Late-term abortionist George Tiller was shot and killed Sunday at Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita, Kan. Tiller was serving as an usher at the time. A suspect was detained in suburban Kansas City, and Wichita police believe the man acted alone.

Anti-abortion groups have denounced the killing. Operation Rescue President Troy Newman said in a statement, “We are shocked at this morning’s disturbing news that Mr. Tiller was gunned down. Operation Rescue has worked for years through peaceful, legal means, and through the proper channels to see him brought to justice. We denounce vigilantism and the cowardly act that took place this morning.”

President Obama was “shocked and outraged” by the shooting, adding, “However profound our differences as Americans over difficult issues such as abortion, they cannot be resolved by heinous acts of violence.”

On a misty day last week, The Isolated Christ walked through Manhattan. The journey started at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where police officers said to move along, went down the soggy street of Fifth Avenue and ended at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Nelson Diaz, the artist, decided to walk The Isolated Christ (pictured) through Manhattan to rebel against the idea that art is just for elite collectors who buy paintings like real estate, with no idea of its beauty or what it means. His has been called the least controversial piece of Jesus art, probably because at first glance its meaning is the most obscure.

The Isolated Christ melds metaphysics and mathematics, and is inspired by both Da Vinci and Francis Bacon. Diaz tries to create a sense of four-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface, to make the point that Da Vinci was trying to make in The Last Supper—Christ is transcendent. In Da Vinci’s painting, the vanishing point is at Jesus’ face; in Diaz’ work, he puts the vanishing point into infinity, “to situate Christ in an infinite plane” and establish His transcendence in “both the spiritual and scientific realms.”

New York has a troubled relationship with Jesus in art. Back in the 1980s, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine unveiled Edwina Sandys’ depiction of Jesus as a woman on a cross. In 1989, New York artist Andres Serrano dipped a crucifix in urine and took a photograph. In 2007, artist Cosimo Cavallaro took chocolate and sculpted a six-foot, anatomically correct, nude sculpture of Jesus. He exhibited it during Holy Week until Catholics protested, and the exhibit closed. (It was revived in October, without protest.) We have His name haphazardly tacked on to non-religious displays, like “Generational: Younger than Jesus,” which features artists under age 33. In April of this year, another artist’s display in Union Square was cancelled. This one featured Obama as Jesus, with a crown of thorns and in a crucifix pose, in a mock voting booth.

You can’t help but notice the tone-deafness of the artists, who never seem to imagine why their art could possibly offend. But you also have to notice the deafness of the protestors, who never seem to ponder what the art could mean.

The Isolated Christ is not arousing much wrath in New York, though. People walked past, most not giving it another glance. An assistant walking alongside the moving art display told me that in Rome it was another story. They were outraged, even though the point was Christ’s transcendence.

“You take it on faith, you take it to the heart. The waiting is the hardest part.”—Tom Petty

We’ve been expecting for 12 months, and my wife hasn’t gained any weight, not even a small pooch of a belly. I put my hands on her stomach and feel nothing kicking. This isn’t natural.

Nothing about our house here in Brooklyn would tip you off that a child is coming. There is no nursery, no pack and play, no mobile hanging above a crib. A modern coffee table with sharp glass edges, an exquisite bookcase, a prized antique book stand? Yes, we have those. But we don’t own a stroller.

This child is coming to us through adoption. That means a wait with no definite end. No due date. And after 12 months of waiting, my wife and I are starting to wonder if it’s really going to happen. Will we have a family?

When we signed up with our agency, the expected wait time for an infant from Ethiopia was six to nine months. A couple of months into the wait, the agency said wait times had been extended to nine to 12 months. Last month we were told that wait times are now predicted to be 12 to 18 months.

The reason why is complicated. Trends play a role. Here’s one scenario. International adoption in one country, say Vietnam, is shut down. Other countries, China, for example, have long waiting lists—possibly a two to three year expected wait. Hopeful parents-to-be then look to another less popular country, say Ethiopia, for a shorter wait. Then, as you have surely guessed, the unpopular country soon becomes the popular country with the long waiting time. This all happens incredibly fast and is sometimes unpredictable. No one knows for certain when a country may close its international adoption program.

