Is Meriam Ibrahim A Modern-Day Perpetua or Felicity?

Meriam Yehya Ibrahim is the Sudanese woman sentenced to death in her native country of Sudan for having married a Christian.  Though Meriam professes Christianity, the government claims that because her father was Muslim, Meriam is a Muslim and therefore she's violated the (Muslim) faith by marrying a Christian.   The account of her husband, Daniel Wani, is, meanwhile, a bit confusing.  Apparently a Sudanese, he's variously described as being a U.S. citizen, a lawyer, living in the United States and here it states he's in a wheelchair and dependent on Meriam for everything.

Viewed from a Western, 21st century perspective, the story is hard to believe, bordering on the unimaginable especially when one considers that Meriam was sent to prison for her so-called crime of apostasy while 8 months pregnant, is in prison with her 20-month old son, is to be given 100 lashes and put to death by hanging.  Is it the 21st century or the 11th, 2014 or 1014?  Or is it perhaps 203 A.D.

The Future Victims of the Colosseum
Henryk Siemiradzki

That's the year Roman Emperor Septimius Severus ordered a group of Christians fed to wild beasts if they would not denounce their Christian faith.  Among them was Vivia Perpetua, then 22 with an infant son (Meriam is 27 with a young son), along with a slave, Felicity, who was pregnant when imprisoned and gave birth to a daughter in prison (as did Meriam).  Perpetua and Felicity, both young mothers, steadfastly professed their faith though gored and bloody. That they endured this most horrific of deaths in a Carthaginian amphitheater is a painful reminder of their astonishing courage and faith. Such martyrdom may or may not be in store for Meriam and I don't know that she's a Catholic, but regardless hers is a modern-day tale suggesting that the Christian persecution and heroism of darker times cannot be relegated to the ash heap of history.

The story of Perpetua and Felicity is easily accessible, but I read a particularly thoughtful account in a little book called Married Saints by John Fink.  You may find more here and perhaps here where you might also take a look at the author's book.

D-Day

This is President Reagan's 1984 speech in Normandy commemorating D-Day; in the audience, surviving Army Rangers who scaled the cliffs. (It's said that the Ranger motto can be traced to one General Cota on D-Day.)  Note the Stephen Spender poem referenced by Reagan which is quite beautiful.

The Truly Great

By Stephen Spender 1909–1995 Stephen Spender

I think continually of those who were truly great.

Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history

Through corridors of light, where the hours are suns,

Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition

Was that their lips, still touched with fire,

Should tell of the Spirit, clothed from head to foot in song.

And who hoarded from the Spring branches

The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.

What is precious, is never to forget

The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs

Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth.

Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light

Nor its grave evening demand for love.

Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother

With noise and fog, the flowering of the spirit.

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields,

See how these names are fêted by the waving grass

And by the streamers of white cloud

And whispers of wind in the listening sky.

The names of those who in their lives fought for life,

Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre.

Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun

And left the vivid air signed with their honour.

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In contrast, there's President' Obama's speech of today.  Obama has difficulty evoking  those "who in their lives fought for life, Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre."  Actually, by unfortunate and clumsy contrast, Obama's words make up "the traffic to smother With noise and fog, the flowering of the spirit."  

Peter Salins, You Forgot The Real Magic Bullet

An argument is made in this article for universal preK as a way to address the country's education deficits particularly in the lower socioeconomic classes.  The author, Peter Salins, starts off by acknowledging that most attempts at pre-K programs, such as Head Start, have been failures and he points out why, namely, they were little more than daycare programs.

Salins explains that if these programs were content-rich, taught by qualified professionals and, if they were more fully integrated into the nation's education system, they could successfully provide the "cultural literacy" that is necessary for getting kids started on the right educational footing.  In fact, Salins suggests that we "scale up" preschool through the public education system so that all children can take advantage of it. In order for the effects of the pre-school to be lasting "we must fully incorporate preschool within the regular district educational system [italics his]. Under this rubric, school districts would extend their educational ladder by two years below kindergarten, creating an integrated pre-K-to-grade-12 curricular program -- accessible, without extra charge, to all local schoolchildren."  This sounds logical enough until one realizes that Mr. Salins, who himself is smart enough to have written a book about being smart, Smart Society, has overlooked the real magic bullet, the family.

Throughout history, being poor or coming from a lower socioeconomic bracket has not generally been an impediment to being smart.  Some of us need only think of our depression-era parents, my own for starters. My father was one of five children born to Italian immigrants, both mother and father largely illiterate with no English spoken in the home.  My father's mother died when he was 12 and his father was a man of erratic behavior and work habits. The family was held together by an older sister who became mother and homemaker as best she could.  She encouraged my father, a feckless student until his high school years, to go to college. He went on to enjoy a very successful career as a civil engineer.  One sister was a nurse, another a secretary.  In Salins' quick-fix world, my father and his sisters would have been in universal pre-K under the tutelage of some highly trained professional (in a bilingual program no doubt).  But they did fine without someone feeding them their ABCs in a high-powered cultural literacy classroom.  In its place, they had the family. 

