OK. So I know that a lot of people were making a big deal about the fact that Tim Tebow and his mom, Pam, were going to be featured on a pro-life commercial during the Suberbowl. I was less worried by the politics than I was by the fact that the video showed Tim Tebow tackling his mother. I know they were trying to be funny, but domestic violence doesn’t really seem like something about which we should be laughing.
Frank Schaeffer is saying what needs to be said:
I’m proud to say that Frank has written the foreword of my forthcoming book.
To be fair, the President did take on the proposed Ugandan law that would make homosexuality a capital offense. Here is his speech
It is a very good speech, but I do wish he’d been more forceful on the Ugandan issue.
Here’s a new rule: you may not criticize radical Muslims if you will not also call out crazy, violent Christians.
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We are on dangerous ground.
In an op/ed piece published in The New York Times on November 11, 2009, David Brooks takes the American media to task for their initial reticence to portray Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan as a radical Muslim terrorist. Maj. Hasan, in case you haven’t been following the news, is the man who murdered thirteen of his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas last week. According to witnesses, he shouted “God is great” in Arabic before pulling out his pistol and killing people. Continue reading ‘David Brooks, Nidal Hasan, and the Separation of Religion and Violence’
I should begin my review of Frank Schaeffer’s latest book, Patience With God: Faith for People Who Don’t Like Religion (or Atheism)(Da Capo Press, $25.00, hardcover), with a disclaimer: I have an indirect financial interest in Mr. Schaeffer’s success as a writer. Frank Schaeffer wrote a beautifully-crafted, thoughtful, and gracious foreword for my forthcoming, yet-to-be-named book on American Christianity’s response to undocumented (or “illegal”) immigration. His name will appear next to mine on the cover of my book because my publisher, Westminster John Knox Press, hopes Frank Schaeffer’s fame will rub off on me in a way that is profitable for everyone involved.
I asked Frank Schaeffer to write the forward to my book because I admire his work. The wit displayed in Frank’s writing has made me laugh out loud in inconvenient places (I first read his novel Portofino in the close quarters of a transatlantic flight) and I have wept at the beauty of Frank’s non-fiction prose, in the silence that descends upon my house when everyone but me is asleep. Reading Patience With God confirmed what I suspected to be the truth: I asked the right guy to pen the foreword to my book. More than ever I want to be on Frank Schaeffer’s team. Continue reading ‘Book Review: “Patience with God: Faith for Those who Don’t like Religion (or Atheism)” by Frank Schaeffer.’
I just found out that on July 16th I was quoted by Jeff Sharlet on the Rachel Maddow Show. He didn’t say my name, and the quote wasn’t exact, but hey, thanks Jeff! The quote in question comes from a piece I wrote for Beliefnet. Beliefnet shelved the piece, but I’m glad to see its having an impact anyway.
More importantly, my thanks to Jeff Sharlet and to Rachael Maddow for covering the story of the misogyny in the Family/Fellowship.
Watch the whole thing or catch the quote at four minutes and fifty seconds into the video.
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A note to my readers: At the end of last week I accepted an offer from Westminster John Knox, a division of the Presbyterian Publishing Corporation, to publish a book I am writing about immigration and the church. I’ve been working on the book for several months now (I expect to be just about half done with my first draft by the end of this week), which is why my blogging has been somewhat sporadic of late. But now that my book has a publisher I am officially setting aside my blog until the Fall, when I have promised my editor a completed manuscript. Look for my book in the Fall of 2010, and look for the return of my blog after the World Series, or maybe a little before that if the Giants’ offense doesn’t pick up soon.
The following column is an edited transcript of a talk I gave on June 27, 2009, in Palo Alto, CA. I gave the talk as part of a panel discussion looking at torture as a moral issue.
For several years now I’ve lived with a double-vocational identity. I am a Presbyterian minister and I am a writer of left-leaning, faith-based social and political commentary. Because of this identity my life can get compartmentalized in such a way that I think about certain issues as a writer and other issues as a pastor. This is how I started to think about torture.
When I found out that the United States was using waterboarding and other forms of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” in the execution of the so-called “war on terror”, my initial response was to address the issue as a writer of progressive political commentary. I wrote a couple of pieces for my regular UPI column and for my blog, but addressing the issue of torture as a writer proved problematic—and ultimately unsatisfying—because the torture issue was bringing out the liberal commentator in lots of folk, and I was having a hard time finding new, fresh, and creative things to say about torture, things that weren’t already being said better by others.
This was a good problem. People were challenging the idea that it is legal to use torture, they were debunking the idea that torture is a useful tool for gathering reliable information, and they were pointing out that torture does little to keep Americans safe. The fact that no one on Pennsylvania Avenue was listening didn’t change the fact that people were talking in great numbers, saying all the right things. It became apparent to me that the national dialogue on torture probably didn’t need another liberal, northern Californian, child of a granola-baking-Birkenstock-wearing-Stanford-educated-in-the-sixties mother to weigh in on the debate.
Continue reading ‘Torture and Public Morality’
Here’s the sermon I preached on June 7, 2009. In this sermon I tell a story from my recent trip to Geneva. I hope you enjoy hearing this sermon as much as I enjoyed preaching it.
Rev. Ben Daniel Sermon June 7, 2009 from Foothill Presbyterian Church on Vimeo.
Click here to watch a video of the worship service in Geneva mentioned in the sermon.




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