Sendak was the more beloved of the two, as attested to by the outpouring of affection across the nation after his death at age 83. George’s death at 92 last Tuesday was met with a quieter round of salutes, most focusing on her Newbery honor book, My Side of the Mountain, and her Newbery Medal winner, Julie of the Wolves. But what she lacked in literary originality, she made up for in work ethic and curiosity for the natural world. George’s publication list boasts 100-plus nature books for children and young adults that spanned seven decades.

An artist’s artist, Sendak was aptly described in The New York Times as having “wrenched the picture book out of the safe, sanitized world of the nursery and plunged it into the dark, terrifying and hauntingly beautiful recesses of the human psyche.” And although George’s plumbing of the “human psyche” was far less raucous, her characters were also pushed out of civilization and into the wilderness. A plot device that, though seeming to move them outward, was a way to strip characters of the constraints of culture and push them on a “journey inward,” the title of her autobiography.

For that journey, George drew on fantastic childhood encounters with the natural world: training falcons with her brothers and studying beetles with her father, an entomologist. Her books are also filled with painstaking research: For Julie of the Wolves, George actually lived with researchers studying Artic wolves and talked to the wolves herself. (No transcripts available. …) Yet over her career, she followed prevailing literary currents into ever more liberal waters, including environmentalism and feminism. As The New York Times once trumpeted in a review, “Julie of the Wolves is a novel for today: It describes not only a self-sufficient girl surviving on her own in the arctic wilderness but the clash of the Eskimo and white man’s cultures.”

Sendak’s and George’s most iconic characters do come home in the end. But does that homecoming really belie a prodigal’s repentance? As a character complains in George’s My Side of the Mountain, “Let’s face it, Thoreau; you can’t live in America today and be quietly different. If you are going to be different, you are going to stand out, and people are going to hear about you; and in your case, if they hear about you, they will remove you to the city … and you won’t be different anymore.”

Sendak’s and George’s generation accomplished “different.” The Dick and Jane blinders are off, and we’ve gone deeper into the passionate, defiant wilderness of the soul. Not an especially comfortable position, but also not hidden from the One who, in times past, has scheduled wilderness wanderings for those He loves.

And, if you hadn’t noticed, it’s an election year, so we’ll soon be deluged with party conventions, raging debates, and candidates hitting the campaign trail even harder. We will hear pomp and bluster and be swept off our feet by grandiose promises. We will have economic, education, military, and domestic agendas hurled at us from all directions. But there’s one thing we will not hear, at least not in sincerity—not once, not ever:

“I don’t know.”

Our culture is one in which not knowing is anathema. Well, publicly admitting that one doesn’t know is anathema. And this is magnified greatly for those in leadership. But I dare say it’s not entirely their fault.

We have created a culture in which leaders must be saviors. We look to them for answers that they are ill equipped to give and solutions they are incapable of finding. We would rather hear them carry on with some semi-convincing, well-spun blather than simply admit they don’t know. We create an untenable environment in which they are not allowed to be wrong and thus cannot be right.

It’s not only public figures who suffer from this malady. They’re just the easiest to discern. I suffer from this daily as a husband, father, theologian, writer, and employee. In little ways I attempt to set myself up as a pseudo-savior. I suspect you do too in your own everyday life.

So let’s practice. Say it with me now: “I don’t know.” It may have tasted funny on your tongue, but it is a powerful phrase. That’s because it expresses honesty, humility, and reality.

Ironically, the most honest, humble, and real person in history never had to say this phrase. That’s because, unlike us or our talking-head faux saviors, Jesus really did know the answer to every question and the solution to every problem.

To stack enigma on irony, think about this: In order to best represent Jesus, the One who knew everything, we must regularly admit how little we know. In order for people to see Him with clarity we need to get out of their way and let them see that He has all the answers and all the solutions. The more we try to answer questions or solve problems we can’t, the more we distract from the One who truly saves.

Not knowing is OK. We’re human, after all. It’s especially OK because there is one who does know. And he’s not running for president.

