Between Two Worlds

From the ESV blog:

The ESV Online Study Bible now lets you listen to a brand-new recording of the ESV text. Try it out in Matthew 5—just click the “Listen” link. You can even listen to any combination of individual verses (try Matthew 5:14-15).

We’ll be rolling out this recording to our other sites, podcasts, and the ESV API in the near future, and you’ll be able to buy it from Crossway starting next week. The existing recordings by Mac McLean and Marquis Laughlin will remain available.

This recording is by David Cochran Heath. Heath is a veteran stage actor, performing in more than one hundred productions. He has recorded many audio books, including Christian classics by Thomas a Kempis, Francis Schaeffer, and John Piper.

I listened last night to the first seven chapters of Matthew. I like the new recording--and it reminded me again of helpful it can be to hear the Word of God read. Here's something I wrote earlier this year:

In listening to an old lecture recently by J. I. Packer, he made the comment that it was not until after the 17th century (as far as he could tell) that people started doing silent prayers and reading as opposed to praying and reading out loud.

For most evangelicals, silence represents the vast majority of our reading and praying. But I wonder if that's to our detriment. One of the great enemies to Bible reading and praying is a wandering mind--and one of the great ways to make your mind wander is to do everything in your mind without involving your voice and ears!

. . . Here's something else to consider: the entire Bible on audio is usually about 75 hours (or 4500 minutes). If you commute to work 5 days a week, that's about 260 days a year. And if it takes you, say, 17 minutes to commute each way to work--and if you listen to the Bible on audio during your drive each way--you'll get through the entire Bible twice in a year.

Robert George and Yuval Levin, in a new article on Obama and Infanticide, argue that Obama's response during the third debate regarding the Illinois Born-Alive Infants Protection Act "followed the pattern of his approach to this subject throughout the campaign: deny the facts and confuse the issue."

Read the whole thing. Here's the conclusion:

Some of Senator Obama's supporters are now making one last, rather desperate-sounding attempt to defend his votes against protecting infants born alive after unsuccessful abortions. Their argument goes this way: Permitting children who survive attempted abortions to be abandoned is so heinous, so barbaric, that for someone to accuse Senator Obama, a decent man who is himself the father of two daughters, of supporting what amounts to legalized infanticide is too outrageous to merit an answer. There is a problem, though. In light of the documentary evidence that is now before the public, it is clear that the accusation against Senator Obama, however shocking, has the very considerable merit of being true.

Randy Alcorn shares why Christians should not vote for Barack Obama--and the conversations he has had with his friend Donald Miller seeking to persuade him of the same.

You can also read an interview online with Miller, who suggests that Obama is "offering progress" on the reduction of abortion, and that Obama is "standing up to his own party on the issue and moving the party forward to elevate the issue of the sanctity of life within the Democratic Party."0

Denny Burk:

In Southern Seminary’s chapel today, Russell Moore delivered one of the most prophetic pro-life messages I have ever heard. You can download it here or listen to it below.

One of the most poignant sections of the sermon comes when Moore makes a comparison between “Christians” of a former generation who tolerated the lynching of African-Americans and “Christians” of this generation who tolerate the atrocity of abortion:

“There are churches, and there are pastors, and there are young evangelical leaders who are saying to us, ‘We ought not be single-issue evangelicals. We ought to be concerned about more issues than simply abortion.’ Which means that we ought to be willing to join ourselves and to vote for and to support candidates who will support legalized abortion, who will deny the personhood of children who are still in the womb, because we are able to support them on other issues . . . Many of them are in a desperate quest to say to their congregations and to people potentially in their congregations, ‘I’m not Jerry Falwell.’ And many of them believe that it is missional to speak to people while blunting or silencing a witness about the life of children so that you can reach them with the gospel. . . Some will tell us there are many other issues: economics, global warming—issues I’m very concerned about too. Previous generations have said that as well. Previous generations of preachers have stood in the pulpit and preached until they were red in the face about card-playing and movie-going and tax-policy and personal morality and tobacco-smoking and a thousand other issues, but would not speak to the fact that there were African-American brothers and sisters of the Lord Jesus swinging in the trees! And there is judgment of God upon that. And there is here too.”

