It’s hard to believe I wrote this four years ago. So much has changed since then, and yet so little is substantially different. I thought it might be appropriate to re-post this as I sit and stare out at a rainy Veteran’s Day.

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Today I flew home from Denver and had a strange experience in the Atlanta Airport. A group of military personnel were flying out — maybe 40 of them. As they walked through the airport in a group, people started spontaneously applauding. I saw young men slowly turn red and break out grinning in spite of themselves. I saw young women staring intently straight ahead lest they turn to look and catch someone’s eye. They looked sheepish and humble. There was no strut in them, but there was the unmistakable tinge of youthful embarrassment.

I normally walk through the airport quickly and with my head down, but I stopped and watched and clapped my hands along with everyone else.

Well, almost everyone else.

There was a family who did not applaud. They had dark skin. They looked Middle Eastern. The children started to applaud, but the adults quickly stopped them. The adults didn’t look angry or frightened; they looked sad.

I stood there for a moment and thought about what was going on. And I found myself conflicted.

There was a part of me that wanted to clap and shout and go pat those young men and women on the back and say how proud we are of them, and how we’re all praying for them. There was another part of me that wanted to yell, “Don’t go! Stay here with your moms and dads and husbands and wives and kids!”

Of course, I respect these young people and their willingness to put their lives in harm’s way to protect innocence and spread freedom and democracy around the world. I believe we are a safer nation because of our military, and I want to honor that — especially the weekend of Veteran’s Day.

But there’s so much about the whole “military mindset” that I don’t like. I realize I am woefully unqualified to speak on this, and I want to learn to speak more intelligently about this subject. As a starting point, I want it to be known that I have tremendous respect for the military and want to show proper respect, but I also have some major qualms about exactly what it is we’re supporting.

I don’t like the fact that we take young people and program them to stop thinking individually — breaking them down and re-training them to practice group-think. At its worst — in scandals like Tailhook or Abu Ghraib — it takes on a distressing kind of mob-mentality that leads to grotesque violations of human rights. I sometimes wonder if boot camp itself isn’t a violation of human rights.

And I don’t like the fact that these young people are trained to kill. To some extent, they are taught to stop considering the value and dignity of human life and see only targets. I saw a bumper sticker the other day that’s stuck in my head. It’s simplistic and reductionist, but I can’t stop thinking about it. It said something like: “Maybe when Jesus said we should love our enemies he meant we shouldn’t kill them.”

I understand the biblical arguments for the Just War theory. I’ve always considered myself a Just War advocate — in a true Augustinian sense.

I also understand the biblical arguments for Pacifism. I was raised in a church that had strong roots in the pacifist movement. From earliest childhood I was taught how to explain the phrase “conscientious objector”.

I understand the arguments for Pre-emtive War — though I must admit I find very little that is biblical about them.

I don’t mean to start a new thread here to unpack all of this. But I wanted to share with you my feelings that afternoon as I watched those young men and women — so full of youth, so full of promise, so full of hopes and fears and anxiety. I don’t know if they’ll come home or not. I don’t know if they’ll kill anyone or not. I don’t know if their mission will be successful or not. I’m not even sure if this whole thing is necessary or not.

I’m sure there are folks who have thought through those questions. I remain unconvinced of a lot of the answers I hear coming from various sources, so I’ll continue to search out the wisdom of God on this matter.

Until I figure it out, though, that’ll be me in the corner listening to the sound of my own conflicted applause.

Perhaps a little historical context is in order. Beginning nearly a hundred years ago as the women’s suffrage movement, feminism has perhaps been the most influential cultural development of the past century. A direct line can be traced from suffrage to prohibition in the 20s to the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s to the women’s liberation movement of the 70s.

Men have had to change the way they think about women, and – perhaps more importantly – women have had to change the way they think about themselves. And, in the process, regardless of how you feel about the word “feminism”, it must be conceded that valuable and legitimate contributions have been made.

