I almost didn’t become friends with Eric (not his real name) when I heard him talk so admiringly of The Purpose-Driven Life.  I didn’t mean to judge him so severely, but the book, at the time, represented for me everything bad about Evangelicalism.  As soon as he mentioned it, very early in our friendship at work, I questioned the premises of the book.  He looked hurt, more than angry.  I still don’t like that book, but Eric managed to forgive me, and I managed to apologize (not for not liking the book, but for being such a self righteous moron), and we’re still friends today.  This essayist has experienced similar book-related relationship problems.

Some years ago, I was awakened early one morning by a phone call from a friend. She had just broken up with a boyfriend she still loved and was desperate to justify her decision. “Can you believe it!” she shouted into the phone. “He hadn’t even heard of Pushkin!”

We’ve all been there. Or some of us have. Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin problem: when a missed – or misguided – literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast. At least since Dante’s Paolo and Francesca fell in love over tales of Lancelot, literary taste has been a good shorthand for gauging compatibility. These days, thanks to social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, listing your favorite books and authors is a crucial, if risky, part of self-branding.

In a pluralist culture, I suppose your Amazon Wish List is as much a cultural signifier as anything else.  I somehow managed to marry a woman who not only reads books that I loathe, but who reads books that I find hard categorizing as “books.”  Nevertheless, viva la difference.  Have you had any similar book differences?

As a criminal defense attorney, Mickey Sherman gets asked a lot of questions about why he does what he does. In “How Can You Defend These People?” Sherman, whose former clients include Kennedy cousin Michael Skakel and “Preppy rapist” Alex Kelly, tackles the tough questions people often wonder about. Excerpts from his book include: How Can You Defend Someone When You Know That They’re Guilty?, Aren’t You Afraid To Deal With ‘Those People?’, and Are There Cases Or Clients You Won’t Take?

The sample chapters are rather interesting, particularly regarding how attorneys like Sherman decide if they are going to defend someone. According to Sherman, whether a client is guilty or not is really a non-issue in that decision:

Shocking as it may sound, we generally believe everyone hires us is probably guilty of something. That’s why they need us! Their apparent guilt is hardly ever a factor in determining whether we want to represent them or not. As discussed in the first chapter of this book, we are often not the best judges of our client’s guilt or innocence and we have no business setting ourselves up as their judge and jury. Our job is to defend them within the bounds of the law and rules of the court. End of discussion. 

What’s your reaction to such a statement, and how do you feel about the work of criminal defense attorneys?

I had a rendezvous with a college friend I haven’t seen in 35 years. I picked him out in a crowd on a city common; the eyes don’t change.

After a shaky personal start in college, he went on to work his way through law school, became a captain in the army, went into private practice, then worked as a trial attorney in both the criminal justice division and the public defender’s office, then as an enforcer of his state’s environmental protection laws, moving on to be the state’s first Prosecutor of insurance fraud, then Inspector General, then First Assistant Attorney General. Now he’s a judge, and well respected for his integrity and courage.

All this I learned snooping on the internet; he is much too modest in person. And anyway, you don’t put on airs with someone you knew when you were 19.

He has no interest in God but is a good listener. Toward the end of the meal I hazarded a change of subject: “You’re all about evidence,” I said. I was leading the witness to a consideration of the elephant-in-the-room evidence that persuaded me, soon after our college parting, about the existence of God — the Romans 7 conundrum that we don’t do what we want to do. He disclosed the same personal dilemma but still wasn’t biting.

It was finally time to say goodbye, and on the way home I thought about what I had gleaned about his courtroom: compassion for the underdog and intolerance for fat-cat exploiters, his love of the law and hatred of lawbreaking. I had given him a Bible over dinner, and who knows, maybe he’ll open it — maybe see in his own internal wiring another evidence of God that demands a verdict.

Most things I read in the Times doesn’t scare me.  And my beliefs give me a certain confidence that, no matter what gets printed in the Times, my quarterback is really quite superior to the other team’s quarterback.  Nevertheless, this article kind of freaked me out.  The long and short is, two scientists are trying to stop a bunch of other scientists from smashing protons together in their collider.  Because the proton smashing could create a tiny black hole.  That would grow.  And eat the earth.  And what makes it all so scary is that a judge is going to decide whether or not the experiment can go forward.

The new worries are about black holes, which, according to some variants of string theory, could appear at the collider. That possibility, though a long shot, has been widely ballyhooed in many papers and popular articles in the last few years, but would they be dangerous?

