Heaven might well be what we should call Hell, and vice versa.” Furthermore:

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A very interesting idea! From http://www.opednews.com/articles/California-Dreamin–How-t-by-Ellen-Brown-090709-934.html

California Dreamin’: How the State Can Beat Its Budget Woes
By Ellen Brown
July 9, 2009

“As goes California,” says the adage, “so goes the nation.” All eyes are therefore on the Golden State as it attempts to solve its $26 billion budget deficit. The world’s eighth largest economy is not going quietly into that pit of debt and devastation that has devoured Third World countries whole. The State’s voters have drawn a line in the sand against further tax hikes, while Democratic leaders have drawn a line at further cuts in services or selloff of public assets. State legislators are deadlocked, caught between the rock of tax ceilings and the hard place of debt limits.
“Expect the best and accept nothing less,” says another adage that typifies the attitude sometimes called “California dreaming.” You create your own reality. Instead of trying to prop up an old model that has failed, you can dream up a new one. If anyone can come up with an original solution to the problem, Californians should be able to. But what? While waiting for developments, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has started paying the State’s bills with IOUs (”I Owe You”s evidencing debt, technically called “registered warrants”).
Hmm . . . Pay the bills with IOUs. Not a bad idea! That was, in fact,

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Sounds like a good pick. I heard on NPR this morning that some scientists are worried because they can’t see how Collins can be a good scientist if he believes in God. That says more about the implicit atheism of science in our culture than anything else one could say!

This via The Schwartzreport.

Genome Project Leader Is Selected To Head NIH

THOMAS H. MAUGH II - Los Angeles Times

Dr. Francis S. Collins, the geneticist who discovered the causes of half a dozen diseases, oversaw the government’s efforts to map the human genome and wrote a now-famous book presenting scientific evidence for a belief in God, will be nominated to head the National Institutes of Health, the White House confirmed Wednesday.

“My administration is committed to promoting scientific integrity and pioneering scientific research,

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From the Austin Chronicle. As always, a thoughtful perspective on something most people would never think to think of.

SOMETHING ABSURD IN BETWEEN

Austin Chronicle – July 3, 2009

MICHAEL VENTURA
LETTERS AT 3AM –

It was such a simple song. It said such a simple thing: “I want to hold your hand.” An impulse basic as lust, or maybe more basic: contact; the acknowledgment of one for another, two together, the beginning of everything – clasped hands.
“And when I touch you, I feel happy inside.” Just like that. Everybody had felt it. Everybody knew it was true.
And the song was everywhere. Even on that ferry to Riker’s Island prison. Unembarrassed, childishly happy, the song tinkled from a plastic AM radio the size of a lunchbox, as though four wee Beatles trilled in a tin can. Not much is bleaker than a prison or a ferry to a prison, and yet, even there, the song reminded you that there’s such a thing as joy.
You boarded the ferry before dawn with cops and guards and who-knows-who in that winter of 1964. It was rarely as warm as 30 degrees. Wind blew through the river’s corridor, encasing you in unspeakable coldness. I was 18, working in the prison mailroom, in the special darkness that was Riker’s, an atmosphere thick with violence and bewilderment. The song insisted that life was wonderful anyway.

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Took a while. One wonders how the voters of the state feel about having to wait so many months because the incumbent wouldn’t admit he was defeated. From http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/02/us/politics/02minnesota.html?ref=us

Franken, in Long Wait, Studied for Senate Role

By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
Published: July 1, 2009
After eight months of quietly raising money, hiring a staff and boning up on health care and other issues, Al Franken, the newly minted Democratic senator from Minnesota, finally got to deliver a victory speech on Wednesday.

“I’m not going to waste this chance,” he declared at a rally at the Capitol in St. Paul, a day after the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled him the winner of a protracted election battle with Senator Norm Coleman that began Nov. 4.

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