Madea has jumped the shark. And I am sorry.

I have enjoyed the Madea movies for a number of years but just saw the most recent. "I Can Do Bad All By Myself"

Sadly, the plots have become tired and predictable and now have to insert meaningless musical performances just to fill the time. The plot was thin and was a retread with a few Madea scenes, some domestic violence, and an ever-so-predictable love story.

Sad but true. Another good thing has come to an end. The Madea series. RIP.

AHS Grade: F

President Obama showed up at the National Prayer Breakfast. In fact, not only did the president show up, he got it right. Well, almost. In a week where the news cycle focused on economics, it is important not to miss Obama's seven wins and his one loss at the gathering of political leaders for a faith assembly.

Of course, the president included praise and endorsement for his poorly-conceived Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. This government boondoggle was started by Bush and enlarged by Obama. Mingling government money and regulations with faith-based ministries only serves to rob faith-based organizations of control of their own destinies. Worse, it robs those groups of the very motive that started their mission effort to begin with. The government's telling a church that it can serve soup but must do so without explaining WHY it is serving soup means the hands no longer express the heart. They merely serve soup. Faith-based without faith is de-based.

Nevertheless, President Obama struck seven powerful notes in his address at the National Prayer Breakfast.

First, he overcame his Islamic fetish. In fact, he failed to mention Islam at all. That omission has to be a first for this president who always feels compelled to remind us that Islam is “one of the world's great religions” and that it has been “defiled by extremists.” Look at any address where he mentions religion, at his speech before the West Point cadets regarding Afghanistan policy, or at his faith-laden comments around Ramadan and Eid-al-Fitr, and you will hear his relentless political correctness regarding the wonders of Islam. Compare those regularly glowing remarks with his failure even to mention Jesus in his Christmas comments, and one has to wonder why he feels so embarrassed about Jesus and Christianity yet so enthusiastic about protecting the brand image of Islam. Political correctness at its worst.

President Obama also got it right in his comments about the faith-based response to the disaster in Haiti. Obama rightly sounded the bell that it is faith-based teams who respond quickly and enthusiastically in the hour of the world's need. He praised Christians, Hindus, Sikhs, and Jews for their timely, compassionate and generous responses to the earthquake. He rightly omitted Islam since there appears to have been no Islamic mercy for the victims in Haiti. Good for him for not glossing over that absence.

Third, the president invoked faith as an instrument to grow America forward in righteousness, equality, justice, and hope. He did this particularly well as he recited the faith of Lincoln to love his enemies in the faces of Confederate soldiers, the faith of Dr. King to love those who fire-bombed his home, and the faith of Wilberforce in England to be so motivated by faith that he overcame great opposition and derision to bring about the end of slavery in Britain. In these comments, Obama's warmth shone through in a way we have not seen since his speech on race from nearly two years ago.

Most Christians differ vigorously with him on issues of the sanctity and dignity of human life. He has yet to make a case for why torture would be immoral while abortion is not. Nevertheless, in his remarks about Lincoln, King, and Wilberforce, Obama revealed glimpses of how much his faith has been shaped by his experience in the black Church in America where the heartbeat for civil rights and equality has resided. Our president best embraces faith when it focuses on the rights of those treated poorly by society. Occasionally, it is nice to hear that dimension of his own Christian faith, and it does serve as a reminder to many Christians in America that it was often the white Church who so virulently opposed the efforts to end slavery and provide equality for all citizens.

In doing so, Obama also revealed some of his own much-maligned personal faith life. He remarked on his reliance on prayer in a warm and personal way rather than the more clinical descriptions he has provided in the past. And he spoke to the role of faith in giving him strength and hope to endure what surely has been a difficult year, much of which from his own poor choices about leadership priorities. For those who have been curious as to his family's reluctance to attend church, these words bring some assurance that the man has not abandoned the faith life that has been a part of his family for the past twenty years.

