Former Georgia Republican Rep. Bob Barr launched a Libertarian Party presidential bid Monday, promising an alternative to the big government approaches of all three presidential candidates. While in Congress, Barr was a key leader in the impeachment proceedings against former President Bill Clinton. Seeing that Republicans are no longer fiscal conservatives, Barr left the Republican Party two years ago.

Barr’s campaign platform includes themes that Republicans of old used to value. Barr believes that government spending at all levels is out of control.

Tens of billions of dollars in corporate welfare - essentially aid to dependent corporations - should be eliminated. Largesse for middle- and upper-income Americans, particularly so-called “entitlement” programs, must be cut. Billions in so-called defense spending, which protects America’s populous, prosperous allies rather than Americans, must be eliminated.

Barr would push to adopt a national sales tax, replacing the Internal Revenue Service and all federal income taxes, as well as payroll taxes. Barr would also push to repeal the 16th amendment, which authorizes Congress to levy an income tax in order to keep his fair tax proposal permanent.

Barr disagrees with government making surrogate decisions about the lives of citizens, seeking to restore our founding fathers’ belief in liberty and recognizing that responsible citizenship requires everyone to be held accountable for the good and bad decisions they make. Barr says, “the sustained government attack on the sanctity of the rights of the individual, including their right to be secure in their privacy and property, has created a moral and Constitutional crisis.”

On immigration, Barr wants to restrict access to public services for undocumented aliens because, to date, such access exists to the detriment of those who would enter the country to work productively and also increases the burden on taxpayers.

On national defense, Barr is tired of using the U.S. military as the world’s police force: “Our great military has been too willingly and quickly used for purposes other than national defense.” Barr wants to use our military when foreign aggressors attack, not simply for interventionist initiatives.

Although Barr may have entered the race too late, there are millions of Americans who might be willing to vote for Barr to protest government monopoly power and spending promoted by both Democrats and Republicans, as some have recently argued. Over the past decade, Barr reminds us, total government spending nationwide (state, local and federal) has increased from $2.9 trillion to $5.1 trillion in 2008.

For those looking for real change in Washington in 2008, Bob Barr may pose a challenge to both big government Republicans and even bigger government Democrats.

High school boys no longer require the internet to view pornography because their female classmates are texting sexually explicit pictures directly to their cell phones. It’s a practice some are calling ’sexting’ and “includes the act of text messaging someone in the hopes of having a sexual encounter with them later; initially casual, transitioning into highly suggestive and even sexually explicit,” as explained by some urban culture specialists. Here is a recent story about the practice:

PORTLAND, Ore. — The popularity of cell phone text messaging has led to a new and controversial trend for students and parents on Portalnd-area high schools. Teens told Portland TV station KPTV that many of their classmates are using cell phones to take and send explicit photos. They said “sexting” is a major problem at most campuses in Portland. Anton Bogan, a local high school student, said “9.7 times out of 10, it’s a nasty photo.”

In the news story I watched, teens admitted that it was mostly girls sending photos to boyfriends, for example. The sexually explicit photos are often later distributed throughout the school with the use of the forwarding feature.

Many parents will find this alarming, but it reveals the need for moral formation, forged within the context of real intimacy, to engender the moral virtue not to participate in activities that others have no qualms about. The Enemy’s “parasite kingdom” continues to attach itself to technology that could also be used for so much good. The same photo and text messaging feature that allows students to take spontaneous shots of their friends having fun, pictures for an auto accident insurance claim, and so on, is also open to gross perversions like most things.

What are parents to do? Prevent their children from having camera phones? Not allow them to be around other students with camera phones? Not allow them to have the text messaging feature on their cell phones at all?

For those parents of children under five-years-old it can be frightening to think about what will be available technologically for your kids that will tempt them into immorality in ways unthinkable today. Who would have imagined, even 10 years ago, that there would come a time when high school students would send sexually explicit pictures of themselves back and forth to one another, on their cell phones, even during school hours? What’s next?

Brandon O’Brien’s Christianity Today column, “A Jesus for Real Men,” is an unfortunate example of opinion offered from cursory knowledge. A little bit of religious history is a dangerous thing. In fact, the overall consensus of O’Brien’s disserts is that he misses the point and innacurately caricatures and revises John Eldredge, Mark Driscoll, David Murrow.

I completely agree. O’Brien’s named “masculinity movement” has been the subject of much conversation over the past 25 years or so because a dying church in America is witnessing the fruit of radical feminism and the warehousing of generations of passive or abusive men.