As the story goes, the lazy grasshopper wiles away his summer days singing and hopping and having an all-around good time while industrious ants work and march and struggle to carry kernels of corn to their anthills, storing up for the winter to come.

As you would imagine, the inevitable happens. Come winter, the ants have plenty of food to see them through the cold, fallow months. The fun-loving grasshopper has nothing. The grasshopper begs the hardworking ants to share their bounty, but they refuse.

Let’s begin with the political lesson. Government, the grasshopper in this little morality tale, is constantly trying to get its citizens, the ants, to cough up more and more of what they’ve earned by the sweat of their brows so that it might pay for its own needs.

The latest of many recent examples occurred last week in Maryland where the majority Democratic legislature passed another tax increase on “the rich.”

Democratic Gov. Martin O’Malley and the legislators have lowered the definition of “rich” from the arbitrary $250,000 established by President Obama, to $100,000 for individuals and $150,000 for couples filing jointly. Maryland residents will now be slapped with a new tax on top of already high state and local taxes, tying the state’s new state-local tax bracket, according to The Washington Post, with that of “… the District’s for fourth-highest in the nation.” Especially in the expensive Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C., incomes of $100,000 and $150,000 are barely middle class.

The tax hike caused the Democratic comptroller, Peter Franchot, to protest. Franchot told Washington radio station WMAL his fellow Maryland Democrats “try to be loyal and want to be supportive of their party, but they’re becoming very frustrated with this long list of almost indiscriminate tax increases that we’re faced with on an annual basis.”

Only if the tax-and-spend “grasshoppers” start feeling the heat from the taxpaying “ants” are they likely to reverse course. Some of that heat may soon be coming from people who are fed up enough to act. There are reports of wealthy individuals and some businesses from states with high taxes, including Maryland and certainly California, moving to states with a lower state tax, or no state tax at all.

The economic lesson is this: Human nature has demonstrated that if government can squeeze more money out of its citizens without having to cut wasteful spending, it will, and if citizens can get other people’s money without having to earn it, they will become addicted to government and come to regard the sustenance as an entitlement.

Compare the huge number of ineffective and wasteful government programs with The Marshall Plan of 1948, which established the Economic Cooperation Administration, the intent of which was to provide $13.3 billion in U.S. aid to Western European countries to rebuild industry and put people back to work after World War II. Much of Europe is in crisis today because it has become a victim of its own welfare state. Instead of industry, there is indolence. Economies are in trouble because government, not the individual, has become supreme. France just elected a socialist president, rejecting necessary austerity. The European gravy train has derailed.

In America, too, many of our domestic programs merely sustain people in poverty rather than help them to become self-sufficient. Liberal politicians, especially, think this is perfectly fine because addiction to government means addiction to them and to the perpetuation of their liberal agenda.

The moral lesson is this: When government takes money from people who earn it, government has a responsibility to spend it wisely and in ways that achieve the ends set down in our founding documents. Chief among these is that noble sentiment found in the Preamble to the Constitution about promoting “the general welfare.” By “spreading the wealth around,” rather than teaching and encouraging individuals to build wealth for themselves, government robs people of the joy produced by human initiative—indeed it takes from them one of the building blocks that makes us unique among living things: the dignity and reward of work.

The moral, political, and economic lessons of the past are in fables and reality to teach the present and ensure a better future. By ignoring them, Europe and America risk repeating costly mistakes and suffering the consequences.

© 2012 Tribune Media Services Inc.

On her birthday, Alice happened to be walking down the main street of Glenside on the way to pray with another woman. As she passed the Catholic church, she noticed that the wall out front had been defaced by hateful anti-Catholic graffiti. She got the idea to enlist her prayer partner’s help to bring buckets and brushes to the scene and to scrub it clean. Very soon afterward, a flock of blue-and-white uniformed school children led by their teacher walked past the church and the wall.

