Joe Queenan Turns Hard Times Into Humor

I really enjoyed this interview with Joe Queenan with Scott Simon. I have heard so many versions of Queenan’s story during my years with Celebrate Recovery. I never fail to be surprised all over again about how rotten hurting parents can be to their children. When you link abuse and poverty there is a TNT combo that can really be destructive, as was the case in Queenan’s life.

His story about making sure his dad couldn’t get into his bedroom at night to hurt him was particularly captivating.

Queenan’s comments about books and education at the end of the interview is worth listening to the whole 10 minutes or so to get to. As he mentions, sometimes the child’s only way out of his world is a book. He can’t afford anything else or go anywhere else. Poor people, he comments, don’t joke about education. It’s their only way out. Words rightly used can do a work in the soul that can be done no other way.

I have always wondered why I needed so many books as a child.

Rick Warren and Same Sex Marriage

Rick is doing his best to not get hit by the flak in the air over same sex marriage. It’s not easy. He recently commented that he did not campaign for Prop 8 in CA that was a rejection of ss marriage. But it became clear that he encouraged his people to support Prop 8. Warren’s response was that was not campaigning.

Two questions conservatives are asking. One, why didn’t you campaign? And two, why did you only offer a biblical response when your people were asking you how they should vote, as Warren commented he had done. Why do your people have to force you to say something? Shouldn’t you have been out ahead of your church?

This issue is coming after Warren. You simply cannot have it both ways. Gays won’t let you have it both ways. And the church won’t either.

In the church this is not an issue about the church’s view of homosexuality. Honestly, as long as I have been in the church, I have very seldom observed anything that approached derision, fear or hate.

The discussion about homosexuality, and any number of other issues, ends up being a discussion about the Bible and how we interpret it. I think most of the evangelicals I know are about willing to believe anything if it is rooted in the historical-grammatical method of interpretation of the Bible. But evangelicals are very impatient with the “gee, we can never know what the Bible really means” school of thought. Or the “we can only have perspectives and never Truth,” school of thought. Or “the Bible is just the words of men responding to God’s presence” school of thought. Or “the words of the Bible do not connect with ultimate reality but merely indicates states of the soul” school of thought. Or the “everything is just a theory” school of thought.

And when evangelicals get a whiff of what is coming down from the pulpits they are much more afraid of the pulpits than they are of Prop 8 issues.

Click here for a Christianity Today discussion of Warren and the ss marriage debate.

Obama Donates .3 Percent of 2008 Income To Faith-Based Charities

Here’s the story.

Don’t read into this who and who I did not support for President. But it sure is relevant for men and women of good conscience and community spirit to know if and how our leaders invest in the welfare of our society.