Here’s recent data from David Murrow:

The typical U.S. Congregation draws an adult crowd that’s 61% female, 39% male. As many as 90 percent of the boys raised in the church will abandon it by their 20th birthday. On any given Sunday there are 13 million more adult women than men in America’s churches. This Sunday almost 25 percent of married, churchgoing women will worship without their husbands. Midweek activities often draw 70 to 80 percent female participants. The majority of church employees are women (except for ordained clergy, who are overwhelmingly male). [Many only return when their girlfriends or wives bring them back.] More than 90 percent of American men believe in God, and 5 out of 6 call themselves Christians. But only 2 out of 6 attend church on a given Sunday. The average man accepts the reality of Jesus Christ, but fails to see any value in going to church.

We must wrestle with the fact that men have checked out of church-life in America.

Leon Podles provides a historical narrative of the masculinity crisis in The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity. Historian Anne Braude’s essay “Women’s History Is Religious History,” in the book Retelling U.S. Religious History readily admits that for quite some time Christianity has been, and continues to be, primarily oriented around meeting the needs of women and their children. Men are not around because American church does not connect.

However, O’Brien, doesn’t get it. The men he critiques are not trying to “re-masculate Jesus,” introduce “greater testosterone” into the church, or use natural instincts to define masculinity. Those are ridiculous assertions. They are addressing the fact that the average man in America simply does not connect with narrow image of Jesus presented in most churches today. The average man doesn’t feel like he fits into the overall ethos of church life since it has been, for far too long, almost exclusively oriented away from bringing men into a broader view of kingdom mission in ways that are unique to callings God has placed on men as they bear the image of God. Moreover, many of the men that do fit into churches organized primarily to meet the needs of women and their children are not the types of men that others look to follow.

O’Brien’s biblical theology is so bad that I’ll have to deal with it elsewhere but his claim that the only time Jesus appears as warrior are his “pre-incarnate” and “post-resurrection” debuts has no biblical warrant and largely misses the reality of spiritual warfare during Jesus life and ministry. Casting out demons is not spiritual warfare? The Kingdom needs warriors who are allied with God to fight against “principalities and powers.” Was Jesus not fighting the devil during his ministry?

Overall, O’Brien wrongly prejudices men against being challenged in good ways because of his own misunderstanding of church history, the reality of the church in America, and a biblical theology that may suffer from a lack of exegetical depth. If O’Brien “got it” a more accurate title to his unuanced opinion would be “The Bible’s Jesus for the Regular Guy.”

If O’Brien knows very little about the writings and teachings of the men he critiques, argues against a straw man, and mishandles biblical theology why should we take him seriously? This would be equivalent an accountant critiquing the Navy’s assessment of what makes a man a good Navy seal.

Brandon O’Brien’s Christianity Today column, “A Jesus for Real Men,” puts the masculinity of the incarnate Jesus into question. In attacking the so-called “new masculinity movement,” O’Brien constructs an unfair, unbalanced caricature of men like Mark Driscoll, David Murrow, and John Eldredge and then seeks to tear down metaphors that do not agree with his more sophisticated pallet. While giving lip service to the contributions of these men he essentially argues against the straw man.

O’Brien first gives an historical error. He claims that the first writer to popularize the masculinity crisis in the church was John Eldredge. False. The first ones to raise the issue were writers like Leane Payne author of Crisis in Masculinity (1995) and Harvard Divinity school graduate and psychologist Sam Keen author of Fire in the Belly: On Being A Man (1992). There was a substantial national discussion about men in the church for years in mainline Protestant and Catholic circles before Eldredge struck the keyboard.

O’Brien then aims his caricature at David Murrow, author of Why Men Hate Going To Church; Brad Stine, a comedian, who began a ministry called GodMen; and Mark Driscoll, pastor of Seattle’s Mars Hill Church. What is most bizarre about the critique of Stine is that one might assume, since Stine is a comedian, that many of his comments would be interpreted as comedic hyperbole. No so for O’Brien. He critiques Stein’s comedic hyperbole as if it were biblical theology.

Perfecting the art of out-of-context critiques, O’Brien takes a few quotes from a Driscoll sermon and caricatures his point as well. Although Driscoll has written an entire book on Christology, called Vintage Jesus, O’Brien seems content to assume the worst from a sermon clip. Why not reference the book?

