Today’s Breakpoint w/Chuck Colson is on Bonhoeffer. To hear Chuck, click here. For the podcast, click here. To read a chapter of Bonhoeffer, click here.
For the Catholic News Agency interview, click here!
To listen to a chapter of Bonhoeffer, click here!
World magazine has named Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy — A Righteous Gentile vs. the Third Reich as Runner-up Best Book of 2010! It deemed the book “immaculately readable…” To read the article, click here.
In what critics are describing as a “shameless effort” to remain relevant, former President Jimmy Carter has agreed to eat a live bullfrog next Sunday night on the CBS program “Sixty Minutes”.
CBS execs are clearly thrilled, predicting a ratings bonanza beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. “The broadcast will be live,” said CBS President Les Moonves, quipping “as will the frog.” But friends close to the Carters are not amused, fearing the stunt will tarnish the former President’s legacy. But Carter remains defiant, describing the act as a “vindication” and as a “valentine” to his rural childhood in Plains, Georgia.
Veteran media watchers are puzzled, calling the whole thing “bizarre”. Some have suggested Carter was stung by the controversy over his remark that cast SC Congressman Joe Wilson’s outburst as “racially motivated.” Eating a small amphibian on a nationally-televised program would serve to “turn the page”, with the added boon of possibly revitalizing the former President as a player on the international stage.
Carter was also thought to be upset that “Dancing With the Stars” had recently rejected him as a contestant. Learning they had welcomed the participation of former House Whip Tom Delay was “the last straw”, according to his wife, former First Lady Rosalyn Carter, who told one friend that while casting about for a way to “leap-frog” ahead of his detractors, her husband’s thoughts had drifted to an incident from 1934, when he was eleven. That memory seems to have sparked the idea for the “Sixty Minutes” appearance. But details of this incident remain unclear, although Carter’s late brother Billy spoke of it in a 1978 interview:
“There was an old redneck feller who lived in a shack by the river. Everybody called him ole Frawg, but I never knew why. My brother Jimmy and I would go down there to taunt him and chunk rocks at him. But one time that man taught us a lesson. One rock hit ole Frawg in the small of the back and he went down. Jimmy run over to see if he was still breathing, but as soon as he got close, ole Frawg grabbed him by the ankle! The old feller was just playing possum! He drug Jimmy to his shack and I ran home. Later on, when Jimmy came home he told me that ole Frawg had said, “You boys think you kin get the better of ole Frawg. But ole Frawg gonna teach you a lesson.” Then he reached down into a cedar bucket and pulled out a bullfrog as big as his fist and he talked to it real tender, callin’ it his brother. And then he chawed the critter’s head off. Jimmy started crying, but ole Frawg said it didn’t taste half-bad. He said his tastebuds wasn’t worth a damn on accounta he smoked so much ter-backy. And he allowed as that old frog was in a better place than that stinky bucket. Years later, when he had become a midshipman at Anapolis, Jimmy told me how the story had affected him, and how some day he’d tell the world about ole Frawg.”
Q&A: To engage the culture, say Eric Metaxas and Richard Land, Christians must deliver the ‘whole gospel’ to a people who are ‘wildly ignorant’ of it | Marvin Olasky
(Photo by JAMES ALLEN WALKER FOR WORLD)
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the rare U.S. senator who was also a thinker, once said, “The central conservative truth is that it is culture not politics that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”
Conservatives have the better of that argument, but both fall short of the central Christian understanding, which is that only Christ saves us from ourselves, and that neither culture nor politics is of any help apart from God’s grace.
I recently moderated at The King’s College in New York a discussion between two thoughtful Christians that encompassed many topics, but particularly the importance of culture. Richard Land has served as president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission since 1988, hosts two national radio shows, and is a fan of Woody Allen. Eric Metaxas, founder and host of Manhattan’s Socrates in the City (”Mission to Metropolis,” Feb. 14), has written two biographies, 30 children’s books, and humor articles that Woody Allen called “quite funny.”
Here are excerpts of the discussion.
LAND: When we look at our culture today, we have to try to understand, and ask God to help us learn, how to explain the gospel to people who don’t have ready biblical references. I read an article in Time magazine about the lack of religion in some parts of America. One couple came to see an Episcopal priest after they had been to a service, and they said, “Our teenage son wants to know who the man is hanging on the plus sign.” They didn’t know it was Jesus and they didn’t know it was a cross. That sounds far-fetched to some of us, but I’ve been some places in our country where it’s not as far-fetched as you might think.