This is a message that needs to be distributed far and wide. I hope you will do so.

“Joseph of Nazareth Is a Single-Issue Evangelical: The Father of Jesus, the Cries of the Helpless, and Change You Can Believe In” (Matt. 2:13-23) - by Russell Moore

As many know, Senator Obama told Planned Parenthood in 2007 that “the first thing I’d do as President is sign the Freedom of Choice Act.”



But how many of us know what the "Freedom of Choice Act" (hereafter FOCA) entails?

Here's an attempt to explain what this would mean.

It's important to note at the outset that this congressional statute is often presented as codifying Roe v. Wade. Hence, if Roe was ever overturned, FOCA would prevent things from changing. While this is true, FOCA goes far beyond this.

The 2007 version of FOCA (for the House bill, see H.R. 1964; for the Senate bill, see S. 1173) includes the following provision:

A government may not

(1) deny or interfere with a woman’s right to choose –

(A) to bear a child;
(B) to terminate a pregnancy prior to viability; or
(C) to terminate a pregnancy after viability where termination is necessary to protect the life or health of the woman; or

(2) discriminate against the exercise of the rights set forth in paragraph (1) in the regulation or provision of benefits, facilities, services, or information.

Section 6 adds:

This Act applies to every Federal, State, and local statute, ordinance, regulation, administrative order, decision, policy, practice, or other action enacted, adopted, or implemented before, on, or after the date of enactment of this Act.

The section highlighted above in bold italics means that FOCA, if passed, will accomplish two things:

1. it would invalidate all current and future statutes, ordinances, regulations, administrative orders, decisions, policies, or practices--at any level of government--that regulate or restrict abortion in any way;
2. it would mandate taxpayer funds to be used at the state and federal level for abortion services (not to do so would discriminate against the "rights" of abortion set forth in the bill).

The National Organization of Women says that FOCA "would sweep away hundreds of anti-abortion laws, policies." Planned Parenthood says FOCA "would invalidate existing and future laws that interfere with or discriminate against the exercise of the rights protected."

What are some of these state laws? The Family Research Council has complied the following list:

• All 50 states have abortion reporting requirements
• 46 states have conscience-protection laws for individual health-care providers
• 44 states have laws about parental notification
• 40 states have laws restricting late-term abortions
• 38 states have bans on partial-birth abortions
• 33 states have laws requiring counseling before an abortion
• 16 states have laws about having ultrasounds before an abortion

One of the states that has had FOCA-type acts on the books since 1991 is Maryland. The result of eliminating all restrictions and regulations, unsurprisingly, is that the Maryland rate of abortion has risen while the national rate of abortion has fallen.


Some people reading the Freedom of Choice Act notice that is says a woman has a "right to choose" "to terminate a pregnancy after viability where termination is necessary to protect the life or health of the woman" (my emphasis).

A surface-reading of FOCA (which is seeking to codify Roe v. Wade) might suggest that there is a meaningful, legitimate restriction on late-term, post-viable abortions, namely that abortions are allowed only in cases where a woman would die or be physically harmed. But this simply isn't true.

Roe v. Wade was handed down on the same day as Doe v. Bolton, and Justice Blackmun said they were to be read together. Doe defines maternal health to include virtually any factor: "emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman's age." The effect is abortion on demand--abortion for any reason.

So to summarize this act--which again, Barack Obama has promised to sign as his first order of business in the White House--abortion on demand will become codified, all regulations and restrictions will be stripped away, Christian hospitals and physicians will not have a choice regarding the performance of abortion (since their accrediting agencies are approved by the federal government), teenagers will not have to tell their parents about an abortion, and prolife taxpayers will be forced to pay for abortions at any stage of the pregnancy for any reason.