What is most profoundly distorting about O’Brien’s critique of John Eldredge is the fact that Eldredge has directly addressed women’s discipleship issues in Captivating: Unveiling the Mystery of a Woman’s Soul, co-authored with his wife. Moreover, in his latest book, The Way of Wild Heart: A Map of the Masculine Journey, Eldredge spends an entire chapter developing the need for men to have an aesthetic conversion and to become lovers of beauty, the poetic, and so on.

O’Brien’s convenient caricatures miss the point that the goal of the recent masculinity reflections is not to “re-masculate Jesus” but to “re-masculate” the church’s men to be conformed to the Bible’s whole teaching about Jesus in his incarnation and exaltation. Then the church’s men can offer their needed strength to their families, the church, and work of the Kingdom.

O’Brien’s column should be taken with the smallest grain of salt because it lacks a fair assessment of the men he caricatures, fails to understand the rhetorical use of hyperbole, and is biased toward affinities of men who are among educated class’s Christian elite.

The recently announced Delta/Northwest airline merger agreement teaches us a valuable lesson about the market: Company brands do not exist forever. In our ever-changing international economic environment it would not be wise for anyone to expect to spend an entire career working for the same company brand. Change happens.

While the Delta/Northwest merger is welcome news, it actually might not improve the industry in the long term unless the airlines retire their antiquated business models. The smaller, low-cost, more efficiently run airlines, like Southwest, continue to gain greater market share because they are responding to changes in consumer demand.

We should also be careful not to pay attention to those who do not understand economic systems and seek to scare people into thinking that fares could potentially sky-rocket. This way of thinking, of course, assumes that markets are static. Here’s an example from the L.A. Times regarding the Delta/Northwest merger:

“It’s good for them, but it’s bad for all of us,” said Richard Gritta, professor of finance and transportation at the University of Portland in Oregon. “More concentration means higher prices and less service. No matter what they say, you’re going to see layoffs.”

What Gritta seems to miss is that more “concentration” in the short term will not necessarily result in higher fares in the long term because the merger now opens up new opportunities for other airlines to assume those routes thereby increasing competition and reducing fares. We have already seen this with the affect Southwest and Jet Blue airlines have had on the entire industry. It’s not a zero-sum game.

The good news about the merger is that we now have one less airline that will receive corporate welfare checks. The airline industry has perfected the art of going to government protection in bankruptcy so as to hide from their own mismanagement and be shielded from unions that seek to leverage arbitrary wage inflation that companies cannot afford. Flying under bankruptcy actually provides an unfair advantage over competitors. Bankrupt airlines continue to lose money without facing market consequences. Bankruptcy protection, therefore, retards growth in the industry and reduces competition in the long run.

Consolidation of mismanaged airlines makes the industry more efficient, better able to meet consumer demand, and—contrary to popular impression—increases competition. Burdened by excess flying capacity, the top five airlines need to be streamlined. If the top airlines were to consolidate, it would give other airlines opportunities to enter into new markets, providing consumers with more flying options. More flying options mean more competition and lower prices.

So we say good-bye the Northwest Airlines brand name. It was a good run. RIP (1926–2008). Now we simply need America’s dead auto industry to take the hint: change or die.

White people have specific tastes, interests, and patterns according to a new blog that has quickly reached national prominence. ABC News reports:

“Three months ago, Christian Lander was nothing more than an anonymous Internet copywriter living in Los Angeles. Today, his blog “Stuff White People Like” is a heavily-trafficked, much-discussed site that last week netted him a book deal.”

Lander, a white man, has stumbled into creating a online experience for people to openly mock, investigate, and pursue what it means to be white in America. “This is a scientific approach to highlight and explain stuff white people like. They are pretty predictable,” he writes.

The site’s most read post is about “Asian girls” and why white people (specifically men, in this case), love them. The post got more than 1,700 comments. Among the first list of post regarding what white people like:

#25 David Sedaris
#24 Wine
#23 Microbreweries
#22 Having Two Last Names
#21 Writers Workshops
#20 Being an expert on YOUR culture
#19 Traveling
#18 Awareness
#17 Hating their Parents
#16 Gifted Children
#15 Yoga
#14 Having Black Friends
#13 Tea
#12 Non-Profit Organizations
#11 Asian Girls
#10 Wes Anderson Movies
#9 Making you feel bad about not going outside
#8 Barack Obama
#7 Diversity
#6 Organic Food
#5 Farmer’s Markets
#4 Assists
#3 Film Festivals
#2 Religions their parents don’t belong to
#1 Coffee

Since Landers is white, critics have resisted the charge of racism. But what is interesting is some people’s concern that this is more than satire. Of course, it is rarely considered “racist” if someone critiques trends within one’s own race. (Chris Rock, for example, frequently criticizes ghetto culture.)

