Today is my 39th Easter. And it will always be my favorite Easter. I have had some blessed ones in the past. Childhood memories of Easter baskets, corsages for mom, Gospel tunes at church… Memories of the Easter Parade along Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia – Easter bonnets and a throwback to an older time… I remember the many Easter weekends that coincide with the azaleas blooming and the playing of the Masters Tournament in Augusta, Georgia – in particular, I recall Bernhard Langer professing his faith in Jesus Christ upon winning his 2nd Green Jacket on Easter Sunday in 1993. And more recently, I fondly remember going to Easter sunrise service at Arlington National Cemetery with my wife and great patriot friends in Washington, DC. But this year, Easter takes on a more special meaning as I sit here with my wife, my 2 ½ year old son and my 1 year old daughter listening to old Gospel tunes (insert rant here about lousy, modern, non-descript “praise music” sung by pointy-glasses wearing, black pants wearing, open-collared shirt wearing hipsters… but I digress) before we head out for the day. I have not written on RedState for a very long time – in large part because last year I was diagnosed with Cancer… Hodgkins Lymphoma, to be more specific. I spent many months going through treatment, including a promising trial drug. As of today, I have now had 3 clear scans and am in “clinical remission.” Today is my favorite Easter, indeed. Praise God. I praise Him for his many blessings – the love of my family and friends. The pure joy of having my son tell me he “loves me too much,” or my daughter looking at me with her big blue eyes and saying “Da.” I praise Him for a wife whose devotion to me through “sickness and health” reminds me what a real promise before God truly means. I also Praise Him for freedom. The care that I received through modern advances in healthcare at MD Anderson was truly amazing. And it is the product of free markets… an imperfect system, to be sure. But it is the product of freedom, not the musing of an arrogant tyrant in Washington who believes the state should tell us what to do. The state can only tell us what to do if we let it. Jesus taught us much about love, forgiveness and doing unto others. But Jesus also taught us a lot about hypocrites, false prophets and supposed leaders who are full of it. This Easter, I am thankful for all I have but also all that I must continue to do to “fight the fight, finish the race and keep the faith.” (see 2 Timothy 4:7).
Read more:
My Favorite Easter
In the end of the sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week, came Mary Magdalene and the other Mary to see the sepulchre. And, behold, there was a great earthquake: for the angel of the Lord descended from heaven, and came and rolled back the stone from the door, and sat upon it. His countenance was like lightning, and his raiment white as snow: And for fear of him the keepers did shake, and became as dead men. And the angel answered and said unto the women, Fear not ye: for I know that ye seek Jesus, which was crucified. He is not here: for he is risen, as he said . Come, see the place where the Lord lay. And go quickly, and tell his disciples that he is risen from the dead; and, behold, he goeth before you into Galilee; there shall ye see him: lo, I have told you.And they departed quickly from the sepulchre with fear and great joy; and did run to bring his disciples word. And as they went to tell his disciples, behold, Jesus met them, saying, All hail. And they came and held him by the feet, and worshipped him. Matthew 28:1-9 Happy Easter to each and every one of you.
