Not Just "Women's Issues"

 I had long heard about Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, but just got around to reading it. Or rather listening. My to-read list is so long that I regularly get audio versions from my library that I can listen to in the car or while doing household chores. In this case, I wished I had the print version so I could underline and more easily follow up on websites mentioned. Do what works for you, but I highly recommend this book for Westerners who want their eyes opened to abuses of women in other parts of the world.

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A Difficult Read

 ​I recently read American Sniper by Chris Kyle. It isn’t great writing, just an ordinary soldier (make that an extraordinary soldier) telling about his experiences. I’m American, but let’s just say this was a cross-cultural experience for me. The book showed up as available on my library app, and I had heard a lot about it when the movie came out, so I thought, why not? “It’s a really good book,” I was told, and I certainly can’t fault it for excitement. Kyle was definitely an adrenaline junkie.

 
But I found Kyle’s attitudes hard to comprehend. He is a brother in Christ according to his own testimony; we believe the same things about Jesus, see Jesus as the same highest priority in our lives and yet, Kyle finds war fun? He kills people for a living. How can that be? 

Strangers in our Midst

The community choir I sing with had our Christmas concert yesterday. We filled a local Catholic church to the brim twice over on a snowless Sunday afternoon. Most of the music was unique arrangements of traditional carols like this pulsing version of "O Come, All Ye Faithful". Some was totally new like "Let There be Light" by an friend of my youth, Craig Courtney.

A piece that has especially stuck with me was this Scottish carol, "What Strangers are These?" The first two verses are typically Christmas, the babe in the manger, shepherds and magi, adoring their King, Jesus the Savior. It is the third verse that haunts me.
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Francis Schaeffer revisited

 Francis Schaeffer and the shaping of Evangelical America by Barry Hankins is not a new book. It was published by Eerdmans in 2008, but I’m just now getting to it. It was a hard book to read. Schaeffer profoundly shaped my thinking as a young adult. The love with which the Schaefers received both European and American young people at L’Abri (“the Shelter”) in Huemoz, Switzerland, was as powerful an apologetic for his conservative Christian faith as his tireless teaching. Although I visited L’Abri only briefly in 1976 (and that at a time when the by-then-retired Schaeffers were away), I heard him speak several times, most notably at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Tennessee. Hankins’ summary of the contents of Schaeffer’s trilogy (The God Who is There, Escape From Reason, and He is There and He is not Silent) brought me back to the roots of much of my thinking that I have taken for granted for many years—the importance of worldview; the upper and lower stories that divorce faith and reason; the mannishness of man, separating us from the animal kingdom; the need to engage culture if we are going to win a world for Christ. 

What Difference Could it Have Made?

 

I have been proofreading a doctoral dissertation this week. No, not mine. You won't need to call me Dr. Hardy in the foreseeable future. I'm just the proofreader. The researcher and future PhD is a Korean missionary to Muslims. She explores the experiences of Muslim migrant workers in Korea and how those experiences affect their faith and practice as Muslims. I recently visited Korea, but this dissertation showed me a completely different side of the country.

A King Worth Serving

 

I fell in love with King Arthur and the Matter of Britain (the whole cycle of stories that come out of that legend) in high school when we read Idylls of the King. The language of Tennyson, the mystery of a baby hidden away to be later revealed as the rightful ruler, the promise of his return in the hour of Britain’s greatest need all tugged at my imagination and made me desire more than anything that it be true.

Surprises in Korea

I have traveled a lot and lived on four continents, but a lot of things surprised me in my recent month in Korea with my daughter's family. Here are ten:

Surprise #1: Korea is amazingly first-world—more so even than our last overseas assignment in South Africa. In Korea everything is high-rises, cell phones with ubiquitous selfie-sticks, and state-of-the-art transportation--along side traditional architecture like this restored gate in Seoul. We saw no homeless, little poverty, nothing old or traditional that hadn’t been rebuilt in the past 60 years.