According to a paper by the cosmologist Stephen Hawking in 1974, they would rapidly evaporate in a poof of radiation and elementary particles, and thus pose no threat. No one, though, has seen a black hole evaporate.

In other words, yes, they could be dangerous.  I don’t like hearing this, mainly because I’m building a picket fence around my house, and I just planted a lot of expensive azaleas and two maple trees.  I don’t want my plants, or my family, to get sucked into a black hole.  But perhaps we’ll all get sucked into the hole, and then we’ll all come out the other side, all of us and all our shrubs, and none of us will even notice what happened.  That would be ideal, I think.

Abstinence gets some decent, if a little oddball, publicity in the Times magazine with this article about growing secular abstinence programs in unlikely places.

The Ivy League’s abstinence clubs began emerging several years ago about the same time as student sex blogs, sex columns and, at Harvard and Yale, student sex magazines. Those involved, however, say that the most important catalyst was university-sponsored safe-sex education, which they saw as institutional encouragement of promiscuity. The founders of the Princeton club, the first to form in the Ivy League in 2005, wanted to offer an opposing view. Many were Catholic, but seeking credibility within the university at large, they decided not to present themselves as a religious organization and always to “shy away from arguments with religious premises,” says Kevin Joyce, a former president of the club. “Here at a university, we have to provide the intellectual basis” for abstinence, he told me. “Every position we take as a group can be confirmed by rational thought.”

Much of the piece focuses on Janie Fredell at Harvard, who belongs to the True Love Revolution, a name about as awesome as True Love Waits. 

“People just don’t get it,” Fredell said. “Everyone thinks we’re trying to promote this idea of the meek little virgin female.” She said she was doing no such thing. “I care deeply for women’s rights,” she said. Fredell was studying not just religion but also gender politics – and was reading Pope John Paul II’s “Theology of the Body” alongside John Stuart Mill’s “Subjection of Women.” She had awakened to the wage gap, to forced sterilization and female genital mutilation – to the different ways that men have, she said, of controlling women. One of these was sexual. Fredell had seen it often in her own life – men pushing for sex, she said, just to “have something to say in the locker room,” women feeling pressured to have sex in order to maintain a relationship. The more she studied and learned, the more Fredell came to realize that women suffer from having premarital sex, “due to a cultural double standard,” she said, “which devalues women for their sexual pasts and glorifies men for theirs.”

Her group’s arguments are powerful with the university audience, but if her propositions are founded on secular ideologies, they will ultimately fail.  Here’s to hoping there’s more to these groups than the cracked and weary discourse of the body, of oppression, of feminism.  If so, kudos.

WARNING: Frank discussions of sex.

As of December 2006, there have been eight known deaths associated with RU-486, the medical abortion drug manufactured by Danco. In addition, the FDA records nine life-threatening incidents, 116 blood transfusions, and 232 hospitalizations. In total, more than 1,100 women have had medical problems after using the drug as of that date. Now, LifeNews.com reports, the FDA wants Danco to come up with a “safety plan.”

The Food and Drug Administration has asked the makers of 25 drugs, including the dangerous abortion pill mifepristone (RU 486), to submit safety plans later this year…The drug manufacturers must devise a Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy (REMS) plan and submit it to the agency by September 21…

Jane Axelrad of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research [said] the safety plans help patients and physicians know the dangers of a drug used improperly.

“These safety plans allow patients to have continued access to certain medicines for which there are safety concerns that can be managed through appropriate use,” Axelrad said. “The FDA approved the drugs identified today before the new law was passed, and they will now be brought under the new statutory authority to require and enforce REMS.”

It’s easy to see why patients with certain illnesses might take medications with histories of complications. Risk vs. reward. Lesser of two evils. That kind of thing. But the main reason for choosing RU-486 is money: Medical abortions are cheaper than the surgical kind. Sad that women are willing to risk their lives when the biggest ”evil” most face is the birth of a living child.

The death of 11-year-old Madeline Kara Neumann has shocked the town of Weston, Wisconsin. Madeline died of ketoacidosis, a treatable though serious condition of type 1 diabetes in which acid builds up in the blood. Hardly anyone dies of ketoacidosis in the United States. Madeline’s parents said they didn’t know she had diabetes. When she became ill, they didn’t take her to a doctor. The circumstances of her illness are in dispute, Fox News reports:

Everest Metro Police Chief Dan Vergin has said an autopsy determined Madeline died from diabetic ketoacidosis, an ailment that left her with too little insulin in her body. She had probably been ill for about 30 days, suffering symptoms such as nausea, vomiting, excessive thirst, loss of appetite and weakness, he said.