Fifth, President Obama used faith as a helpful reminder to the attendees that all of us are created in the image of God. As such, civility in how we treat one another, even in vehement public policy disagreements, is a reflection of our morality and faith in the God who made us.

Surprisingly, President Obama also spoke with humor and grace. These qualities have been largely AWOL in his leadership of late. He even injected levity into the gathering. “But surely you can question my policies without questioning my faith, or, for that matter, my citizenship.” That comment drew both laughter and applause, a welcome contrast from the usual finger-pointing and blame-placing that we have grown accustomed to in political gatherings where more than one opinion is represented.

Finally, he showed up. Maybe I should not be surprised, but I was. His presence surprised me, given his growing predilection for waxing cautious on all things faith-related, from the erection of a creche in the White House at Christmas, to his failing even to mention the name of Jesus in His Christmas remarks (I think Jesus had something to do with Christmas, but I'll get back to you on that).

In matters of faith and morality, Obama usually seems tentative and careful, perhaps a reflection of his scars from the Jeremiah Wright ordeal. I think it is more likely, however, that Obama's own faith is still quite nascent, even, dare I say, embryonic.

However, his willingness to address the prayer breakfast at all suggests that he continues to try to move down a road that unnerves him a bit. For that willingness, I applaud him. May his emerging faith grow to full maturity.

As promised on the show on Sunday (sorry it took me so long), here is the column written by a British helicopter pilot regarding his change of sexuality. Very interesting reading.

My script is not allowing a usual click-through link so you will have to copy and paste for yourself. Sorry.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/men/article6990013.ece

I found two comments particularly provocative.

First he says,

Some will dismiss it as heresy. I have long argued that homosexuality is natural but abnormal, to a torrent of hostility from gay friends who refuse to acknowledge that what you are and what stake you hold in society are not the same.

And then later
Loving your own sex occurs in nature, without artificial triggers. But it is still not average behaviour. Homosexuality is an aberration; a natural aberration. Gays are a minority and minorities, though sometimes vocal, do not hold sway.
But two decades of cavorting with my own sex has delivered little that is memorable, except one super-sized sexless friendship with the aforementioned ex-boyf, with whom I spent a decade of my life; numerous hours of internet dating; a dizzying number of casual couplings and a few trips to genitourinary medicine clinics.


This got me to thinking, given the recent study I saw that showed about 10% of gay men and 20% of lesbians say that they chose to be homosexual. This is an odd phenomenon that gets little discussion in the news today but is worth studying and noodling.

Ok, I saw this article today and it got me thinking.
Sandra Bullock is poised to win an Oscar for her performance in The Blind Side. I already told you it ranks up there with Slumdog Millionaire and The Hangover as one of the three best movies of the last 5 years.

Good for Sandra!

Now here is my question. How in the world can one actress do so well in a movie like Blind Side and be so terrible in a movie like All About Steve.

Yes, I actually watched that movie this weekend. The plot hinges on the lousy love life of a crossword puzzle writer. Does any writer in Hollywood have an ounce of creativity left? A crossword puzzle writer seeking love? That is the best we could do?

Bullock was awful in that role. The movie was terrible and poorly written. Her acting was forced and manic. My wife and I did not even make it to the end of the flick. Just plain awful. An AHS F for All About Steve.

So Bullock shines in Blind Side and sucks in All About Steve. Go figure.

Guess she is like the rest of us. Great at our best moments and awful in our worst. Here's praying for more good moments than bad!

One night last week, I shared that I agree with Rep. Coffman of Colorado and Sen. Inhofe of Oklahoma. We simply have no choice but to profile in America. The only question is whether we have the nerve to profile or would prefer instead to commit a slow national suicide.

The show generated lots of emails and debate. Here are two sides of the issue from two listeners.