More:
Easter 2012: He Lives
New York Times editorials are often worth reading—stop laughing, I’m serious!—because they provide a window into the mindset of the liberal left, the ideological tendency that dominates many major cultural institutions and, for at least the next nine months, the executive branch of the federal government. Times editorialists write for people who think alike and seek reinforcement of their prejudices. Unconstrained by any need for compromise or sensitivity, they provide an honest distillation of left-liberalism, something you can’t always get from politicians who need to appeal broadly enough to win electoral majorities. What you learn from reading Times editorials is that the fundamental attitude of left-liberalism today is one of contemptuous ignorance. A case in point: In late January, as expected, President Obama signed off on an Obamacare regulation deeming contraceptives, including abortifacient drugs and sterilization procedures, to be “preventive” medicine, which employer-provided medical insurance must cover. When he refused to exempt religious organizations that have moral objections, even pro-Obamacare Catholics like E. J. Dionne of the Washington Post and Carol Keehan of the Catholic Health Association objected. But not the New York Times , which sneered at Mitt Romney for “promising to defend the Roman Catholic Church’s ‘religious liberty.’” Those scare quotes were the most shocking act of punctuation since early in what Reuters called “the ‘war on terror.’” By mid-February, Obama had made a symbolic concession to religious liberty, an accounting gimmick by which insurers would say they, not employers, were providing the disputed services. That fig leaf was enough to satisfy Dionne and Keehan, but nobody else—including the Times , which was happy with the substance but angry about the symbolism. This time the editorial led with the scare quotes: In response to a phony crisis over “religious liberty” engendered by the right, President Obama seems to have stood his ground on an essential principle—free access to birth control for any woman.… Nonetheless, it was dismaying to see the president lend any credence to the misbegotten notion that providing access to contraceptives violated the freedom of any religious institution. Churches are given complete freedom by the Constitution to preach that birth control is immoral, but they have not been given the right to laws that would deprive their followers or employees of the right to disagree with that teaching. In reality, no one denied that individuals have “the right to disagree with that teaching,” and the reli-gious institutions that objected to the mandate did not claim the authority to police their employees’ private lives or opinions. Rather, they opposed the government’s attempt to coerce them into facilitating the practices against which they preach. The editorial continued by assuring Times readers that everyone who disagrees is dishonest, be-cause the Times knows what they really think: “The president’s solution, however, demonstrates that those still angry about the mandate aren’t really concerned about religious freedom; they simply don’t like birth control and want to reduce access to it.” The evidence for this assertion: Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican of Florida, has introduced a bill that would allow any employer to refuse to cover birth control by claiming to have a religious objection. The House speaker, John Boehner, also supports the concept. Rick Santorum said Friday that no insurance policy should cover it, apparently unaware that many doctors prescribe birth control pills for medical reasons other than contraception. The Rubio and Boehner examples, as described here, offer zero support for the claim that opponents “don’t like birth control” and contradict the claim that they “aren’t really concerned about religious freedom.” The Rubio bill would give broader recognition to religious freedom than an exemption limited to religious institutions. As for Santorum, he has voiced serious, and not unreasonable, doubts that birth control is good for society. But let’s stipulate for the sake of argument that he doesn’t “like birth control.” First of all, so what? The Times editorialists may believe that birth control is valuable or beneficial, and it may be, but it’s weird that they get bent out of shape merely because other people don’t like the stuff. Second, even if the Times accurately characterizes Santorum’s views on birth control, it is both a non sequitur and, knowing him, a completely preposterous assertion that he isn’t “really concerned about religious freedom.” Times columnist Gail Collins went off message, beginning her column on the same day as the editorial: “It’s not really about birth control.” It was amusing to imagine left-liberals who look to the Times for guidance, driving themselves crazy trying to reconcile the dueling messages. But Collins was right that wasn’t about birth control. It was about freedom from government control. She wants more such control; as she put it sneeringly: “National standards, national coverage-all of that offends the Tea Party ethos that wants to keep the federal government out of every aspect of American life that does not involve bombing another country.” But at least she has some rudimentary understanding of the other side of the debate. Not so her op-ed colleague Nicholas Kristof, who in his column the following day treated savvy readers to this magnificently funny display of un-self-awareness: I may not be as theologically sophisticated as American bishops, but I had thought that Jesus talked more about helping the poor than about banning contraceptives. The debates about pelvic politics over the last week sometimes had a patronizing tone. Physician, heal thyself. But the most revealing Kristof assertion was this one: “The basic principle of American life is that we try to respect religious beliefs, and accommodate them where we can.” That prompted an incandescently furious response from Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary: Nicholas Kristof’s statement is light years beyond the President in disrespect for religious liberty.…The language of accommodation is almost as old as the Constitution itself, but it was never framed as Kristof frames it—certainly not by the founders who spoke of “inalienable rights” granted to human beings by the Creator’s endowment.… With this one simplistic and condescending sentence he throws religious liberty under the bus and reveals what makes sense to so many in the secular elite. They will try their best, they promise, to respect our religious beliefs, and to “accommodate them where we can.” That’s it. Don’t dare ask for anything more. Religious liberty—no scare quotes here—is one of America’s basic principles, the first freedom in the Bill of Rights. The separation of church and state protects religious minorities, and nonreligious ones, from the coercive imposition of religious law. It is also a bulwark against a secular government’s impositions on private conscience. To the Times editorialists, it is at best an inconvenience. And the paper’s reporters aren’t much better. Here’s what passed for balance in a story by Laurie Goodstein: The uproar threatens to embroil the Catholic church in a bitter election-year political battle while deepening internal rifts within the church. On the one side are traditionalists who believe in upholding Catholic doctrine to the letter, and on the other, modernists who believe the church must respond to changing times and a pluralistic society. Albert Mohler is a Baptist. This columnist is an agnostic. But I’m with Mike Huckabee, another Baptist, who said: “We’re all Catholics now.”
