After months of controversy surrounding his choice of church, Barack Obama announced today that he’s resigned his and his family’s membership at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. “This is not a decision I come to lightly … and it is one I make with some sadness,” he said at a news conference, noting that he and his wife, Michelle, had been discussing the issue since the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s controversial appearance at the National Press Club last month in Washington, D.C., but added, “I’m not denouncing the church and I’m not interested in people who want me to denounce the church.”

Where does he go from here? “I suspect we’ll find another church home for our family,” Obama said. Let’s pray he finds a God-centered, Bible-believing, Gospel-preaching, politics-avoiding place for him and his family to worship. Any of you know of a good Chicagoland church home you could recommend for the Obamas? I assume Michael Pfleger’s Saint Sabina Roman Catholic Church isn’t an option.

The problem the Democrats were having with what to do with the Florida and Michigan delegates was finally decided today. The two states’ delegations will be seated at the convention with each delegate receiving a half vote. In Michigan, Hillary Clinton got 69 delegates and Barack Obama, who wasn’t on the state’s ballot, 59. Florida’s delegate distribution was based on the actual primary results, with Clinton getting 105 pledged delegates and Obama picking up 67.

The compromise decision made by the Rules Committee was not well received by the Clinton contingent in attendance, in fact, according to AP’s account, the scene at times got a bit ugly with shouting matches going back and forth, interrupting the proceedings:

“We just blew the election!” a woman in the audience shouted. The crowd was divided between cheering Obama supporters and booing Clinton supporters.

“This isn’t unity! Count all the votes!” another audience member yelled.

Clinton supporter and member of the Rules Committee Harold Ickes angrily informed his colleagues that Clinton reserves the right appeal the matter to the Credentials Committee, which could drag the matter out all the way to the Democratic convention in August.

The Burmese junta began forcing refugees out of government-run emergency shelters and camps on Friday, carting them back to their damaged homes in military trucks.

Much of the responding criticism from around the world focused on conditions back home for the returning hurricane victims, leaving unasked questions about the junta’s motives for redistributing the population.

Saturday’s Washington Post suggested the government feared the tented villages of refugees might become permanent. Human Rights Watch argued that the forced evictions are “part of government efforts to demonstrate that the affected population is capable of rebuilding their lives without foreign assistance.” Refugees International claims that Burmese authorities are trying “to get people back on their land to begin tending their fields and reviving the agricultural sector.”

One government official apparently claimed that the evicted refugees could live off of wild vegetables and fish, if they ran out of “bars of chocolate donated by the international community.”

Whatever the junta’s reasoning might be, closing the government refugee camps will at least lower the disease rate. As early as May 9, a nurse with Medecins Sans Frontieres told Al-Jazeera, “We are concerned when large numbers of people congregate, for instance in a school or temple where there’s no water supply or sanitation, that can really fuel outbreaks of disease.”

Meanwhile, the US and several aid organizations have strongly criticized the military rulers of Myanmar. The US Secretary of Defense has blamed the hesitant Burmese response for tens of thousands of the deaths this month, famously calling the junta leaders “deaf and dumb” to foreign offers of aid. Refugees International accused the leaders of having “raised another hurdle to effective humanitarian response,” and Human Rights Watch said the government was “returning people to greater misery and possible death.” Some have speculated that such heavy handed criticism is what Burma had been trying to avoid by preventing foreign aid workers into the country.

These criticisms contrast sharply with World Vision’s response to a meeting for foreign aid organizations in Yangon last weekend. World Vision noted that they “welcomed the government’s commitment to receiving international staff and aid,” although they remained “keen to establish how this would include reaching those in the Delta and for how long.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her counterpart, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, have pledged to fellow Democrats, in hardly uncertain terms, to do their best to end the party’s marathon nominating war, like, yesterday—at least, certainly before it reaches the national convention in August.

On a San Francisco talk radio show Thursday, Reid said he’d spoken with Pelosi and party chairman Howard Dean and all three agreed they should take steps to avoid a contest drawn all the way out to August. “We all are going to urge our folks next week to make a decision very quickly,” he said. According to The New York Times, Reid later bested that vow, telling another group in L.A. that the nominee “would be known by Wednesday”—the day after the bookending primaries in South Dakota and Montana.

He and Pelosi both have stayed neutral so far, but Pelosi, the highest-ranking Democrat, promised Wednesday to The San Francisco Chronicle editorial board that she’d “step in” absent a resolution in June. Slightly more circumspect than Reid about more immediate action, Pelosi added vaguely that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton “cannot take this fight to the convention. It must be over before then.”

A speedy resolution, of course, is what Pelosi and her party preferred from the beginning. And Obama, apparently, is betting on its imminence; he told reporters Wednesday that, as far as he’s concerned, the general election begins Wednesday. But the possibility that Clinton could drag the race out—likely for better rather than worse—to its bitter, internecine end still has conservatives like Rush Limbaugh, with his Operation Chaos, rooting for her. It’s effectively impossible, however, for Clinton to reach 2,026, that magic number of delegates necessary to clinch the Democratic nomination before the convention. (Using the Times’s handy calculator, even if Clinton repeated her all-time best performance—her 77 percent floor wiping in Arkansas—she’d still need 83 percent of the remaining superdelegates.)