Alice told me the effect this had on her: She felt the pleasure of God. She felt that if she had been born only to do this one act—to erase a defiling word and prevent it from entering into the souls of innocents—it was a good work and she was the workmanship of God (Ephesians 2:10) in this moment.

It is interesting to me that my friend Alice is a gifted poet, and that the word for “workmanship” in this Ephesians verse is the Greek “poema.” Thus, Alice is a writer of poems, and Alice is also God’s “poem” that He is writing of her life.

See Alice write her verse to the glory of God. See Alice come against the writings of Satan. It was a good and memorable birthday after all, a shining hour like those recorded for our encouragement and emulation in Hebrews 11. Like those Old Testament saints, Alice, by faith, carried soapy water to an obscene message of Satan and blotted it out to the glory of God.

The report doesn’t reference “fat people.” It consistently uses the term “obesity,” a cloudlike phenomenon that blankets the United States. Our problem is an “obesogenic” environment: too much soda, not enough sidewalks. “The average person cannot maintain a healthy weight in this obesity-promoting environment,” said IOM panel member Shiriki Kumanyika of the University of Pennsylvania Medical School.

Did you catch that? The average person is helpless in this super-size society. Everywhere he goes, sugar is throwing itself at him, fat particles clog the air he breathes, a paucity of sidewalks force him to drive to work, vegetables scamper out of his reach. What’s needed is a full-bore intervention by government, industry, and school to pull obese America back from the brink.

The IOM report is far from svelte: 478 pages of diagnosis and recommendations. The latter involves a five-pronged strategy involving state and local governments, childcare providers, employers, manufacturers, farmers, and, of course, schools: “Strengthening schools as the heart of health” occupies pride of place at the end.

It’s hard to argue with some of these goals—I’d like to see breast-feeding encouraged and children getting out to play. There are two problems, though. For one, the policies are so wide-ranging they clash with other policies. For farms to grow more whole grains and vegetables they’ll have to give up their corn subsidies. For schools to schedule the recommended one hour of physical activity per day they will have to sacrifice some of the time used to meet their testing requirements. The obesity crisis is head-butting the academic crisis. That’s how it is out in culture-land: This policy obstructs that initiative, which circumvents the previous agency guidelines.

The other problem is the overlooked battleground: home. What used to be the “heart of health” is an empty shell, as far as the War on Fat is concerned. Parents are mentioned occasionally, but not as major players. For what are parents but average persons thwarted by our obesogenic environment? Like the rest of the bovine public, they must be poked and prodded into the health corral. Of course, the IOM can only address public policy, not dictate what’s on the table at family meals. Yet if there is a fat epidemic it’s partly because family meals are becoming scarce. America has left home. This really is a “culture”: Figuratively speaking, America roams the streets at night and makes the rounds of agencies by day, collecting food stamps and WIC vouchers and qualifying for the free lunch, breakfast, and sometimes even dinner programs at the local school.

Is it too simple to say we all need to go home? Sure. Obesity is a problem, and as one who struggled with weight gain in the past, I sympathize. But it’s an individual problem, not a national one, and the solutions will have to be individual, too.

On April 17, Times columnist Ross Douthat came out with Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics. He charts the religious movement of America from the 1950s to the present, and then takes on heresies like “Pray and Grow Rich” and “The God Within.”

One week later, Canadian columnist Michael Coren’s Heresy: Ten Lies They Spread About Christianity came out. It knocks down claims that Christianity is racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-intellectual, anti-Semitic, war-mongering, progress-resistant, and generally gnarly.

Heresies to the left of us, heresies to the right of us: They all volley and thunder. Some evangelicals say they won’t vote for Romney because he espouses Mormonism, which could well be viewed as a Christian heresy. They worry that a President Romney would increase the prestige and influence of the Latter-day Saints, especially abroad. That’s a legitimate concern.