Arlene - AGREE

I'm a liberal, Democratic, Jewish woman with atheistic leanings who happens to agree with you 100% on the Muslim situation. I was listening to your show earlier this evening as I was taking a walk along the beach. I think it may have been a rebroadcast; I was unable to call in. I appreciate your courageous, gutsy words and your well-founded logic. I would like to comment:

1. More people might say they have concerns about Muslims if the survey didn't use the term "prejudiced," which we have ingrained in our minds as a perorative term. Prejudice = bad. Prejudice = prejudging people without giving them a fair shake. So I wouldn't trust the results of that survey.


2. You're absolutely right about this so-called religion - a religion that preaches violence and destruction. Sure, the Christians have done some terrible things in the past (that little thing called the Inquisition, for instance), but that is history, not a current threat. I don't have concerns about Christians, Jews, atheists, agnostics, Buddhists, etc. blowing up planes.


3. There is a lot of resentment in the Muslim world toward Israel, the U.S., and other thriving nations. While Israel and the U.S. don't advocate destroying Muslim nations, the Muslim nations preach destruction of Israel and hatred of the U.S.


4. I appreciate what the senators said about the need to profile people. But it was wrong for Inouye to use the blanket term "Middle Eastern." That would include Israel, which is hardly a terrorist threat. I think the senator was too wimpy to say "Muslim."


5. Speaking of political correctness gone awry, why do so many of my fellow liberals laud Islam when the religion oppresses women, represses free speech, has a totally barbaric legal code, is not progressive in the least? Compare what nations like the U.S. and Israel have contributed to world culture, knowledge, and medical/scientific/technological advances with what the Islamic world has accomplished in the past few centuries.


6. I think vetting Muslims makes sense, but I do wonder about profiling. I mean, one cannot ask a person what his or her religion is, whether boarding a plane or applying for a job.

DJ - DISAGREE

Really? Then who were the Muslims warring with if not the Christians? You cannot have it both ways, Allen. christianity's violent ways are why missionaries like Xavier, who did not pursue violence, and used his authority to preempt the portugese who did, are such stand outs in religious history. Also, the entire subjugation of the north American continent came within the last 400 years, and every last bit of that was justified, in theory at least, by the authority of the Christian idea of God.

In my letter to Scott Roeder, posted here and at Town Hall where my weekly columns appear, I introduced the murderer of Dr. George Tiller to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. A lesson in non-violence would have been good for Roeder.

In a passing comment, I called Dr. King the "premier American Christian leader of the 20th century." That comment generated enormous heat both at Town Hall and in my email inbox. The name-calling began.


Readers labeled Dr King...
Communist agitator
Corn syrup Adulterer
Puppet
Dim Bulb Plagiarist
Sho did like his ho's

The hatred surprised me. Was King perfect? No. But we have sunk to a level in America now where we expect anyone who receives praise and admiration to be entirely perfect. You do not assess a person by one part of who he is but by the totality of his life. We are seeing the same thing in attacking Pat Robertson right now for his remarks about Haiti all the while ignoring the more than $1.2 Billion his Operation Blessing has given to aid natural disaster and poverty efforts over the years. I vastly prefer Robertson's way of doing it poorly as opposed to how most people do nothing at all.

Anyway, back to King. When did his Dream arrive?

Might have been 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to get up, and at age 26 he was thrust into the role of leader – organizing and leading a bus boycott for over a year to desegregate public buses in Montgomery

Might have been when a bomb was thrown onto front porch of his home in 1956

Or when Bull Connor unleashed police dogs and fire hoses on him and his fellow protesters in Birmingham or perhaps even as he sat in jail there

Might have been in a store in Harlem when he was signing copies of his first book about the Montgomery buses
Heard someone ask: ‘Are you Martin Luther King?’
Then he was stabbed – stabbed in the middle of a crowded department store by an unstable woman
Pain overwhelming – if he had sneezed, he would have died
Thoughts raced through his mind – ‘Will I make it? Who will care for my family? Who will carry on the work? We have so much more to do…’