Nevertheless, Clinton has dug her heels in, ensconced for the long haul. The Times also reported yesterday on her campaign’s threefold endgame strategy: (1) though she can’t eclipse it, cut into Obama’s delegate lead by lobbying to seat as many delegates as possible from Florida and Michigan, whose standing at the convention was stripped away after their states’ parties moved the primaries up in violation of DNC rules; (2) add to her lead in the popular vote with a strong finish in Puerto Rico’s primary on June 1; and (3) persuade superdelegates to join her side, as she aimed to do yesterday with this letter and memo, by stressing both (1) and (2) as well as the Electoral College argument, a calculus based on the logic that, come November, Clinton would outperform Obama by winning more states (both blue and red) in the general election. This is particularly persuasive, she hopes, for Democrats who’ll never forget how their candidate won the popular vote in 2000 but lost under the state-by-state Electoral College system.

The result of (1) doesn’t look good, given even the best-case scenario for her (seating half the penalized delegates) theorized yesterday by party lawyers. The DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee meets Saturday to determine how many of the two rogue states’ delegates to seat. Clinton’s supporters have promised to “flood it” in protest.

This Sunday, I begin teaching my first adult Sunday school class, and at the request of a member of the class, we’ll be breaking down the anthropology and Christology of The Screwtape Letters. In Uncle Screwtape’s very first letter, he tells nephew Wormwood not to attempt to encourage disbelief with argument. Arguing, says Screwtape, even if the human is arguing against Christianity, is not good. It encourages him to use his brain, and these devils don’t want humans using their brains. They want them feeling. Not thinking. Thinking, even atheistic thinking, can lead to belief, because thinking is the province of logos, the Word. And so, this caught my eye. A few weeks ago, we blogged on the Templeton Foundation’s posing of the question, “Does science make belief in God obsolete?” This article from The American examines the answer of one physicist and Christian who answered the question with “Absolutely not!” But I’m not sure the rest of his answer is satisfying. His name is William D. Phillips, a professor at the University of Maryland and a Nobel Laureate in physics.

Phillips, himself a scientist and a practicing Christian who talks openly about his faith, wrote in his essay that “a scientist can believe in God because such belief is not a scientific matter.” […] Phillips said that examining belief in God from a scientific vantage point was the wrong approach, since one cannot measure God scientifically. “I do not believe that science is ever going to prove the existence of God,” he explained, “nor do I believe that science is ever going to disprove the existence of God.” The real question, Phillips said, is not a scientific one, and it should not be dealt with in a scientific paradigm. He maintained that people want to experience religion the way they do art, music, or love.

He says that God might not make sense, really, but “I can feel God’s presence in my life.” So, we have a Nobel Laureate turning off his mind when it comes to God. Wormwood has done well.

OK, technically it’s not a “sport,” but, hey, ESPN360.com and ESPN covered the quarter- and semifinals. And last night on ABC, 13-year-old Sameer Mishra of West Lafayette, Ind., won the 2008 Scripps National Spelling Bee by correctly spelling the word “guerdon,” which means “something that one has earned or gained.” The eighth grader won $35,000 in cash plus more than $5,000 in other prizes.

Runner-up Sidharth Chand, 12, of Bloomfield Hills, Mich., fell short by misspelling “prosopopoeia,” which, according Merriam-Webster, means “a figure of speech in which an imaginary or absent person is represented as speaking or acting.” One of the pre-Bee favorites, Tia Thomas, 13, a homeschooler from Coarsegold, Calif., finished third, misspelling “opificer,” a skilled or artistic worker. Another favorite, homeschooled Matthew Evans, a friendly rival of Tia’s from Albuquerque, N.M., was unexpectedly eliminated earlier in the day in the semifinals when he misspelled “secernent,” a word dealing with secretion. Both Tia and Matthew received rare standing ovations as they left the stage.

In attendance last night was 94-year-old Frank Neuhauser, who won the first national bee in 1925 by correctly spelling the word “gladiolus.”

(It’s interesting to note that as I ran this post through spell-check, all the words from the competition were flagged, except for the winning words, “guerdon” from 2008 and “gladiolus” from 1925.)

Perhaps I’m in the minority, but I don’t always notice the soundtracks of movies I watch.  Of course, I can think of plenty of movies with standout soundtracks–Chariots of Fire, Star Wars (the older movies), and Gone with the Wind come to mind. But generally, at the end of a movie I don’t think, “Wow, I really loved the music.” One recent exception was Juno, which has one of the most unique soundtracks I think I’ve ever heard.

Everyone seems to have their own opinions on the best movie soundtrack(s). What’s yours?

On Saturdays, we consider a passage of Scripture: 

“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.

“You shall have no other gods before me.

“You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.

“You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain.

“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.

“Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.

“You shall not murder. 

“You shall not commit adultery.

“You shall not steal.

“You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.

“You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor’s.”

Exodus 20:2-17

Happy last day of May!

Today’s quote is from a songwriter and composer: “The toughest thing about success is that you’ve got to keep on being a success.”

The Vatican has issued a warning that women taking part in ordinations as priests would be excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church. Monsignor Angelo Amato of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith said, “The church does not feel authorized to change the will of its founder Jesus Christ.” When Amato was asked whether the church was going “against the tide” of other Christian churches who allow women in the pulpit, he pointed out that the Catholic church was in “good company” with Orthodox and ancient eastern churches and that it was some Protestant denominations who had broken with tradition.