We have an obligation and a responsibility to live a whole gospel before that world out there. The idea that there’s a social gospel and a spiritual gospel is an invention of the devil. There is only one gospel, and it is a whole gospel for whole people. It is blasphemous to go out and seek to feed the hungry and not tell them about the bread of life, or to seek to house the homeless and not tell them that in our father’s house are many mansions, or to seek to give water to the thirsty and not tell them about the rivers of living water. It is also a denial of the incarnation to go preach the gospel and ignore the fact that people are hungry and thirsty and naked and homeless. We are to do both.
METAXAS: You have to realize that you’re speaking into a culture that in some cases is wildly ignorant, just amazingly, staggeringly ignorant of some things they should know. About four years ago, Dick Cavett, the former talk show host, walked into a Park Avenue bistro. Cavett is totally brilliant, knows everything there is to know about everything—except that he has lived in New York City since he left Yale in the late ’50s, so he has been part of the epicenter of secular culture. In the back of the bistro there’s Father Rutler, a Catholic priest and a true intellectual. I think, “This is the Lord!” because I would love to introduce Dick Cavett to this guy. So we go sit with him and Dick Cavett turns to Father Rutler: “I’ve got a question for you, Father. Where does the Golden Rule come from?”
Father Rutler is so smart that he thinks Dick Cavett is asking him some deep theological question. He thought there was no way that someone could not know that Jesus said the Golden Rule. But Dick Cavett is the poster boy for people who seem to know everything—but in Manhattan most people are absurdly ignorant of the things that evangelicals know incredibly well. If you want to reach the world with the gospel, move to New York City.
LAND: If you showed American television to a sociologist, they would be hard pressed to conclude that 61 percent of Americans say that religion is a very important part of their lives. It just wouldn’t compute, given our sitcoms and films.
METAXAS: And the 12-year-old girl in Topeka goes up to her room and turns on her TV and effectively gets the worldview of Hugh Hefner and Baywatch. If the invisible hand of the market were working when it comes to media, a third of every sitcom, talk show, and movie that you watch would come from the perspective of conservative, evangelical Christians. But somehow the market isn’t working, because we have been out of the game for 50 or so years.
LAND: When Muslims come to America and get out of New York City and Washington and go into the real country and see people who are actually religious, it stuns them. I’ve talked to some Cuban Christians who are very ambivalent about the ending of the embargo, because they say that if the embargo ends, a lot of what will come into their country from America will be very harmful to their families and their faith. . . . We do need to do a better job. We desperately need Christians to engage the media.
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Talking with Woody Allen
LAND: I’m a Woody Allen fan. Woody Allen movies come to Nashville three weeks after they’re released, and they stay there for one week at one theater, so all of us who like Woody Allen know each other. I think people will be watching Woody Allen films a hundred years from now to figure out how a particularly influential subset of American culture lived and what they were like in the late 20th and early 21st century. Woody asks all the right questions; he just doesn’t have any answers. His central question is, “If God doesn’t exist, what meaning does life have?”
METAXAS: In a number of his movies it’s as if it’s the gospel — [only] without the ending. He makes you see that life without God is agony, it’s undoable.
WORLD: If you were sitting next to Woody Allen on a plane, what would you say to him?
METAXAS: I have to somehow figure out how to connect with him. . . . If you come across as morally superior, that’s unbiblical, that’s wrong, it’s a lie, so you’re confused. But also you’ll push the person away. You’ve got to find a point of connection, otherwise they won’t hear you. If you walk around New York you might see someone, semi-homeless, almost always from out of town, with a hat and a Bible “preaching the word” on the street. Nine times out of 10 they are not preaching the Word any more than Satan was when he was quoting the Bible to Jesus in the wilderness. The words are not magic. Some people will respond, “The word of God will not return void,” and yes, the capital-w Word of God, the Logos, will not return void—but the words of the Bible can certainly return void unless they’re anointed by the Holy Spirit. Many people think that if they just spew out Scripture or something that people are hearing them, but it’s not true. Jesus never did that. He always connected with everyone around him.
LAND: I would say make a connection with him as a person. I would start with his movies and tell him how much his movies had meant to me and spoken to me as a human being. It’s very clear that he’s a very vulnerable man; he does have no hope, and he’s very disturbed by having no hope.
METAXAS: He should be, but there are a lot of people who just float through life. The thing about somebody like Woody Allen is that he has thought this through and he sees the bleakness of it. A lot of people haven’t thought it through; they’re not logical. Logic is good.
— Marvin Olasky
Copyright © 2009 WORLD Magazine
Articles may not be reproduced without permission
August 01, 2009, Vol. 24, No. 15
To read this article in its original format, go to www.worldmag.com.