If you don't know, you may find the following helpful:

• Abraham Piper, What Is RSS? A Step-by-Step Guide to Google Reader
• Tim Challies, All About RSS

“Christology in the Old Testament: A Panel Discussion of how and to what extent we should see Christ in the Old Testament”

Denny Burk: “Tom Schreiner [the moderator] opens the discussion by asserting that all of the panelist agree that the Old Testament is about Christ (e.g., Luke 24:27). The panelists disagree, however, on how this works out in exegesis of the Old Testament text.”

HT: James Grant

C.J. Mahaney asks Mark Dever and John Piper what they do and how they would counsel others.

An overview from Leland Ryken.

A convicting plea from Eric Ortlund:

Dear Friends -

I find I far too often tell people I'll pray for them and then forget about it. I'm asking you not to be like me after reading this post. I'm sure some of you have heard about the persecution in India, in the northern province of Orissa - about 50,000 Christians have had to flee their homes under persecution by extreme Hindus. Churches have been burned and Christians have been tortured and martyred for their faith in Jesus. I'm asking everyone who reads this to pray frequently for these Christians, with whom we'll be spending the rest of eternity - and to pray for their persecutors, that, like Paul, they'd see the light.

No corner of the Internet is really private, and one has to be careful about what one says; but the situation in India is no secret, so I think it's OK to talk about it here. The sitaution in Mosul, a city in Northern Iraq across the Euphrates from Ninevah, is no secret either - 1300 Christians have been forced to flee, often entire families, under persecution. Christians have been martyred here as well. See this article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7671609.stm

I got an email through the grapevine from an Iraqi pastor who talked about how families were sleeping in their cars, who had had relatives kidnapped and executed. I don't want to be ashamed before him in Heaven by having to admit that I never prayed for him. Let's not fail to pray for peace in this area, and even more deeply for Jesus to shine his light through his people.

The BBC files a video report about the persecution in India, and offers further information here.

Abraham Piper: "The full text of Don't Waste Your Life is now available online for free in a format optimized for the iPhone."

A little testimony about this: the folks at DG gave me a heads up about this site last week. I was scheduled to give a talk on vocation at CrossWay Community Church in Kenosha. So while waiting in the car while my wife ran into the store, I was able to reread a good chunk of Piper's chapter, "Making Much of Christ from 8 to 5"--which I would highly recommend! The entire chapter read very well on my iPhone.

Michael Haykin:

Before John Newton (1725-1807) was called to the Anglican ministry he described what he understood his calling to be to a friend, Harry Crooke of Hunslett, Leeds, in these words:

“The message I would bear is Jesus Christ and him crucified and from the consideration of the great things he has done, to recommend and enforce Gospel holiness and Gospel love, and to take as little notice of our fierce contests, controversies and divisions as possible.

My desire is to lift up the banner of the Lord, and to draw the sword of the Spirit not against names, parties and opinions, but against the world, the flesh and the devil; and to invite poor perishing sinners not to espouse a system of my own or any man’s, but to fly to the Lord Jesus, the sure and only city of refuge and the ready, compassionate and all sufficient Saviour of those that trust in him.”

[Cited in Marylynn Rouse, “An important turn to my future life,” The John Newton Project Prayer Letter (October/November 2008), p.1].

In some ways, a better description of the vocation of a Gospel minister would be hard to find.

Brett Kunkle:

Media dominates our students' lives. Teens average more than 6 hours of screen time per day. That means hundreds or even thousands of messages are directed at youth every single day. If we are not intentionally training them to discern and evaluate those messages, then they are passively absorbing them. So how can you be intentional?

The Center for Parent/Youth Understanding has put together some excellent tool for parents, youth workers and teachers. The end goal is to get students thinking for themselves about media choices:

While many of us mistakenly continue to “think for” students as they pass through the teenage years on the road to adulthood, the 3(D) Guide enables you to “think with” students about their media so that they will be equipped to launch into adulthood with the ability to “think for themselves” about media in faithful, obedient, and God-honoring ways.