On the other hand, Barack Obama appears to syncretize three beliefs that could also be called Christian heresies. His Rev. Jeremiah Wright-influenced liberation theology is an extension of the theological liberalism that J. Gresham Machen eviscerated in his 1924 classic, Christianity and Liberalism. His Harvard Law School politics are based in radical secularism. And, without bowing to the claims that Obama is a Muslim, elements of Islam’s communalism mixed with authoritarianism are also evident.

So, evangelical voters do not have a choice between a heretic and someone whose views most Christians can look at with comfort. Heresies surround us, and no candidate is pure. In such a case, it probably makes sense to put aside heresy-seeking and look more at the trustworthiness of the candidates and the policies each advocates.

One way to determine whether the nation should trust a person is to see whether his spouse can. In this regard, both Obama and Romney have high grades—no episodes of adultery. A lot of evangelicals scathingly say that Obama ran as a person who could bring Americans together yet has been radically divisive once in office—but anyone who listened closely to Obama’s talk in 2008 could see that he’d be the most leftist president in U.S. history.

So it comes down to policies, where Romney provides a clear alternative to Obama on the economy, the federal deficit, social issues, foreign policy, and the makeup of the Supreme Court. One other question concerns the treatment of religious minorities—and Christianity is now a minority religion in the United States. In that respect, here’s the most interesting sentence in yesterday’s New York Times profile:

“While voters tend to see Mr. Romney as immensely fortunate, those close to him say that he never forgets he is a member of an oft-derided religious minority.”

“In India we have a saying: Everything turns out well in the end. If things are not going well, you know that it is not yet the end.”

(There are other sayings from India not to be addressed in this short column, such as: “What is the use of counting the mango trees? Eat the mangoes.”)

The hotel clerk in Marigold Hotel utters the quote above to pacify a disgruntled guest at his establishment. It is funny because it is India. The saying rings true in a country steeped in suffering. What strikes us about it is its acquiescence and wryness. Nothing works out well in India, we are given to understand, but never mind, this is to be expected. The fact that things are intolerable at present is merely a sign that life is normal. Therefore, cheer up. Conditions are going according to plan. If our days were free of hassles, then that would be our evidence that we had left normal life and reached Moksha.

And so, you see, the clerk is actually doing the irate patron a favor by throwing in a little metaphysics free of charge, along with the dust, cockroaches, and pigeons in the luxury hotel that does not live up to its billing. Why should she complain?

But I decided I should take the hotel clerk’s saying to heart. It is a good one. It is a culture making lemonade of lemons. And why not make lemonade of lemons when you can?

I would suggest merely one element of improvement to the saying, if by chance I can transform it from fatalism to inexpressible joy:

“And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28).

No wryness there. No tongue in cheek. No despair. Outwardly the circumstances look the same for the fatalist in India as for the Christian confessionalist: The hotel may be a dump, the vacation may be a flop, the brochure may have over-promised, but the believer in Christ has a sure hope and not just a fistful of wishful thinking. And the Promiser doesn’t hawk the future with a wink and a nod.

• What would this mean for the pending legislation?
• Should the Securities and Exchange Committee regulate banks more stringently?
• Was James Dimon, Morgan’s CEO, now transformed from “Golden Child” to “Ninny?”
• Were other banks also ready to announce the same mistake?
• How could we protect against such things in the future?

And on it went. The pontification and blather rambled on ad nauseam.

Here are a few observations that do not require prophetic gifts.

First, as we have created banks too big to fail, we have also now created banks too big to manage. There is little evidence to believe that James Dimon is an incompetent idiot. To the contrary, there is every reason to believe he is extraordinarily competent. His enterprise, as large as it is, is simply too big to ensure that it will never make a large mistake. If he managed it so tightly that it could never make a large mistake, then it would probably be relegated to the heap of mediocre performers who never do anything extraordinary. This problem is a good argument for smaller banks, not larger ones.

Second, we do not need more government regulation to fix this problem. It is a pipe dream to believe that federal employees of any sort could have prevented what daily reviews by dedicated Morgan employees missed. Remember, this is the same government that has been unable to pass a budget for the last three years, has cost overruns so often that it is a celebratory event when a project is completed on time and on budget, and is currently still trying to compete in the relatively simple business of delivering mail, and is consistently losing money day by day.