My father's sister, my aunt, kept the family together  not because she cared whether her siblings would be smart, but because she placed value on home and family life. She knew instinctively that keeping her siblings close at hand was the best way to ensure continuity and security in their lives, an environment that would in turn give them the foundation to function confidently outside the family. Besides, if she didn't care for her own, who would?  

Salins himself acknowledges that the family is where it all starts. Though his article makes only one reference to families and one to single mothers,  he says that disadvantaged children come from families "unable to provide the cognitive stimulation" necessary to launch them on a solid educational path.  Salins has identified the problem, broken and disabled families, but, somewhat perversely, he has come up with a remedy that treats another problem--fixing government pre-K programs.  In so doing he leads us into a fine Catch-22 of treating the symptoms while leaving the root cause untouched, thereby giving rise to the same symptoms all over again.  Instead of again putting band-aids on pre-K programs, why not work on building up the family since the success of the former admittedly depends on the health of the latter?

If it were possible to develop a productive, educated society by having every government-run school district pour knowledge into the heads of three year-olds, Salins' enthusiasm for universal pre K might make sense. But the toddlers he's talking about are human beings who in addition to some cognitive literacy need stable homes with mothers and fathers who are their first teachers, their first defenders and their champions. Before young children can sit in a classroom, they need to develop an awareness of who they are, where they fit in, they need to learn social skills and self-control.

Salins will never find enough teachers no matter how highly trained to do all this. It's not the job of a pre-K teacher or any classroom teacher to provide what only the family is uniquely created for. Families don't have to be perfect to be effective and parents don't need to be as rich as Rockefeller or as smart as Einstein to fulfill their role.  They don't even need to be the greatest parents.  They just need to know how important they are to the development of their children.  

How do we change the culture of family life in our soceity?  Consider the fact that the average six-year old can rattle off the earth's endangered species and deems it a crime to hurt the rain forest, that the average teenager knows not to smoke, drink or use drugs, but, yes, to use a condom, that the average citizen knows that smoking is evil and getting fat is worse. Suppose as a society we cared as much about our mothers and fathers and children as we do about which elephant is nearing extinction, or whether a 16 ounce drink is healthy.  Start educating teenagers about the advantages of being married before having children. Let teen age girls and young women know that one route to poverty can be through single motherhood, that if you want to avoid that pitfall, practice chastity and get a high school degree.  Educate young men about the importance of fatherhood, of being a man and the rewards that go with the role of provider and protector.  Instruct young people that marriage is among the best protections against poverty, that stable homes produce the highest index of wealth.  Support churches and civic groups that work to build up and counsel healthy marriages and healthy families.  Re-examine divorce laws and structure the tax code in such ways that reward stable marriages and intact families.

Our society's magic bullet is not government-run education, but our human treasure in the form of our children and their parents.  The family, reasonably healthy, reasonably intact, but fully supported and strengthened by the society as a whole will do the work that no policy expert or expert teacher can come close to doing.

First "Stupid" Then "A Knucklehead"

Several years back, when it came time to do the college search, our oldest son decided to apply to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.  Living in Manhattan, coming from an international private school, and, for us, a family with no military background, it was an unusual path to take.

It generated not a few comments from those unflaggingly progressive New York City neighbors and friends of ours, most of whom had nothing particularly nice to say either to our son or to us as parents.  One especially angry neighbor stopped me on 14th Street just in front of the post office to ask what was going on and she (yes, it was a woman) finally could contain her distress no longer.  Her face red and her stance belligerent, she yelled after me that "only a 17-year old would be stupid enough to do something like that." Shortly thereafter, when our son was a first-semester plebe at West Point, then-Senator John Kerry delivered his own version of what most of my neighbors had been saying a few months earlier. Kerry told a college-age audience that they needed to be smart and get a good education lest they get "stuck" in the military.

Well, our son did do "something like that" and while he's not "stuck in Iraq" he is now a 25 year old soon-to-be captain in the U.S. Army.  He's been a platoon leader, planned missions and conducted training sessions. He handles and is responsible for equipment valued in the millions of dollars.  He lives in beautiful country, but he's 3,000 miles from the rest of his family.  He works long hours with modest pay.

And according to First Lady Michelle Obama he's a knucklehead. 