Ethiopia—when we started investigating the process nearly two years ago—was one of the faster countries. But since then the number of adoptions from there has gone up dramatically. Don’t just take my word for it. According to the website for United States Department of State, the number of adoptions to the United States from Ethiopia in 2004 was 289. By 2008 that number had risen to 1,725. And this, you are thinking, is a good thing, right? Well, yes, it’s good for children to get forever families. But in the case of Ethiopia the infrastructure wasn’t there to handle so many adoption cases. The government agency there that handled (I say handled, past tense, because word has it that a new or restructured agency is on the way) adoptions on that end consisted of four to five people. A few years ago, four to five people would have been plenty to deal with the handful of adoption agencies working in Ethiopia, but now there is an estimated 70 adoption agencies working in the country. Our agency has 400 families on its Ethiopia waiting list. So now imagine: 70 agencies and four to five Ethiopian officials processing the individual cases.

I could further elaborate on the reasons for the long wait. I could talk about the ways in which Ethiopia has tried to slow the process down in order to root out the seedier elements that have crept in as adoption from Ethiopia has grown in popularity. I could talk about the two-month court closure that happens every summer in Ethiopia. But I think I’ll stop.

Understanding the myriad reasons does not really help me wait.

I try to remember a couple of things. First, my gain is another’s loss. My child will be losing his or her family and country and culture. His or her parent or parents, if living, will be losing a son or daughter. These are the sad facts. And when I remember them, my desire to have my needs met now—to have a family now!—seems selfish. Second, I’m starting to suspect that this time waiting is doing me some good, that the waiting is changing and shaping me—that God is using this process to make me more patient and humble, that He is preparing me to be a father.

I’m waiting for that day.

Video of the much-publicized statement made by Supreme Court judicial nominee Sonia Sotomayor at Duke University Law School in 2005 can be found all over the internet.

“Court of Appeals is where policy is made,” Sotomayor said, while she was a judge on the appeals court. ”And I know I should never say that, because we don’t ‘make law.’ I’m not promoting it, I’m not advocating it . . . you know.”

Her statement drew some chuckles from the audience then, but it will assuredly draw some serious questions during this summer’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings.

Here it is, Rants! & Raves!, your weekly chance to sound off about the week past. Remember the rules:

1. A Rave! is something that happened during the past week that you’re pleased about and is signified by the word “Rave!” and/or an appropriately peppy emoticon.

2 A Rant! is something that happened during the past week that you’re ticked about and is signified by the word “Rant!” and/or an appropriately grumpy emoticon.

3. You may Rant! about something a person said, did or wrote, but you may not Rant! about generally disliking a person.

Have fun!

Happy Saturday!

Today’s quote is from a well-known German piano player:

“I shall hear in Heaven.”

A look back at the news of the week, illustrated by some of the best editorial cartoonists in the business: Pulitzer Prize-winner Steve Breen, Gary Varvel, Michael Ramirez, and Scott Stantis.

Nicholas Kristof’s column this week looks at the psychology of liberals and conservatives, saying we don’t just think differently but also have different visceral reactions to questions like, Would you slap your dad? or Would it disgust you to touch a faucet in a public restroom?

[C]onservatives are more likely than liberals to sense contamination or perceive disgust. People who would be disgusted to find that they had accidentally sipped from an acquaintance’s drink are more likely to identify as conservatives.

The upshot is that liberals and conservatives don’t just think differently, they also feel differently. This may even be a result, in part, of divergent neural responses.

He says according to studies, liberals and conservatives have different ideas of morality. Liberals emphasize fairness and protection from harm, while conservative morality means upholding authority and loyalty, and a strong sense of disgust.

His conclusion about bridging the political divide is less interesting than the psychology itself, to me. I took two of the quizzes he uses as evidence, here at www.yourmorals.org. I got contradictory results, rating higher than liberals in some respects and higher than conservatives in others. Take the tests too, and tell me what you find.

It’s an awkward thing to have people come to me for guidance about their lives, about their relationships with other people and with God. It seems I’ve spent most of my life either avoiding relationships or hurting the people closest to me, and fairly well, making just about every mistake a man can make without winding up dead or in jail. If you think God has no sense of humor, consider how He has placed me amidst scores of young adults who, bless their souls, think I have some wisdom to give them.