Third, the risk of this mistake needs to be borne by the shareholders of JPMorgan and no one else. I decided to buy a share of ownership, and I placed my trust in Dimon and his management team. They made a serious mistake, but they also have a long string of very wise decisions leading up to this debacle. I can decide to sell my position, vote to oust current management, or buy more stock, believing that in the long run, they will revert to form. I may lose all my money, or make a good return.

I do not want the government to bail me out. I should not want, my neighbors to bail me out, either. Our system if left alone, allows me to fail as well as win. I am OK with that.

When I was a freshman at the University of Toronto in the early 1980s, the great political scientist Nelson Polsby gave a guest lecture in which he argued that the election of Ronald Reagan was a fluke, largely a protest vote against an unpopular president. There was no electoral realignment and he had the figures to prove it. But unlike this accomplished scholar, I was not confused by the facts. I sat there thinking this fellow was so lost in his data that he could not see the only thing that mattered. Regardless of why people voted for Reagan, by 1984 he would charm them not only into loving him, but also into thinking they had always loved him. I predicted (take my word for it) that he would win reelection in a landslide, which he did.

In other words, the best view of the race for the White House may not be from the depth of the data mine but in the peripheral vision of the engaged layman who is not too deeply engaged. Ian Leslie reports on research that shows the danger of “choking” when you “overthink” a decision or move, as in sports. Psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer, he tells us, finds that:

“[Y]ou have to be skilled at ignoring information. He found that a portfolio of stocks picked by people he interviewed in the street did better than those chosen by experts. The pedestrians were using the “recognition heuristic”: They picked companies they’d heard of, which was a better guide to future success than any analysis of price-earning ratios.”

Think of Eddie Murphy’s character in Trading Places.

So what does the “pedestrian” see when he applies his “heuristic” to the November presidential election? Again, I go back to 1980. I had heard that Ronald Reagan was a mean, saber-rattling monster. But when I saw him for the first time in his debate with Jimmy Carter, I found a cheerful, soft-spoken grandfather, but one who was sharp and sensible. I was 18, and he won me.

Today, I think when people eyeball the political field they see a blame-shifting president who hasn’t accomplished a lot except a healthcare law that most people don’t like. But his challenger seems like a cheerful guy who knows business when business is our problem in a chronically slow economy. To the average voter, everything else—the dog on the roof, Bain Capital, flip-flops, and gaffes—is just chatter. That’s my pre-Memorial Day call. But anything can happen in politics.

“I will say to the LORD, ‘My refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust.’”

So don’t just read it. Say it! Actually say the words! Stop and say to the Lord right now: “You are my refuge and I trust in you.” The words of the Psalm are not just pretty wallpaper.

Psalm 103:1-2 says:

“Bless the LORD, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name! Bless the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits.”

This looks like a command to me, so don’t just read it on the page: Do it! Bless the Lord! Say thank you to Him several times a day! While you’re driving the car and refraining from texting and have nothing better to do anyway, think of a few of “His benefits” and send up a word of gratitude.

Psalm 104:33 says:

“I will sing to the LORD as long as I live; I will sing praise to my God while I have being.”

If you have read this verse during your morning devotions, don’t make a liar out of yourself—actually do the thing! You just said, “I will sing,” so sing!

Unless this is just words on a page, do it! Unless this is just a lofty sentiment by some pious dead guy living 3,000 years ago, do it! Unless the words were merely meant as cultic recitation but not as meaningful to your life in a normal dimension, do it! Unless the writer was only a type of Christ and this Psalm has nothing to do with you, and you have no right to own these words as your own, do it! Unless there is a fixed gulf between you and the Old Testament writers, do it!

How strange is the mind of man. We read things in the Bible in plain English and yet do not understand. Satan has no more amazing craftiness than to blind us in our own language.