Might even have been in the middle of the night as he looked at his wife and daughter sleeping, realizing that they might well be taken away from him at any moment – he became weak, fearful – bowed down over that cup of coffee
“And I knew religion had to become real to me. Had to know God for myself. I prayed a prayer, and I prayed out loud that night. I said, ‘Lord, I’m trying to do what’s right down here. I think the cause we represent is right, but, Lord, I must confess I’m weak now. I’m faltering. I’m losing my courage. And I could hear an inner voice, Martin, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth, and lo, I will be with you even until the end of the world. Jesus promised never to leave me or forsake me.”

But it is possible that the dream became full and real only as he stood on the Washington Mall in 1963 and Mahalia Jackson said, “Tell them about your dream, Martin, tell them your dream!”
And Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. stood before 200,000 people and said, “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’”

King led a movement that ushered in great social change. He gave his life to do so. He led the movement from his role as a Christian pastor who sought to help America live up to its promises. Best of all, he taught us a lot about the dignity of each human being. The premier American Christian leader of the 20th century. No one else even comes close.

My daughter and I had a wonderful weekend getaway last weekend. My wife is out of the country right now, so she missed out.

Mountains. A little ice and snow. Peace and quiet. My daughter worked on homework and Facebook (unfortunately we did have Wi-Fi access). I watched the NFL playoffs and finished my book on my conversion. And we just enjoyed being together. Great stuff. Very renewing time away.

We need that. Time off, time away. Two new studies show that. One study is the first to PROVE that stress does cause heart attacks and shorter lives. Better find a way to reduce stress and keep it at manageable levels. Time off does that.

A second study shows that LoverBoy got it right. We really are working for the weekend. A new study (U of Rochester) shows we feel better on Friday than we do on any other weekday. We then feel terrific on Saturday. By Sunday afternoon, we’re sliding down into a malaise. And the study showed the same “weekend effect” for everyone regardless of age, or how much they earned. You are in the best mood, have the most energy, and the least aches and pains on Friday and Saturday. And Wednesdays are just like all the rest - no such thing as hump day. Weird, huh?

So here is the important question. How do you multiply Friday and Saturday into other days of your week?

Three ideas:

1) Discover and embrace your life's purpose. When you know your reason for being, you can begin to include it in all of your days throughout the week whether you like your job or not.

2) Seek a job that helps you fulfill that purpose. It will still be work but it will be meaningful work.

3) Serve another person in a significant way on Mondays and Wednesdays. This will add meaning and power to other parts of your week.

Scott Roeder, meet Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Perhaps the two of you have never met.

As your trial for the murder of Dr. George Tiller begins in earnest, you would do well to meet the premier American Christian leader of the 20th century. Whereas you believe that your murder of Dr. Tiller is morally justifiable as an act of defending the pre-born, Dr. King stared evil and violence squarely in the eye and chose a higher path. He and his colleagues withstood fire hoses, attack dogs, bombs, knives, and guns, and yet chose not to respond in kind. You have chosen the path of hatred; he chose the path of love.

Now mind you, I hear your pain. My soul aches deeply every day at the fact that more than 1,200,000 children each year will not see their own birth in this country. While you have chosen to kill as a tactic, many others and I seek to serve mothers in crisis and their pre-born children in ways that offer them hope and love. I am deeply disturbed that the most dangerous place in a child's life in America is in her own mother's warm womb. Ending abortion is the right thing to do. That is a noble goal.

However, how we end abortion says as much about us as that we seek to bring an end to this moral evil. There is a good reason why virtually every pro-life group in America has denounced your actions and the use of violence in the battle to end abortion. Very simply, you are wrong and so are your actions.

As a Christian, your faith should teach you that truth and love will have the final word. As Dr. King himself stated, “That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.” A Christian keeps an eye toward the eternal, not merely toward the temporal. Christians know who wins in the end. Therefore, the Christian faith is rooted in the basic hope that only good ultimately conquers evil. Killing in the name of life is not only logically inconsistent, it is also morally wrong.