There's a free leader's booklet to use with the 3-D Guide. There's a free media survey that will give you a handle on how much media your student actually uses. And there are even reviews of the most recent movies, music, tv shows and more, all using the 3-D Guide's format.

I just put together a brand new talk on this, entitled "Mind Games: How Media Messes With Your Mind," because this is such an important area of life for students to apply worldview thinking. Cultural messages are aggressively promoted through all forms of media. If you do nothing to train your students in this area then you've handed them over to the culture for 6 more hours of training every single day. Scary.

On Faith's Sally Quinn interviews Tim Keller (5 minutes):



HT: Kevin Cawley

John Piper:

It was a life-changing revelation to me when I discovered that Paul, for example, did not merely make a collection of divine pronouncements, but that he argued. This meant, for me, a whole new approach to Bible reading. No longer did I just read or memorize verses. I sought also to understand and memorize arguments. This involved finding the main point of each literary unit and then seeing how each proposition fit together to unfold and support the main point. (Biblical Exegesis: Discovering the Meaning of Scriptural Texts, pg. 18, my emphasis)

If you want to learn this method of biblical interpretation (which works especially well in Pauline texts), there is now a website devoting to the art of biblical arcing.

HT: Johnathon Bowers

Douglas Groothuis coined the term "fetus fatigue" to describe the current exhaustion and impatience among evangelicals that abortion has occupied the center stage in political debate.

In his latest essay Al Mohler picks up on the same idea:

There are signs of fatigue among Christians on this issue. Some argue that the sanctity of life issue is simply one among many important issues. Without doubt, we are faced with many urgent and important issues. Nevertheless, every voter must come to terms with what issues matter most in the electoral decision. At some point, every voter is a potential "single issue" voter. Some issues simply eclipse others.

This is the case with the sanctity of human life. I can understand the fatigue. So little progress seems to have been made. So much ground has been lost. So many unborn babies have been aborted. The culture has turned increasingly hostile to this commitment, especially among the young. There is a sense that many want to get on with other issues.

There is fatigue and frustration with the Republican Party and with limited progress. There is frustration with mixed signals and missed opportunities. There is the acknowledgment that we have too often been told what we want to hear and then ignored.

There is the sense that the battle has grown old -- along with those who are fighting it. There are signs that the culture is closing its ears. We all have other concerns as well. Can we make any progress on those if we remain tenaciously committed to opposing abortion?

Yet, there is the reality that we face a choice. This is a limited choice. And we cannot evade responsibility for the question of abortion. Our vote will determine whether millions of unborn babies live or die. The Freedom of Choice Act, if passed, would lead directly to a radical increase in the numbers of abortions. The abortion industry has told us that themselves.

The question comes down to this: How many lives are we willing to forfeit -- to write off as expendable -- in order to "move on" to other issues of concern? There is no way to avoid that question and remain morally serious. The voting booth is no place to hide.

Read the whole thing, which also contains a summary of Robert George's article.

I'm a bit odd in that I am not much of a music guy. There are only a few Christian artists that I want to listen to over and over. Andrew Peterson is one of them. The Lord has used his music and poetic lyrics to stir my soul--for which I am most grateful.

His latest album, Resurrection Letters Volume II, releases October 21, and autographed copies are now available for pre-order.

Here are the songs on the album:

1. All Things New
2. Hosanna
3. All You'll Ever Need
4. Invisible God
5. Hosea
6. Love is a Good Thing
7. Don't Give Up on Me
8. Rocket
9. Windows in the World
10. I've God News
11. The Good Confession (I Believe)

What's quite cool is that Peterson is now with Centricity Music, and they have an online jukebox where you can stream the entire CD for free!

For those who live in Chicagoland, he'll be giving a free concert on Oct 21 at 7 PM at Elmhurst Christian Reformed Church.

As you may recall, the entire ESV Study Bible is available online for free to everyone who has a print version of the ESVSB. You can highlight the text (five different colors), take your own notes, listen to a new audio recording of the ESV text, view all of the maps, charts, notes, introductions, article, illustrations, etc. We hope it will prove to be a useful tool in your study of God's Word.