Perhaps it’s not a sense of humor but a sense of justice, because nothing stings quite like having a young man look to me for guidance at being a man, given all the ways I’ve avoided doing precisely that. Nothing feels quite so fraudulent as stating plainly what a man or woman ought or ought not to do, with the knowledge lurking in the back of one’s mind that one has done precisely the opposite more times than he cares to recall.

And yet there they are, and here I am, and while our interactions are ostensibly concerned with business and economics and management, quite often the conversations go to the personal, the spiritual. Young people are thirsty for plain talk about life, about God. Maybe we’re all thirsty for it. We’re thirsty for something beyond the platitudes and rote sayings and overly familiar verses, and some of us are ashamed that we’re thirsty for those things, ashamed that we hurt, ashamed that we yearn for a communion we can’t describe.

We want a real conversation, young people in particular, and for some reason some of us have trouble finding it, and we feel guilty that we can’t, like there’s something wrong with us when our preacher or our priest or our parent seems to be speaking in unfamiliar tongues. Maybe what we want most is to say that we are hurt, or scared, or angry, and not hear—for a while at least—how that hurt or fear or anger might be corrected in us. Maybe when we hear someone admit that he carries these burdens, that he loves the Lord as best he can and is just about as imperfect as a man can be, we feel safe enough to say what’s on our own hearts.

They certainly deserve better than me to talk to. Maybe that’s why they feel comfortable with me in the first place. I don’t know what to do with that, or what it means for my far-more-together Christian friends. And I don’t know what to do with the fact that I have stumbled into this place where I, weak and fumbling fool that I am, should be expected to offer anything like wisdom. But there you have it, and here I am, and I pray to God I don’t mess it up.

These days I am trying to distinguish between theology and the Bible. This is nothing more than what the Bereans did, I hope. They heard teaching, and then they went home and checked it out. We are always to put the Word of God above the word of man. If anything is clear in the Bible, it is that.

We are to listen to the insights of others, too—hence the legitimacy of theology. But the greater danger does not lie in this neglect but in the first. Our minds are so constructed, evidently, that we will force into our mistaken theologies whatever the Bible data serves up. This is counterintuitive but reminds me of the fact that when the Israelites moved into Canaan, false worship tended to change true worship, rather than the other way around.

And so because it does not come naturally, I am struggling. But the struggle has become unavoidable because something’s got to give. The gap between my reality and my theology has become untenable, as when your suspicion that the roof needs work is finally confirmed by leaks in the ceiling.

Reading the Old Testament or Acts has become an occasion producing melancholy. I see speech and reasoning from the mouths of those simple believers that is different from the speech and reasoning that I and my church mates are content with, and I have caught myself making uneasy peace with that gap by half-consciously ascribing these former saints’ lifestyles to a different and bygone era in the history of redemption.

It is interesting for me to realize that all that talk about the history of redemption is human overlay. A lot of theology seems to have evolved in response to the misfit between our own lives and the lives narrated in the Bible. I’m not saying there’s not a history of redemption (one has to be very careful); I’m just saying: Watch the self-serving importations. I need to know if the way the Shunammite reasoned (2 Kings 4), the way Naaman’s servant girl reasoned (2 Kings 5), the way the woman with the bleeding reasoned (Mark 5) were supposed to be different from the way I reason.

Reading the Old Testament and Acts as the lives of extraordinary people in a dispensation remote from yours is the surest way to get nothing out of the Bible. Satan need not weary himself with disproving the facts of the recorded stories, if only he may keep as the flickering votive candle in your mind the notion that these people were “special cases.” This is never done fully consciously, by the way.

And so I am waging a personal war in my bedroom morning devotions, to intentionally “be an imitator” (1 Corinthians 11:1, Hebrews 6:12) of the faith I read about. My reason is the one given in Hebrews 13:8—that Jesus is the same. And even if I am wrong on some points, I am quite sure of this: I will never rise higher in my faith than my view of who God is and what he is capable of and willing to do in my life. Let me have likeminded fanatics around me. They are safer for me than underestimators.

To hear commentaries by Andrée Seu, click here.