Ironically, the contemporary feminist movement has its roots in Evangelical Christianity. Most of the early pioneers of women’s suffrage were committed Christians. It was because of their religious beliefs (not in spite of them) that they worked towards greater equality for women.

Susan B. Anthony, for instance, was a committed Christian, having grown up in a Quaker family that instilled in her a strong devotion to Jesus and, as a result, to the pursuit of justice. She campaigned tirelessly for the abolition of slavery and for the full citizenship of black people — including their right to vote. This was in the 1820s, by the way. She also argued in favor of co-education, claiming that women were able to learn just as well as men. She worked for child labor laws and for the rights of women in the workplace. She was also staunchly opposed to abortion — which is, sadly, a stance that few feminists share today.

However, she realized that her opinions would never be taken seriously until women had the right to vote. And so she devoted the next half century to the women’s suffrage movement.

If feminism is defined as “a belief in and commitment to the full equality of men and women in home, church, and society” (this is from feminist theologians Letha Scanzoni and Nancy Hardesty), it would seem that feminism is rooted in a value system drawn from a Judeo-Christian worldview — which places men and women on equal status and stresses the inherent dignity of each human life.

Historically speaking, the ideas and ideals of Christianity and Feminism have hardly been mutually exclusive. That’s a fairly recent development. In fact, a good case can be made that one (Feminism) initially grew out of the other (Christianity). It seems now that most Feminists aren’t very fond of most Christians and most Christians are afraid of most Feminists.

Why do you suppose it’s so hard to get the two sides together now?

The other day, Brent (who is a rambling wreck from Georgia Tech and a he**uva Methodist Pastor) wrote this: “By the way, I strongly reject that there are any interesting or meaningful innate differences (aside from sex organs) between men and women. I believe it’s socialized and acculturated to the extent that it may as well be biological, but it’s not. In other words, women are not innately more or less anything than men. And vice versa… except physical strength, but that goes back to differences in reproduction, from what I understand.”

Yesterday, Smockity Frocks (who has a real name and so many children she might just live in a shoe) wrote this: “Maybe I am oversimplifying this, but how about the fact that women have breasts and a uterus? That makes us perfectly suited to nurturing tiny, helpless babies. Men have test…osterone which makes them suited to defending nursing mothers and babies from savage beasts and marauding raiders.”

So, are the differences between the genders simply physical, are those differences thrust upon us by the expectations of our culture, or are there innate differences in the way we’re wired?

I stumbled across some research that may be helpful here. Mark S. George is a neuro-psychiatrist who co-authored the book The Neuroscience of Clinical Psychiatry: The Pathophysiology of Behavior and Mental Illness. As you can tell from the title, it’s a real page-turner.

Dr. George actually conducted brain scans of both men and women as they recalled a range of emotional experiences. He didn’t expect to find major differences. He didn’t even set out to distinguish between the men and the women. He was studying the response of human brains to various emotions — not the difference between male and female response. However, the differences, in his own words, “were so huge that I hesitated to report them.” In his experiments, melancholy feelings activated neurons in an area eight times larger in women than in men.

Sandra Witleson, a research scientist from Canada, did studies to determine the location of emotions in the brain. Again, she wasn’t trying to see how men and women respond differently to emotions — just trying to figure out where in the human brain emotions are triggered and stored. She showed emotionally charged images to the brain’s right hemisphere (by isolating the left eye and left ear). Then she reversed the experiment, showing the same images to the left hemisphere. From MRI scans, she found that a male’s emotion is located in two areas of the right hemisphere only, but a woman’s emotion is located in various regions of both hemispheres.

Of course, we could make a “chicken/egg” argument out of this. Did the brains come this way (nature), or were they shaped this way (nurture)?