But Leilani Neumann said her daughter, a straight A student, was in good health until recently.

“We just noticed a tiredness within the past two weeks,” she said. “And then just the day before and that day (she died), it suddenly just went to a more serious situation. We stayed fast in prayer then. We believed that she would recover. We saw signs that to us, it looked like she was recovering.”

Instead, Madeline died last Sunday. The Neumann’s other three children, all teens, have been removed from the home and are staying with relatives. Charges against the Neumanns are pending. Madeline’s death raises profound legal and moral questions over religious belief and practice, especially when the life of a child is at stake. What are your thoughts?

After George Müller got his heart into a place where it had “no will of its own in regard to a given matter,” he remained on guard against feeling as a means of decision-making. When I think on how love drove him to care for thousands of orphans, it seems odd that he would not want feelings to reign. A friend of mine who is a philosophy professor would wholeheartedly approve, despite being an atheist; whenever his students begin a sentence with “I feel,” he nips them in the bud. “Think your way to truth,” he tells them, “don’t feel.”

It’s certainly an odd notion, in an age of irrationality and sentimentality, when you’re supposed to listen to your heart, as a pop song goes, and when learning to love yourself, according to an older pop hit, is the greatest love of all. Aren’t all the movie heroes, after all, people who lead with their hearts?

Yet Müller distrusted his own emotions when it came to decision-making, because he knew what the Bible warned, that the heart is deceitful, and dreadfully sick. When emotions are in charge, such that they govern actions, they are more likely than not to extend first to the self, and to others only insofar as they propel one’s self-love. We’ve all met parents, for example, who tell themselves they doesn’t discipline their children because they love them so very much, but who in actuality love themselves too much, and see their children only as extensions of themselves. The heart can be beautiful, the heart makes us human, but the heart is a lousy decision-maker, because its prime object of affection is so frequently itself.

So Müller, that committed Christian and caregiver to lost children, worked to keep his feelings in check. Only then, he must have believed, could he reflect the love of God, which is always borne out in action, not sentiment. It’s been quite often, in my ten years as a Christian, that I have let my emotions make decisions for me, while I told myself that the whisperings of my deceitful heart were in fact the prompting of the Holy Spirit. Ironically, it’s only as I’ve learned to try, at least, to put my own wants in check that I have found my actions more infused with genuine love, as opposed to sentiment, with self-sacrifice, as opposed to self-centered martyrdom, with courage, as opposed to bravado. It’s one more way that He is strong where we are weak, which is something I learned to pronounce early in my Christian walk, but have only recently begun to understand.

Editor’s Note: Here’s a link to Tony’s first post in this series, “A rule of prayer.”

Good morning!

Today’s quote is from a stateswoman: “Democracy is necessary to peace and to undermining the forces of terrorism.”

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia is calling for a respectful dialogue between monotheistic “brothers in faith.” He warned against atheism and the disintegration of the family, the loss of morals and decline of religion: “If God wills it, we will then meet with our brothers from other religions, including those of the Torah and the Gospel… to come up with ways to safeguard humanity.”

He says the country’s top clerics have given their permission to the plan. Coming from a country that bans non-Muslim religious services and executes Muslim apostates, this is encouraging news that Muslims, Jews and Christians all welcome.

AP says quotes Michael Cromartie, chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religions Freedom: “It’s a courageous thing for the king to do. … It’s a start to have an open and free dialogue in a country with a reputation for religious oppression.” The Jerusalem Post interviewed Rabbi Yona Metzger, who also expressed optimism: “If an imam in Saudi Arabia sends out a message of restraint and peace, that could save the life of a Jew in Paris.”

Saudi newspaper al-Jazirah welcomed the dialogue too: “The dialogue could clear up some facts about our religion, far from the distortions that extremists and fanatics have caused.”

But Jihad Watch is still suspicious: “Islamic law is reciprocity-impaired when it comes to respect. It is not “respect” in the general sense; rather, Islam is to be respected, and will deal with other faiths according to what it believes is the divinely-ordained order of things.” Reuters quotes others expressing skepticism that the dialogue will actually take place.

Still, the announcement may have mollified some during a week when religious tensions ran high. Geert Wilder released his anti-Islam short film this week. In the Netherlands, Muslims are rioting over anti-Islam cartoons, and there’s a heated debate over the wisdom of Magdi Allam’s public and defiant Easter baptism.