Other recent posts about what white people like include outdoor performance clothes (North Face, REI, Mountain Equipment Co-Op, Columbia Sportswear, and Patagonia), Whole Foods and Food Co-ops, wearing shorts as much as possible, soccer, recycling, public radio, and more.

Since whites are the dominant culture, “stuff white people like” drives the marketplace. For racial minorities, however, this list may indicate the kinds of issues and topics one may need to appropriate to assimilate into the dominant culture’s social and professional settings.

The domain for “stuff evangelicals like” has already been registered with Word Press, a blog hosting site. In the satirical and self-critical spirit of Lander’s blog, what types of things could be listed on such a list for evangelicals? If asked, I would submit that evangelicals like throwing rocks at the big, bad Goliath called “the culture.” What else?

If you are in your 20s or 30s and a baby boomer is discipling you, write a book about it. Your experience is an anomaly. One universal characteristic of America’s first “me” generation is that they do not seem to disciple younger men. Ask a 25-year-old man in your church who is discipling him or ask a boomer man to name one younger man he is discipling and you will likely hear crickets.

In a recent conversation with an 80-year-old, well-respected, sage pastor in my denomination, he expressed disappointment that the men he had invested in during his 45-years of pastoral ministry had no “Timothys” of their own. This pastor told me that his own generation (the “Builders”) was deliberate in discipling and caring for their younger brothers in the church. Their efforts were integral to the development of so many of today’s strong and gifted boomer leaders. This retired pastor, shaking his head, looked up at me and said, “I can’t figure out what happened.”

A few months ago I had the privilege of attending a meeting of what some would call evangelical “movers and shakers” (primarily boomers). During the meeting there was a collective realization and lament that they had no disciples and that they had not invested in the younger men. I sat there in shock. If the all-stars had missed it for all those years, what hope was there that other boomer men discipled?

While I was in seminary in my early 20s, a group of us prayed that a few older men in the church would seek us out for discipleship. One of my friends even wept as we prayed. We made real attempts - but it never happened.

Churches, marriages, families, and communities continue to suffer because older men are not shepherding younger ones. Older men discipling younger men, life-on-life, is not just a good idea, it is commanded and modeled throughout the entire biblical story (1 Tim 5:1, Titus 2:6, 1 Peter 5:1-5, 1 John 2:13-15, Proverbs 27:17). Discipling is essential to the Kingdom (Matthew 28:19-20). What will it take for men discipling men, all of them, to become the ethos of our churches? This effort will not reduce to a pragmatic “program” or a “ministry” but a way of life.

I discovered a wonderful movement of the Kingdom of God in Guatemala City, Guatemala under the leadership of Pastor Francisco Bendfeldt in a recent visit. The new church is called Casa De Libertad (House of Freedom). This young church has the potential to ignite a revolution of new evangelical churches in Latin America. Casa De Libertad embraces the imperatives of orthodoxy and orthopraxis.

The church’s vision is “to be the Church, not just a church, and foster an environment of responsible freedom and true worship to Jesus that leads our families to serve and transform our community.” The five pillars of the church include “unity, responsible freedom, true worship of Jesus, family, and community transformation.”

From spending time with pastor and members, I was encouraged by their passion to see the Gospel transform people and the culture. In Creation Regained, Albert Wolters reminds us that all of creation is included in the scope of redemption. “It is all of creation that is included in the scope of redemption. . .through Christ, God determined ‘to reconcile to himself all things,’ writes Paul (Col 1:20), and the words he uses (ta panta) preclude any narrow or personalistic understanding of the reconciliation he has in mind.”

Following Jesus, then, is becoming an intimate Kingdom ally with God and pursuing our role in His cosmic plan to redeem the whole creation. In following Jesus, we not only care about saving souls but also about the restoration of creation here and now. Jesus followers are passionate about evangelism, redeeming the arts, education, business, social issues, politics, cities, science, our communities and so on. All of creation belongs to Christ and God’s people are called to apply redemption to all things on earth as it is in heaven.

As I witnessed in the powerful preaching and Christ-centered worship, those who attend are pointed to Jesus that they may be freed from sin, idolatry, legalism, and the power of the devil to live lives characterized by freedom (Gal. 5) not the false religious rules of “religion.” True freedom is freedom to be the kind of human being that God originally created humans to be and to live our human vocation with moral responsibility to the glory of God.