I vote for nature — which is the chicken (or is it the egg?) — and here’s why. Recent studies of fetal development show that around 16 weeks into the development of a male fetus, the chemical hormone androgen washes over his tiny, little brain. When that happens, many of the fibrous connections in the corpus callosum (the communication link between the two sides of the brain) begin to dissolve. Because of this, approximately 80% of us boys are only able to use one half of our brain at a time.

A female fetus does not experience this androgen wash, so she is born with the interconnecting fibers intact. Most females, then, can retrieve and store information simultaneously. Drs. Sally and Bennett Shaywitz, professors of neurology at Yale University, say this is why women recover more fully from a stroke or a brain injury than a man.

So, maybe the differences are all in our head after all! But does this have any practical implications?

I don’t know about you, but I have all sorts of baggage associated with the very word “feminist”. Most, if not all of it, is unpleasant. See, I grew up in the era of the ERA (the Equal Rights Amendment), and, somehow, in my head I got it tied together with the whole Roe v. Wade thing. When my church talked about politics (which was, admittedly, not very often), these were often mentioned in the same breath and always in negative terms.

I vaguely remember Walter Cronkite introducing news footage of women carrying placards in Washington, DC. Being a shallow little ankle-biter, all I really remember is that none of the women they showed were pretty, and they all seemed angry with me for being a little boy instead of being a little girl.

Shall we just get this out of the way? The image that springs to mind when I hear the word “feminist” is of a Camille Paglia-reading, shorthaired woman, her thick ankles sprouting out of her sensible shoes, glasses edging down her nose, hands on hips, a scolding expression on her pinched face.

That is so politically incorrect, but I’m just being honest here.

The one other image that comes to mind when I hear that word – and I’m really not sure if this makes total sense or is utterly ridiculous – is that of Alan Alda.

Depending upon your politics, you may think Alan Alda is either the most enlightened man in modern history or the personification of everything that’s wrong with men these days. Personally, I’ve gone from one extreme to the other and finally settled somewhere in the middle.

I think.

Suffice to say, I am firmly situated in a particular cultural context. That culture has certain strong ideas of what constitutes masculine and feminine behavior.

The Bible tells us that God made us all — male and female — in his image. Does it also say anywhere that he made us masculine and feminine? Or are those words strictly defined by the culture in which we live? Is there such a thing as “biblical masculinity” and “biblical femininity”?

I do not like very many people.

I know that sounds awful – me being in ministry and all – but it’s true. Let’s just say that God’s still working on me, and that bit about loving my neighbor as myself is one area where I’m in need of remedial help.

Not to make excuses, but I don’t think I’m the only one who struggles with this. In fact, there was once a great church leader for whom I wrote a book. A mutual friend told him I might be able to help him, and his first question to my friend was, “Do you think I’ll like him?”

My friend’s response was, “Probably at first, but then you’ll get to know him. That’s usually when you stop liking people.”

Sounds familiar. Oh, and it was true – mutually.

Perhaps all those critical thinking skills my elementary school teachers tried to impart work a little too well. All I know is that I sure can think critically – about nearly everything and everyone. My friend Tim Spivey once told me, “You could walk up to the world’s largest piece of Swiss cheese and spend all day complaining about all the holes!”

He’s right. I see the holes. I spot the mistakes. And – what’s worse – I enjoy finding the flaws.

I’m not sure if it’s gotten worse over the years, but I do find it interesting that there’s an entire industry devoted to publicizing the ill-advised words and actions of people now. TMZ. The Smoking Gun. FAILblog. Let a celebrity have one bad hair day. Let a politician misspeak one time. We are all one mistake away from having our 15 minutes of shame.

I do not like very many people, and we are all prepared to laugh at the humiliating misfortune of one another. I think it was Chekhov who said the main difference between humans and animals is that humans will laugh at one another’s pain.

And this is where I turn the post from a lighthearted, self-deprecating reflection on yet another of my many foibles into an insightful commentary on the state of our world.