For an introduction, with screenshots, see the overview.

Also see the FAQs.

For a free preview of an entire book with all of the features, go to the Gospel according to Matthew.

Even if you don't own a print ESVSB, you can still access the entire ESV text and take notes and listen to audio and highlight verses or key words--but the Study Bible features (notes, intros, illustrations, maps, etc.) will only be available for you on the Gospel of Matthew.

Many thanks to Stephen Smith and the Crossway IT guys who were able to put this together so quickly. If you have suggestions for improvement, feel feel to leave a comment here.

For those who don't read this blog on RSS, please make sure to see the post below summarizing Robert P. George's latest essay, on Obama's Abortion Extremism. (My posts are out of order.)

Tony Reinke:

Corresponding to the launch of the beautiful Jonathan Edwards Online 2.0 website, the Yale University Library (aka the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library) has released a series of stunning hi-res images of the writings of Jonathan Edwards. These images represent a gracious gift to the Edwards community. You may view the large sampling here. Included is a photo of the first page of his diary.

I would like to encourage readers of this blog to consider taking a fast with regard to abortion.

The best thing I have read on this is the chapter, "Fasting for the Little Ones: Abortion and the Sovereignty of God over False Worldviews," from John Piper's Hunger for God (the link takes you to a free PDF of the whole book).

Piper looks at Francis Schaeffer's legacy of worldview engagement, and then writes:

But I wonder if many of the young scholars and activists (now in their forties and fifties!) whom he inspired need to hear a balancing word about the power of prayer and fasting, not as an alternative to thinking and acting, but as a radical foundation that says, “The victory belongs to the Lord, even if the horse (of scholarship and politics) is made ready for the day of battle” (see Proverbs 21:31). Listen to the books crying out for evangelical renewal and reformation in the life of the mind, the restoration of Truth in the place of technique, the recovery of church social compassion from government powerlessness, the taking of moral high ground in the environmental cause, and many other causes. Is there a sense in each of these that the root issues are so intractable to human suasion that the call for fasting and prayer would not only be fitting but desperately needed? I am commending such a call.

So what can you pray? Here's one way:

Fasting comes in alongside prayer with all its hunger for God and says,

“We are not able in ourselves to win this battle. We are not able to change hearts or minds. We are not able to change worldviews and transform culture and save 1.6 million children. We are not able to reform the judiciary or embolden the legislature or mobilize the slumbering population. We are not able to heal the endless wounds of godless ideologies and their bloody deeds. But, O God, you are able! And we turn from reliance on ourselves to you. And we cry out to you and plead that for the sake of your name, and for the sake of your glory, and for the advancement of your saving purpose in the world, and for the demonstration of your wisdom and your power and your authority over all things, and for the sway of your Truth and the relief of the poor and the helpless, act, O God. This much we hunger for the revelation of your power. With all our thinking and all our writing and all our doing, we pray and we fast. Come. Manifest your glory.”

Piper also writes:

I appeal to you to seek the Lord with me concerning the place of fasting and prayer in breaking through the darkened mind that engulfs the modern world, in regard to abortion and a hundred other ills. This is not a call for a collective tantrum that screams at the bad people, “Give me back my country.” It is a call to aliens and exiles in the earth, whose citizenship is in heaven and who await the appearance of their King, to “do business” until he comes (Luke 19:13). And the great business of the Christian is to “do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31), and to pray that God’s name be hallowed and his kingdom come and his will be done in the earth (Matthew 6:9-10). And to yearn and work and pray and fast not only for the final revelation of the Son of Man, but in the meantime, for the demonstration of his Spirit and power in the reaching of every people, and the rescuing of the perishing, and the purifying of the church, and the putting right of as many wrongs as God will grant.

I join Piper in commending this practice to you--utterly foolish to the world, but pleasing to God.