Embedded in a culture of Roman Catholicism and “health and wealth” prosperity Gospel evangelicalism, Casa De Libertad offers a fresh Kingdom-oriented, Christ-centered approach that could not only be a model for Central America but Latin America as a whole. You can hear more about this exciting new church (in Spanish) on YouTube.

Last week, Barack Obama released a statement condemning the controversial comments of his retiring pastor, Jeremiah Wright. On Tuesday he gave a speech on race in light of the controversy. My question is: What does Barack Obama have to do with the comments of an independent, fully grown pastor 20 years his senior? Who cares about Rev. Wright? Why is Barack Obama accountable for another man’s words? Obama is not his clone. This is a classic case of political scare tactics intended to frighten white voters.

But this mode of political attack begs the question: What is so scary about Wright in the first place? Why are people shocked by Wright’s comments? I guess most whites (liberal or conservative) have not been in many black mainline churches during Black History Month and heard the preachers of the Jim Crow generation offer reflection. If they did they might notice what should be obvious—given the context—Wright’s comments are not unusual or extreme for the religious left.

Consider the generation from which Wright hails. As one of America’s Jim Crow generation, Wright grew up in a legally segregated, racist America. He has witnessed and was shaped by the turmoil of the civil-rights movement. The fact of the matter is that Rev. Wright sounds exactly like many, many other black pastors of his era. And while I do not support Wright’s comments, I understand why he feels the way he does.

The new pastor at Trinity United Church of Christ, the Rev. Otis Moss III, defended his predecessor in The New York Times: “It is an indictment on Dr. Wright’s ministerial legacy to present his global ministry within a 15- or 30-second sound bite.” We should not consider Wright’s words apart from what they are born of. Nor should we consider it the sum of his ministry. Rev. Moss continued in his statement, highlighting the focus of Wright’s ministry over the past 30 years, which included:

… places for senior citizens, day care for children, pastoral care and counseling, health care, ministries for persons living with H.I.V./AIDS, hospice training, prison ministry, scholarships for thousands of students to attend historically black colleges, youth ministries, tutorial and computer programs, a church library, domestic violence programs, and scholarships and fellowships for women and men attending seminary.

But that is Jeremiah Wright. And Wright is not running for president; Barack Obama is. Should we not be more concerned about $800 billion in new spending Obama has proposed? An exploding welfare state seems to be more of a threat to our republic than the isolated views of a retired pastor.

In some respects, the Christian West’s colonization of Asia has proved harmful for women. In The Jesus of Asian Women, Filipino author Muriel Orevillo-Montenegro offers a sobering narrative of female oppression in the Philippines, India, Korea, and Hong Kong. Because Western Christian imperialists saw Asian religions and culture as vile and idolatrous, they thought redemption possible “only if Asia’s heathen souls adopt Western culture and abandon Asian religions and ways of life” (11).

Orevillo-Montenegro also laments the fact that the first Western Christians only seemed concerned with saving souls and failed to address the oppressive social realities facing Asian women. One of the book’s major themes is that the teachings of Jesus should expose “the oppressive elements of religion and the dehumanizing structures of society” (19) rather than enable them:

Christology should not endorse the oppressive structures in culture, religion, and society, by being silent and hiding behind metaphysical concepts while the broad masses of Asian peoples, mostly adherents of Asian religions, suffer poverty, exploitation, and marginalization under the imperial powers of this world. Women and children in particular continue to suffer under patriarchy and sexism in the church and society.

When Western missionaries reduced Christianity to an escape-from-Hell-plan instead of seeing it as a way of life that embraces God’s sovereign covenantal redemption of all creation, they missed the connection between “the historical context of Jesus’ death and the suffering inflicted on the colonized peoples by the colonizers” (44).

It should be noted that the author intertwines her poignant concerns about the conflation of Christianity and Western culture with her own conflations of Christianity and feminism (another Western culture). She notes that Asian men are captive to the “Euro-American, middle-class, white, male theologies that are not only patriarchal, androcentric, and sexist, [but] sometimes misogynistic” (53). However, is it really true, as she says, that “a male-centered or androcentric Christology inevitably promotes patriarchal norms and sexists attitudes toward women” (53)?

If readers can get past Orevillo-Montenegro’s more extreme points, she presents challenging issues that the gospel needs to address. If our missionary activities are directed at the reality of Christ redeeming all things, should not Christians also fight passionately for the human rights of Asian women who are culturally oppressed?