We do not like very many people. In fact, our dislike may be perilously close to downright hatred. We do not like very many women, for example. Society seems to be giving off the impression that if they’re not smooth-skinned, large-breasted, tiny-derriered sex machines then there must be something wrong with them. We especially do not like smart women. They are allowed to have a strong opinion, in a sassy sort of way, but they are not allowed to have thought through their arguments very well. Not if they want to make it to People Magazine’s list of the most beautiful women in the world.

Oprah Winfrey somehow managed to be granted an exemption, but I’m pretty sure she’s the exception that proves the rule.

Give us vapid, compliant, eye-candy women, and we’ll come back begging for more. Until there’s a lapse in judgment of some sort, of course. Then we’ll set upon them like jackals. Let them tell us how they voted and why, and, once we’re done verbally abusing them, they shall forever be stricken from the record.

The sad reality is that most women are not like this foolish ideal. Thus, we, as a society, do not like very many women. In fact, we seem to hate most women. That’s why we’re trying to kill them. With our nonundelow foods (non-dairy, unsweetened, decaffeinated, low-fat), we suck cellulite out of hips and inject collagen into lips, convincing women they’re fat or flat or just plain plain. And it’s killing them.

An estimated seven million women in America suffer from eating disorders. Ninety-five percent of them are between the ages of 12 and 25. Eighty percent of American women say they are dissatisfied with their appearance and shape. Half of the women in this country are currently on a weight loss diet.

Electrolyte imbalances from taking diuretics, racing heartbeats from taking diet pills, Sudden Death Syndrome from crash dieting and/or binging and purging – these kill hundreds of women each year. Some weight loss surgeries themselves kill as many as one in every 200 patients.

Society does not like very many women. And, though you may have come a long way, baby, this is still in many ways a man’s, man’s, man’s world.

And so, it would seem inevitable that voices would arise, placing the blame of all this societal evil squarely on the shoulders of men. A man. The man. Any man.

Enter the feminists.

Tell me: How do you define the word “feminism”?

Shortly after the release of the song “Waiting On the World to Change”, John Mayer told a newspaper reporter, “I wanted to start a debate. Most of us are happy to wait for things to change.” So, maybe, as some have suggested, Johnny boy was being ironic.

Of course, he also reportedly told a concert crowd in Vancouver that this song is as much a political song as “Grey’s Anatomy” is a show about medicine.

Who knows? Supposedly, he smokes a lot of pot, so he might not remember what he was thinking when he wrote it originally.

Regardless of his original intent, my point is this: there are a lot of people who honestly feel the way he describes in the lyric. They feel disenfranchised. They feel like they can’t effect change. They feel powerless, at the mercies of some great “them” out there. Thus, they blame the evils of society on “them” — the government, the wealthy, corporate America, Opus Dei, the Masons, etc.

The general feeling depicted so accurately in Mr. Mayer’s song is one of frustration and resignation. As he sings, “Now we see everything that’s going wrong with the world and those who lead it. We just feel like we don’t have the means to rise above and beat it. So we keep waiting, waiting on the world to change.”

Here’s why I bring this up: It’s not just the whiny, emo kid who feels this way. It’s not just the dope-smoking, seven-year senior at your local community college who feels this way, either. I know a lot — and I mean a lot — of Christians who feel this way, too.

Culture is bad. Universities are liberal strongholds. The media can’t be trusted. Government is corrupt. Hollywood is perverse.

But they won’t listen to us. We’re nobodies. We’re just regular folks who “don’t have the means to rise above and beat” the system.

So, we keep waiting — waiting on the world to change.

And just how do we think that’s going to happen? The world’s going to change itself?

Jesus gave his followers some pretty explicit marching orders. He told us to get out there and mix it up with the world, taking his light and his salt with us as we go. He even promised to be with us as we go. Believe it or not, he’s already out there — in the recording studios and sound stages, in the green rooms of Broadway theatres, in the halls of Congress, in the libraries and lecture halls on University campuses worldwide, in the strip clubs and biker bars and crack dens, too. He’s in the soup kitchens and in the museums of New York, Chicago, Boston, Atlanta.