Oh, it's not just our son by any means, and she wasn't singling out knuckleheads in the military.  She was more sweeping in her characterization of young people as a group of knuckleheads.  I happen to have three in my family.  As Mrs. Obama puts it, my kids would be among those young people who are "cookin' for the first time and slice their finger open."  Presumably, according to the first lady, when my kids and their goofy lot aren't bungling something in the kitchen,  they're out "dancing on a bar stool," drunk enough to fall off and get a concussion I would imagine. And since they're all knuckleheads, they won't have insurance so they won't be able to get their finger stitched up, that is, if they're even smart enough to think to go to the doctor.

The First Lady's shallow humor was a push for her husband's Affordable Care Act, delivered at the expense of the young people who helped send Mrs. Obama and her husband to the White House.  Her hapless remark, like Kerry's "botched joke," has been covered by a variety of sources and there's not much more I can add except to shake my head in the disappointing knowledge that the first lady has a lot in common with my neighbors and friends of eight years ago.  They were merely speaking their minds when they let go with their opinions on young people joining the military just as Michelle Obama let us know who she thinks is stupid.  While I applaud them their honesty, I find it remarkable that these unflattering, critical labels roll so easily off the tongues of, well, liberals who pride themselves on being tolerant and well-educated and smart.

Are you a homophobe?

You just might be called one if you have any doubts whatsoever that college football player Michael Sam who announced a while back that he's gay, is courageous or made history.  You just might be labeled a homophobe if you're not rushing to acclaim his action as "unprecedented" and "postmodern".  You certainly will be consigned to the ranks of what the enlightened elite calls homophobes if you aren't at least proud, respectful, and supportive of Michael Sam.  Watch out!   Being cast as a homophobe in today's politically correct culture puts you on the negative side of the balance sheet.

Sam's statement has created somewhat more hub-bub than NBA player Jason Collins's announcement of last year perhaps because, as eligible for the NFL draft, Sam could be the first openly homosexual NFL player. But back in April, even Collins's moment of truth elicited a response from Barack Obama who referred to Collins's announcement as an "extraordinary measure of progress."

There's something curious about the matter if you stop and think about it for a minute.  First,  I really don't know any homophobes.  I don't know anyone who has a fear of homosexuals, who is so afraid  that he won't speak to a homosexual or who is so terrorized by homosexuals that he would cross the street to avoid possibly grazing shoulders.  I know of no one who would first inquire as to a person's sexual preferences before patronizing their business, calling them a friend or helping them as a neighbor. A homophobe is a rare phenomenon.

Second, both Sam and Collins seem intent on emphasizing that their identity is not their sexuality but their profession. Sam himself testifies that he's a "football player", that's who he is, that his sexual preference shouldn't be a "big problem" that being gay is "nothing" compared to the hardships he's endured in his life.  Jason Collins has offered much the same.  He doesn't have time to think about making history.  He wants to focus on his job.  He says that this is about Sam "just being a football player and me just being a basketball player and trying to help our respective teams win."   Obama himself had this to say. "We judge people on the basis of their character and their performance, not on their sexuality. I'm very proud of him."  

So if we judge people on their character and not on their sexuality, why are we talking about their sexuality?

In the current public discussion of these sports figures, having a same-sex attraction, being 'gay,' is characterized for us as nothing special, just another choice, an alternative life style, not a big deal.  Anyone who doesn't buy into that characterization is a homophobe.  Period.  The label is tossed off freely, carelessly---and with not the kindest intentions.   

The powers that be, that nebulous "they" have dictated that there will no discussion, no dissent, no ifs, no whys or maybes. If you don't care to agree--for whatever reason--that homosexuality is no big deal, then you, my friend, are a narrow-minded, nasty, backwards fool.  You are a homophobe.  Is nobody allowed a little time for introspection,  questioning, wondering?  How did homosexuality all of a sudden become no big deal after millenia of being considered something different? When did homosexuality become the norm?  Or is it?  Sam and Collins are telling us it's nothing, they're just regular guys but they and the chorus behind them are also telling us that they're different and special and courageous. For being normal?  Which is it?

The Parable of the Talents in India

This researcher found that for an exceptionally impoverished group of women in India, of the Dalit

caste,  there's a connection between becoming a convert to Christianity and improving their economic situation.  The Christian converts, as opposed to their Hindu and/or Muslim counterparts, invested monies they received from a microfinance program thus generating more capital for themselves and improving their lot.  Say, there's something to the parable of the talents after all!

Also noteworthy is the importance of owning a home, something those of us (even those who rent) in an affluent, free(ish) and democratic (still more or less so) society may take for granted.  As the researcher notes:

The impact of home ownership is crucial, since “by being able to own a house, these poor women were able to get bank loans, commercial loans, which they didn’t have access to before that. When you have a house you can get a loan at 3 percent, instead of from a money lender at 18 percent.  So having a house is a very important investment in your future, so you can have access to very affordable credit.” 