Readers of this blog know the esteem I hold for Robert P. George--in my view (and that of many others), he is one of the great moral philosophers and public intellectuals of our time. With a law degree and a theology degree from Harvard, and a doctorate from Oxford, he currently serves as McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University, and as the director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. He also serves on The President's Council on Bioethics and previously served on the United States Commission on Civil Rights.

Dr. George is a man who chooses his words very carefully. And that is why his latest essay, Obama's Abortion Extremism, is so significant. It begins in this way:

Barack Obama is the most extreme pro-abortion candidate ever to seek the office of President of the United States. He is the most extreme pro-abortion member of the United States Senate. Indeed, he is the most extreme pro-abortion legislator ever to serve in either house of the United States Congress.

George then raises the fact that many today are suggesting that one can be pro-life and pro-Obama:

Yet there are Catholics and Evangelicals—even self-identified pro-life Catholics and Evangelicals—who aggressively promote Obama’s candidacy and even declare him the preferred candidate from the pro-life point of view.

What is going on here?

I have examined the arguments advanced by Obama’s self-identified pro-life supporters, and they are spectacularly weak. It is nearly unfathomable to me that those advancing them can honestly believe what they are saying. But before proving my claims about Obama’s abortion extremism, let me explain why I have described Obama as “pro-abortion” rather than “pro-choice.”

George proceeds to work through Obama's legislative career--which has merited a 100% rating each year from the NARAL Pro-Choice America's Congressional Record on Choice--to show Obama's unmitigated commitment to abortion, even when the legislation has nothing to do with the making abortion illegal. For example:

1. Obama "has promised to seek repeal of the Hyde Amendment, which has for many years protected pro-life citizens from having to pay for abortions that are not necessary to save the life of the mother and are not the result of rape or incest."

2. Obama has promised that “the first thing I’d do as President is sign the Freedom of Choice Act” ( FOCA). This would make abortion a federally guaranteed right through all nine months of pregancy for any reason. Virtually every state and federal limitation on abortion that is currently on the books would be abolished (e.g., parental consent and notification laws for minors).

3. Obama opposes the ban on the heinous practice of partial-birth abortion and strongly disagreed with the Supreme Court ruling to uphold the ban.

4. Obama wishes to strip federal funding from pro-life crisis pregnancy centers that provide alternatives to abortion for pregnant women in need.

5. Obama refused to support the pro-life Democrats' “95-10” legislation (designed to reduce the number of abortions by 95% in 10 years by strengthening the social safety net for poor women). This would not have made abortion illegal; it would seek to reduce abortion.

6. Obama "opposed legislation to protect children who are born alive, either as a result of an abortionist’s unsuccessful effort to kill them in the womb, or by the deliberate delivery of the baby prior to viability." The bill contained a specific provision that ensured that the bill would not affect abortion laws (Obama and his campaign lied about this fact until it was proven in the records).

7. Obama has co-sponsored a bill authorizing the large-scale industrial production of human embryos for use in biomedical research in which they would be killed. It would require the killing of human beings in the embryonic stage that were produced by cloning, and would make it a federal crime for a woman to save an embryo by agreeing to have the tiny developing human being implanted in her womb so that he or she could be brought to term.

8. Obama was one of the few senators to oppose a bill that would have put a modest amount of federal money into research that would develop methods to produce the exact equivalent of embryonic stem cells without using (or producing) embryos. "From any rational vantage point, this is unconscionable. . . . Why create and kill human embryos when there are alternatives that do not require the taking of nascent human lives? It is as if Obama is opposed to stem-cell research unless it involves killing human embryos."

With regard to those who think that electing Obama will save lots of unborn lives, George writes:

They tell us not to worry that Obama opposes the Hyde Amendment, the Mexico City Policy (against funding abortion abroad), parental consent and notification laws, conscience protections, and the funding of alternatives to embryo-destructive research. They ask us to look past his support for Roe v. Wade, the Freedom of Choice Act, partial-birth abortion, and human cloning and embryo-killing. An Obama presidency, they insist, means less killing of the unborn.

This is delusional.