As a member of the self-named “Army of God,” you and your group have arrogated to yourselves something that rightly belongs to the God you claim to serve, namely the taking or ending of human life. You have twisted the meaning of pro-life by endorsing death. The irony is obvious to everyone but you.

Worse still, your group has assumed the divine right to take life in order to serve the cause of saving life. For centuries, Christians have articulated the rare occasions when the use of violence is morally defensible. Dr. King and other Christian leaders embraced the “just war theory” delineated and refined by thinkers like Augustine, Aquinas, and others. Such just war cases are characterized by traits not present in your own “war.” For example, only legitimate national governments acting as moral agents have the authority to declare war. This moral conviction knows that vigilante justice, like that embodied in your own army, breeds hatred, fear, and anarchy, rather than true peace and true justice. You have taken unto yourselves the roles of both God as the ultimate taker of life and of temporal political government as the moral agent of war. In doing so, you represent the ever-present human urge to decide what is right and wrong without answering to others, including the Church.

In addition, Christian thinkers hold that war should be used as a last resort, enacted only after all other measures have been exhausted. In a liberal democracy like our own, there are multiple lawful measures and acts of civil disobedience available to those of us who value all human life, even those with whom we vigorously disagree. In choosing to resort to violence and murder, you have stepped out of Christian thinking and into the realm of self-authority.

Mr. Roeder, your “Army of God” invokes the faith with great gusto but also with great disregard for the teachings of the man you claim to follow, Jesus. In the face of violence, even in the face of his own torture and death, Jesus turned the other cheek. As He was being arrested, He instructed His own followers not to retaliate. In the end, it is this very example of non-violence that carried the day in the moral leadership of Dr. King. He and his leadership invested monumental amounts of time to train their “soldiers” not to retaliate. To take the higher moral ground. To change hearts rather than end lives.

While I mourn with you the deaths of pre-born children, I rejoice in the fact that the pro-life movement is gaining strength and public opinion as evidenced in recent polls showing slow movement back toward the valuing of human life. I rejoice that your actions stand out for their rarity. Your murderous act was the first death of an abortion doctor in America since 1998. Despite you, America faces no epidemic of anti-abortion violence. In fact, it is interesting to note that the same number of pro-life demonstrators were killed last year as abortion doctors - one. James Pouillon's death stands as a reminder that violence on either side of this issue solves nothing. It only leaves more dead bodies.

Finally, I encourage you to use your time in prison well. A recommended reading list would include Dr. King's “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” and the Sermon on the Mount by Jesus. Both of these pieces will aid you in understanding non-violence not as a passive or lazy response but as one that has the capacity to change the minds and hearts of America.

Please know that many of us will be praying for you, but more importantly for the lives of children in America, the born and the unborn. The disgrace of your murder cannot erase the moral horror that is perpetrated in this country each day.

Grace and Peace,
Allen Hunt

Been reading lots of books lately. Started several while on break after Christmas, and I am keeping the momentum.

One to suggest to you.


The Water is Wide by Pat Conroy.
I actually picked this up at the suggestion of my nemesis, Erik. Conroy is best known for Prince of Tides, Lords of Discipline, and The Great Santini, among others.

But this work is one of his earliest pieces. After college in the 1960's, Conroy taught school and spent one year in the remarkable setting of Daufuskie Island off the coast of South Carolina. A remote, lightly inhabited island where many of the residents still spoke Gullah. This book provides a fictionalized account of his experiences on "Yamacraw Island."

In typical Conroy fashion, his work with the islanders proved much more positive than his interaction with the educrats of South Carolina. Amazing stories of work in a one-room school with students possessing an entirely different view of life and the world.

A very interesting piece of fiction. Not Conroy's best - he grew in prowess from this beginning. But still an excellent read.