 An unexpected finding linked home ownership among these women with a greater likelihood of seeking help for abuse at the hands of husbands.   I think, though, that it's not so much the home ownership that does this, but rather the sense of worth that the Christian faith builds up in these women who realize the value of their existence. They become secure in the knowledge that they matter, that the fruits of their labor matter and that they don't deserve to be beat up by a bully not yet acquainted with the special gifts offered by Christianity.   The providential effects of Christianity for women have not gone unnoticed over the ages, being written about most recently by our own Cardinal Dolan.  He wrote up a good riposte to the imaginary "war on women" so popular with some in our society.  The cardinal writes specifically about the way in which early Christianity and now Catholicism elevate women, beginning with Mary, a teenage girl who finds herself pregnant and unmarried and becomes one of the central figures of the Catholic faith. 

Historians of the Roman Empire document how much the Church’s elevation of women threatened the status quo: in an empire that treated women like chattel, the Church declared her equal in dignity to man; in a culture that declared she could be dismissed from a marriage by a selfish husband (she could never divorce him!), the Church taught, with Jesus, that marriage was forever; in a society that coerced abortion against the natural maternal instinct, the Church proclaimed, no! In a culture where women were viewed as objects of pleasure for men, Christianity objected, raising sexuality from just the physical to a very icon of God’s love for us: personal, passionate, faithful, forever, and life-giving.

Michelle Obama On Living Out Your Faith

I know it's an old article, from 2012, a year and five months old to be slightly less than precise, but who can resist Michelle when she's "speaking truth to power" and talking about Jesus as an example for our lives.  I just read the article again after seeing Mrs. Obama's wise words quoted regarding Liberty Ridge Farms, a business that is doing just what First Lady Michelle is advocating--living out one's faith every day of the week.  Moved to speak about Christ, clearly Michelle is not an angry black woman.

“Our faith journey isn’t just about showing up on Sunday for a good sermon and good music and a good meal. It’s about what we do Monday through Saturday as well, especially in those quiet moments, when the spotlight’s not on us, and we’re making those daily choices about how to live our lives.

“We see that in the life of Jesus Christ. Jesus didn’t limit his ministry to the four walls of the church,” she said. “He was out there fighting injustice and speaking truth to power every single day. He was out there spreading a message of grace and redemption to the least, the last, and the lost. And our charge is to find Him everywhere, every day by how we live our lives.”

The owners at Liberty Ridge Farms remained  true to their beliefs not just on a Sunday when it's easiest to be faithful, but on a weekday when they explained to a probing caller that their business couldn't host a same sex wedding.  Now they're involved in a lawsuit and being asked to pay damages. 

Michelle talks about "our faith journey" though for all she and her husband are now affiliated with a faith journey, minus their perfunctory Easter family visit,  the Obamas are presumably among the 60% or so of Americans who seldom or never attend church.  (That's  except for the 20 years when the Obamas weren't really regular attendees at that Jeremiah Wright church in Chicago and didn't listen anyway when they were there.)  The President's administration is notably hostile to the practice of religion in the public square--exactly what the First Lady is advocating here--with its HHS mandate, its attempts to limit religious freedom in the military, its disinterest in America's commitment to religious liberty globally and the President's narrow interpretation of what religious freedom and the First Amendment mean.  From an article in First Things:

Barack Obama once asserted that “our deliberative, pluralistic democracy demands . . . that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values.”   

As the article points out, this is precisely what our democracy doesn't call on us to do.  Our "religiously motivated. . concerns" are our particular religious beliefs, particular to us, to the dictates of our conscience.  They are, as James Madison writes, our property to which we have that God-given right as expressed in the Declaration of Independence. Referring to President Obama's commitment to religious liberty internationally, which differs not at all from his commitment to religious liberty domestically,  the article goes on to say,

The current administration, while it has delivered some nice speeches on the subject, has invested its energy and resources in the promotion of “LGBT” interests, not religious liberty. Obama took two and one-half years to get his ambassador-at-large for religious freedom, Suzan Johnson Cook, in place, and even then she was buried deep in the bureaucracy, with little authority or resources. Clearly the Obama administration has subordinated religious liberty to the international pursuit of what it believes to be superior rights claims. 

Michelle reminds us that what's important are "those quiet moments" when we make choices about how to live our lives. Speaking truth to power.  Fighting injustice.  Finding Christ "everywhere" by "how we live our lives."  Saying one thing but meaning another.  Probably.  Deception comes in many guises and turns of phrase.