He’s out there, and he promises to give us everything we need to join him there.

So, tell me, please — and be honest about this because I really want to know — what are we waiting for?

Me and all my friends
We’re all misunderstood
They say we stand for nothing and
There’s no way we ever could

We keep on waiting
Waiting on the world to change

– John Mayer

Before I get into this, I should let you know that I really like John Mayer. I own three of his records (“Continuum”, “Heavier Things” and “Room for Squares”). I think he’s a really talented guitarist, and I enjoy his lyrics.

But this song, as catchy as it is, reveals something about his thought process that’s really disturbing to me. Perhaps it really is the thought process for many of his contemporaries (though I am only seven years older, and it sure doesn’t reflect my thoughts).

Maybe I should give some background first. I was an activist when I was in high school and college — a card-carrying member of Greenpeace, a financial supporter of Amnesty International. I had to be talked out of going to Tiananmen Square to protest the human rights violations going on over there in 1989. I was part of a group of students who got recycling bins on our college campus in the fall of 1988. My friends and I were young and idealistic, and we really believed we could change the world.

I still believe this.

It’s why I’m so passionate about helping parents become better parents. It’s why I travel so often and so far to help churches become better churches. It’s why I write so much to try and help Christians become better Christians. I believe we can change the world. We’ve done it before, and we can do it again.

But John Mayer and his cronies have given up. They would like things to be different, but they feel powerless to do anything about it. So, they’ve resigned themselves to wait. They’ll continue to complain about things, but they won’t try to change anything. Instead, they’re waiting on the world to change. Then they’ll step in and do something. Or it won’t change, but they’ll find themselves in charge by default — with no experience at working for change, just wishing for it.

Anyone else see a problem with that?

It seems many Christians view life in the big city with a jaundiced eye. And that prejudice is returned in kind. Many city dwellers view Christians with suspicion or downright hostility.

Christie Brown left a comment the other day suggesting that it’s because so many Christians give off a vibe that says, “We’re intolerant and exclusive.” I think that’s kind of a two-way street, because many of the urbanites I know give off that same vibe — only they add an air of sophistication bordering on elitism — towards those who live in the suburbs or (heaven forbid) rural areas.

I’ve lived in big cities, and I’ve lived in tiny towns, and I currently live in suburbia. As much as I would like to say, “People are just people,” I’m not sure that’s true. The folks who live in these various areas have distinct personalities. Granted, they share many of the same maladies and idiosyncrasies. We are all human, after all, and the issues that affect us are not legion, there are only a few things that make up what we know as “the human condition”. Loneliness. Regret. A desire for meaning and purpose. Fear. Hope. Doubt. Love. These are universals.

And yet….

Life in the big city shapes a person, no? As does life on the ranch or life in the great outdoors or life in the sanitized housing tracts dotting the suburban landscape.

So, what gives? Why do so many Christians (and the vast majority of the Christians I know live either in suburban or rural areas) view city dwellers with such suspicion? And why do so many city dwellers view Christians with such disdain?

Autumn in New York
Why does it seem so inviting?
Autumn in New York
It spells the thrill of first nighting

– Vernon Duke

So, we went to New York, Manhattan, the Big Apple, The City That Never Sleeps. And we had a fabulous time. We met friends — old and new — and we saw a really good musical (“In the Heights”). We saw the Naked Cowboy in Times Square. We ate at Bobby Flay’s Mesa Grill and caught the Dizzy Gillespie Alumni All-stars at The Blue Note. We went to church at St. George’s in Gramercy (near Stuyvesant Square). We visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art and strolled through Central Park in the rain. We ate chicken soup at midnight in the Carnegie Deli. And we visited the Ground Zero Museum Workshop — which was touching and thought-provoking and I’ll have more to say about it later.