FoxNewsChannel’s THE STRATEGY ROOM. Eric Metaxas with Lauren Green. 
The media’s perennial difficulty in covering religion has been well-documented at www.getreligion.org — but it’s never been quite as funny or ridiculous as it is here, in this www.getreligion.org story about Obama’s invitation to speak at Notre Dame… As G.K. Chesterton — or perhaps it was legal scholar Mary Ann Glendon — once said: “Que Sera, Sera!” [Music up and out]
Exactly six years ago today — on April 5th, 2003 — my friend David Bloom died in Iraq at the age of 39. Five years ago I wrote this essay:
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BUT SWEET WILL BE THE FLOWER: The Life And Death Of NBC’s David Bloom
At twelve o’clock stood New York Governor, George Pataki. At one o’clock , White House Press Secretary Ari Fleisher. At two o’clock was former New York City Mayor Rudy Guiliani. At three o’clock , just across the aisle, were Katie Couric, Matt Lauer, and Ann Curry. Everywhere one looked were pundits and anchors and government officials, so many of them that you thought you had fallen into your tv set. There was Tom Brokaw and there was Tim Russert and there was Andrea Mitchell. And there was Chris Mathews and Lester Holt and Campbell Brown. And there was Dominic Dunne and there was General Barry MacCaffrey and there was Peggy Noonan. And there we were, my wife and I, at our friend’s funeral.
The scene was St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan, just over a year ago, and the sad occasion was the funeral of David Bloom, the former NBC White House Correspondent and Weekend Today Show anchor whose good looks and brilliance and ebullience had recently brought him the greatest fame of his famous life. For several exhiliarating and tense weeks the entire country had watched him and prayed for him as he bounced along in his modified tank, which someone had dubbed the Bloom Mobile, windswept and typically enthusiastic, the best-known embed in the Iraq War, updating us from the ever-changing middle of it all, and somehow reassuring us by his very presence, by his inherent and ineffable upbeatness, that everything — despite everything — was okay.
[To continue reading, click here.]
“And no Christmas list would be complete without a lullaby book. It’s Time to Sleep, My Love, written by Eric Metaxas and illustrated by Nancy Tillman is a ravishingly beautiful volume that my wife and I will be giving to our grandchildren. (We plan to get a back-up copy to keep in readiness for visitors.) “You are loved,” it says, and neither irony nor absurdity nor the most bitter pain puts a dent in that sentiment, which mysteriously undergirds the universe.”
John Wilson, “Wrapping Up 2008″ in the current issue of First Things.
Last night my chickens came home to roost when I somehow found myself moderating a dialogue between the Rev. Jeremiah Wright (Barack Obama’s friend and pastor of 20 years) and the inimitable Rev. John Rankin of the Theological Educational Institute. The title of the forum was “The Bible, Race, and American History: What Are the Issues?” There were lots of media there, of course, fishing for controversy. But the only controversy was the lack of controversy. It was all scandalously civil.
My small contribution was duly noted in both newspaper accounts. The Connecticut Post‘ said my moderating was “humorous”. The full story is here. The New Haven Register said I “set a tone of civility.” Their story is here. The local Fox News tv report is here. I’m behind Dr. Wright, shuffling my papers…
I doff my hat to my dear friend, the Rev. John Rankin, for creating a place for civil debate and bona fide conversation on important subjects — and with people who are usually ideologically far from his positions on things. Rankin’s other Mars Hill Forums are absolutely must-see material. The second-half of this conversation between Wright and Rankin will be on December 5th in the Greater Hartford Area. Stay tuned.
Even a Greek diner’s java cup evokes Socrates for Eric Metaxas
By ALISON BOWEN
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Eric Metaxas might just know the meaning of life.
Metaxas, 42, is the founder and host of Socrates in the City: Conversations on the Examined Life, a floating Manhattan lecture series lately headquartered at the Union League Club. Following the example of Socrates’ maxim that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” the semimonthly event provides a place where busy people in suits and sports jackets can discuss, as Metaxas puts it, “life, God and other small topics.”
“It’s going to challenge people, but at the same it’s going to challenge them in a way that’s provocative and exhilarating and hopefully even fun,” he adds.
Metaxas was born in Astoria, Queens, to a Greek father and a German mother (they met in an English class). Now an upper East Sider, he says his own quest for the meaning of life began with a childhood rooted in the Greek Orthodox Church and culminated when he was 25 years old after attending Yale.
