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.

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.

Would the average American pagan be able to spot an Evangelical in a crowd?  Probably not, at least not the ones I know who live in large urban areas, insulated – so they think – from us provincial snakehandlers.  To the average pagan, Evangelical and Fundamentalist and Crazy Retard are synonyms, and they don’t care to notice the difference.  “Educated people have the notion that evangelicals are ‘barefoot people of Tobacco Road who, I don’t know, sleep with their sisters or something,’” Peter Berger, a Boston University professor, says.

His university’s Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs is leading a two-year project that explores an “evangelical intelligentsia,” which Berger says is growing and needs to be better understood given the large numbers of evangelicals and their influence.

“It’s not good if a prejudiced view of this community prevails in the elite circles of society,” said Berger, a self-described liberal Lutheran. “It’s bad for democracy and it’s wrong.”

The article continues:

Notre Dame is home to several of the best-known evangelical thinkers besides Noll, including philosopher Alvin Plantinga, whose “free-will defense” takes on the logical problem of evil, and historian George Marsden, who won the prestigious Bancroft Prize for his book on colonial preacher Jonathan Edwards.

Other notables who identify themselves as evangelicals include federal judge Michael McConnell, a top constitutional law scholar, Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Project, and Duke professor Peter Feaver, a former top director at the National Security Council.

It all sounds a bit like a coming out party, like homosexuals had in the 80s and 90s, when actors and cultural leaders came out in big ways.  Oh, well.  It needs to happen.  The thing is, there are so many Evangelicals out there, writing Good books and making Good laws and making Good music and generally being Interesting, it’s just that they aren’t identified as “Evangelical.”  They’re just people.  Maybe these Interesting Evangelicals don’t celebrate their being an Evangelical because the rest of us would go on and on about it.  If I wrote a really great novel and got mild notoriety, I wouldn’t hide my faith, but I wouldn’t start a crusade, either.  I’d just let it be there, like Percy or O’Connor did.  Like a lot of people do.

In that respect, if Evangelicals feel like they are slighted culturally, it’s our own fault.  If anybody mildly important comes out of the closet as an Evangelical, we claim them as our poster boy and hero.  Not everybody wants to be considered an Evangelical Writer or an Evangelical Politician or an Evangelical Actor.  They just want to be writers and politicians and actors, helping redeem creation with one good thing at a time.

I’d be interested to hear all of your thoughts on this.

Words coming from the pulpit of Trinity United Church of Christ continue to dog Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. This time, however, it wasn’t the preaching of Jeremiah Wright or his successor, Otis Moss; it was the Rev. Michael Pfleger, a white pastor of Chicago’s predominantly black Saint Sabina Roman Catholic Church.

Pfleger, a well-known activist in the city, chose to use his time at Trinity Sunday morning to berate and belittle Obama’s opponent in the Democratic race, Hillary Clinton (see video here): “She just always thought that, ‘This is mine. I’m Bill’s wife. I’m white.’ … And then, out of nowhere, came ‘Hey, I’m Barack Obama.’ And she said, (more…)