We really had a fantastic time. Autumn in New York is so inviting.

And yet….

Autumn in New York is often mingled with pain.

Here in my comfortable neighborhood, I am relatively isolated from any visible sign of human misery. There are no homeless people at the entrance to my driveway. No one asks me for spare change between my house and the grocery store. No one tries to sell me a fake Rolex when I take the dog around the block. Living where I do, it would be easy to assume there are no hookers or adult bookstores left.

I know there are people suffering around me — in my own neighborhood, even — but suburbanites have the common courtesy to suffer privately behind closed doors. They’re not big on bringing their suffering out into the open where the neighborhood watch program can see it.

But when you go to New York, there it all is — front and center — lumped together and stacked on top of itself — 23 square miles of whatever-you-want-whenever-you-want-it — rich and poor, healthy and sick, married, single, gay, straight, bi-, sane, crazy, good, bad, sublime, ridiculous, wholesome, sordid, Christian, pagan, Jewish, Muslim, undecided, unsorted, unwashed, miscellaneous and everything-in-between.

We would walk through the most mouth-watering smell and then get punched in the face with an eye-watering stink we had never before encountered…often within 10 feet of one another.

I live in a pretty sanitized world, and it’s relatively easy to be a Christian in that kind of environment. Living your faith with integrity in a place like New York takes some doing, and I wonder if I’d be up for the challenge. Raising kids there, staying married there, following Jesus there would be difficult.

Heck, paying the bills there would be difficult!

What do you think? Could you do it? Could you live as a Christian in The City? Do you think it would be worth the effort?

I missed a meeting this morning.

Here’s how it happened: Yesterday, someone (or someones) launched a Denial-of-Service attack against Twitter. Facebook was also attacked, and — as a result — the site was very buggy for most of the morning.

Before I knew this was the result of some hacker or cyber-terrorist or whatever, I thought that perhaps the problem was with my computer. I hadn’t rebooted in probably a week or more, so I figured that would be where I’d start. I saved and shut everything down, and, when I got back up and running, I failed to open my iCal — which would have alerted me this morning to the fact that I was supposed to be in a recording studio at 10:00 to lend Clay Olberman’s voice to a KidJam masterpiece penned by my good friend Phil Pierce.

For many of you, that last bit will make no sense whatsoever. Suffice to say, I consider myself a victim of the cyberattack that brought down both Twitter and Facebook.

And it got me thinking.

Remember 10 years ago when everyone was worried that the internet might eat itself because of the Y2K bug? It turned out to be one of the biggest hoaxes in a long time. Computers kept right on computing with no interruption of service whatsoever. The lights stayed on, Jesus did not return, and we all went on our merry way.

But Twitter and Facebook went down yesterday — for a while. And people didn’t know what to do. How would they survive if they couldn’t tell people what they were thinking about ordering for lunch or how awesome their morning workout was or the fact that some guy on the bus smelled like old milk?

I should confess. I don’t Twitter. I do Facebook, though. And, obviously, I blog. I’m no Luddite, fantasizing of a day when the machine finally grinds to a halt, leaving us with some post-apocalyptic, pre-industrial, Cormac McCarthy-esque world to endure.

I love the interwebs.

And yet….

I do wonder what in the world we’d do if it all went away. What if the internet stopped? What if cell phones didn’t work? (BTW, my cell phone isn’t working properly — not alerting me to missed calls and new voicemails — sorry if I haven’t called you back). What if we had to go back to the way we did life in the 70s and 80s?

Does anyone remember what life was like back then with rotary phones (and no call waiting), newspapers and four television channels?

There would be some good things that might happen as a result. For example, kids would play outside more. Adults would go to bed earlier.

But there would be some bad things as well. Access to information would be limited. I wouldn’t feel as close to my sister in California as I do now.

What would you miss most if it all went away?

What would you embrace if it all went away?