“When you’re in college at a place like Yale, all of the influences lead you to think that sophisticated, serious people don’t ask big questions too much, and they certainly don’t get very serious about faith, and certainly not Christian faith,” he says. “You graduate with this idea that there’s nothing there really for me.”
Metaxas says that after he asked God to reveal himself, God did so in a dream, very dramatically and personally. Although he’s reticent on the details, he says it solidified his faith.
“It was like going to bed single and waking up married,” he says. “I had absolutely no doubt that the Bible was true, that there were good answers to these questions.”
Socrates in the City is one of a handful of projects in which Metaxas is involved, along with raising his 7-year-old daughter, Annerose, with Susanne, his wife of nearly 10 years; serving on the vestry of Calvary-St. George’s Episcopal Church in downtown Manhattan, and participating in the New Canaan Society, a Christian men’s fellowship group.
Catherine Billon, CEO of Internet company RiverWired, who met Metaxas five years ago through mutual friends, tries not to miss a Socrates in the City event. She says Metaxas has the ability to make even the most banal of topics interesting and the most dismal of situations promising.
“He’s eternally hopeful, no matter how dark the situation,” Billon says. She adds that Metaxas’ wit often diffuses tension when discussions turn to touchy topics. “Humor is the great equalizer.”
With the development of Socrates in the City, Metaxas can add “discussion starter” to his list of accomplishments as a writer, speaker and frequent emcee.
Most recently, he wrote Everything You Always Wanted to Know About God (but Were Afraid to Ask). In contrast to Socrates in the City, where Metaxas incorporates many different theological views, the book specifically attempts to answer questions about Christianity.
Metaxas’ career as a writer also spans humor pieces for The Atlantic Monthly and others, and writing for the children’s video series “VeggieTales.” Upcoming projects include a biography on 18th century abolitionist William Wilberforce.
Over lunch at Orsay on the upper East Side, his easygoing personality extends to both his meal companion and the waiters, who know him by name. Sipping a Diet Coke with lemon, he explains why he brings in Socrates speakers from as far away as England. “I want to bring voices that you’re not going to bump into in New York City,” he says. “They’re voices that are largely absent from secular New York culture. I think that’s a big problem.”
Metaxas decided to gear Socrates in the City toward what he describes as the “elite class” of New York: businesspeople and professionals who may not otherwise take time to explore faith.
“We’re kind of preoccupied with success and those kinds of things,” Metaxas says. “The human heart and soul and mind don’t stop looking for satisfaction just because we’re really busy. Those questions don’t go away.”
The idea for Socrates in the City emerged after a friend encouraged Metaxas to form a Bible study for New York professionals. Metaxas thought that the typical New York businessperson would not be attracted to a religious convention in an auditorium.
“They’re really busy, especially some of a certain ilk of New Yorkers, the ones who are least likely to read Nietzsche on the subway,” he says. “They’re there on a cell phone in a cab. Those are the types of folks, if you invite them to a really nice club, and have wine and hors d’oeuvres, they’ll listen to someone who’s interesting.”
Each Socrates session begins with about 30 to 45 minutes of wine and hors d’oeuvres, after which Metaxas introduces the guest speaker, who talks for about 30 to 45 minutes. With the postlecture question-and-answer session, the upscale atmosphere melts into a down-to-earth theological discussion.
“I thought it would be a cultural service, in a sense, to the professional class in New York kind of like a soup kitchen for the mind,” says Metaxas.
The speakers, all handpicked by Metaxas, have included Boston College philosophy professor and author Peter Kreeft and House of Lords Deputy Speaker Baroness Cox and British physicist Sir John Polkinghorne.
“That’s the caliber of mind that New Yorkers need to be able to taste and experience,” Metaxas says. “You can hear all kinds of speakers in New York, but something about a guy like [Polkinghorne], he tends not be in the cultural milieu of New York City.” Although he upholds a strong Christian faith, Metaxas deliberately orchestrated Socrates in the City to stimulate conversation that reflects different theological views. The nonprofit series is sponsored by individuals and not affiliated with any religious organizations.
“I think the great fear is that these questions do not have answers,” Metaxas says. “I guess I feel like there’s really good news. The good news is that there are good answers that I think people would want to hear as opposed to, ‘Life has no meaning.’”
Metaxas has drawn his own conclusions about the meaning of life, and he points people toward his book as an explanation of his personal views. Socrates in the City, he says, is intended to prompt thought and conversation from all walks of life.
“The main thing about society, it’s about examining life,” he says. “You can only lead people into the quest and the conversation, and they will go as far as they want. You have to allow people the freedom to explore.”
(For more info visit socratesinthecity.com where you may purchase CDs of previous events.)