George ends his article in this way:

What kind of America do we want our beloved nation to be? Barack Obama’s America is one in which being human just isn’t enough to warrant care and protection. It is an America where the unborn may legitimately be killed without legal restriction, even by the grisly practice of partial-birth abortion. It is an America where a baby who survives abortion is not even entitled to comfort care as she dies on a stainless steel table or in a soiled linen bin. It is a nation in which some members of the human family are regarded as inferior and others superior in fundamental dignity and rights. In Obama’s America, public policy would make a mockery of the great constitutional principle of the equal protection of the laws. In perhaps the most telling comment made by any candidate in either party in this election year, Senator Obama, when asked by Rick Warren when a baby gets human rights, replied: “that question is above my pay grade.” It was a profoundly disingenuous answer: For even at a state senator’s pay grade, Obama presumed to answer that question with blind certainty. His unspoken answer then, as now, is chilling: human beings have no rights until infancy—and if they are unwanted survivors of attempted abortions, not even then.

In the end, the efforts of Obama’s apologists to depict their man as the true pro-life candidate that Catholics and Evangelicals may and even should vote for, doesn’t even amount to a nice try. Voting for the most extreme pro-abortion political candidate in American history is not the way to save unborn babies.

I encourage you to read the whole article, and to pass it along to others.

Update: You can listen to Al Mohler interview Robert George on the Albert Mohler Radio Program live tonight from 5:00-6:00 p.m. ET.

Update 2: Regarding the arguments of Doug Kmiec--the Catholic pro-life but pro-Obama Constitutional scholar at Pepperdine--both Drs. Mohler and George referred to them as "ridiculous" and "through the looking glass." This seems to be the take of Ramesh Ponnuru, who recently called Kmiec a "silly and confused man" (with regard to this issue).

The following short film was shown a couple of times at the DG National conference. I think it's well done and convicting:



"Along with the above YouTube version, we've posted HD and iPod versions through our 2008 National Conference iTunes Podcast."

Bill Kristol, writing in the NYT, offers the following advice: McCain should fire his campaign:

He has nothing to lose. His campaign is totally overmatched by Obama’s. The Obama team is well organized, flush with resources, and the candidate and the campaign are in sync. The McCain campaign, once merely problematic, is now close to being out-and-out dysfunctional. Its combination of strategic incoherence and operational incompetence has become toxic. If the race continues over the next three weeks to be a conventional one, McCain is doomed.

He may be anyway. Bush is unpopular. The media is hostile. The financial meltdown has made things tougher. Maybe the situation is hopeless — and if it is, then nothing McCain or his campaign does matters.

But I’m not convinced by such claims of inevitability. McCain isn’t Bush. The media isn’t all-powerful. And the economic crisis still presents an opportunity to show leadership.

The 2008 campaign is now about something very big — both our future prosperity and our national security. Yet the McCain campaign has become smaller.

What McCain needs to do is junk the whole thing and start over. Shut down the rapid responses, end the frantic e-mails, bench the spinning surrogates, stop putting up new TV and Internet ads every minute. In fact, pull all the ads — they’re doing no good anyway. Use that money for televised town halls and half-hour addresses in prime time.

And let McCain go back to what he’s been good at in the past — running as a cheerful, open and accessible candidate. Palin should follow suit. The two of them are attractive and competent politicians. They’re happy warriors and good campaigners. Set them free.

Read the whole thing.

The following hour-long conversation among Tim Keller, John, Piper, and D.A. Carson was filmed at the 2008 leadership meeting of The Gospel Coalition and recently posted on Facebook:

• A Conversation: Tim Keller, John Piper, and D.A. Carson (1 of 6)
• A Conversation: Tim Keller, John Piper, and D.A. Carson (2 of 6)
• A Conversation: Tim Keller, John Piper, and D.A. Carson (3 of 6)
• A Conversation: Tim Keller, John Piper, and D.A. Carson (4 of 6)
• A Conversation: Tim Keller, John Piper, and D.A. Carson (5 of 6)
• A Conversation: Tim Keller, John Piper, and D.A Carson (6 of 6)