Read the original post:
We’re All Catholics Now
There have been a number of times throughout my life that I have encountered God’s blessings, his mercy, and his discipline. When I was little, I sat in my grandmother’s lap hearing stories of Daniel in the Lion’s Den. When I was a teenager, I could see God working in my life. When I was in college, I could feel his call. When I got married and and had kids and was told my wife would die (she did not), I could feel his peace. I am convinced the Big Guy Upstairs is real, not that I’d ever doubted. There was no doubting in my mind that He was both very real and very involved — not an abstract or detached Creator. This pattern has repeated itself throughout my life, sometimes to my liking and sometimes definitely not to my liking. But still, it played out. A few years ago, my wife decided to leave her job to stay home with our children. We could not make ends meet if she did it, so we prayed fervently about what to do. We decided God would provide. She left her job, our insurance, and our safety net. Within three days I received a pay raise for the first time in three years equal to my wife’s salary. Within a week, CNN came calling. WIthin a year, WSB Radio needed someone to replace Herman Cain on the radio. None of this would have been possible had my wife not felt compelled to be a stay at home mom. Some will look at all this and chalk it up to coincidence or luck or even my own skill. But I know I am not that lucky and I am not that skillful. At this time of year we are confronted with the question of whether He is real. C. S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity, “A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic-on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg-or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse.” We see the hostility of this world to Christ and must often remind ourselves that this world does hate Christ and those things of Christ and people of Christ. The Media Research Center brings word this morning about Queer Christ , the Christ who really is not for the people who really are not. I used that line on twitter and there has been an outpouring of condemnation. I get that many want to wrap themselves up in Christ and feel the right wants a monopoly on Christ, but as much as those of us on the right need to do more to show we realize we don’t have a monopoly on Christ, the left needs to understand that it has obligations too. Anything goes does not go with Christ. We are not to judge, but we are to apply the standards Christ and his Apostles set forth as we live our live. We are to know right from wrong and to recognize there really is a right and a wrong and a moral and an immoral and a good and an evil. Christ is not political. He is righteous. The funniest comment about my link to the MRC story on Queer Christ was from a kid on Facebook who said, “(I don’t actually believe in your Jesus, but I do enjoy stuff like this as it proves none of you have learned anything from the Gospels.” It is always humorous to see one who does not believe claiming we know nothing from the Gospels. Christ is for everyone, but not everyone wants him as he truly is. They want their Christ. Everyone, all of us , fall into that trap. But some refuse to recognize it and get out of it. They want their sin and their Jesus. Over the next three days we remember the three days that have had a bigger impact on the history of mankind than any other. You can deny that Christ was crucified, despite historic, secular sources that confirm the event. You can deny that Christ rose again from the dead. What you cannot deny is that what so many treat as fact and others scorn as cheap, recycled myth has shaped art, science, culture, literature, and government more profoundly than any other event. I personally have a hard time believing that any myth would be so powerful and so lasting. Today we remember Christ’s death. On Sunday, we remember He lives.
Go here to see the original:
On Faith This Good Friday
If one were to travel back in time to tell most observers of the events on the original Good Friday that the day would be remembered as “good,” they would have thought it a sick joke and you a madman. It was wall-to-wall awful. Judaism of the first centuries was a messiah-rejecting machine. One after another, would-be redeemers of Israel would amass a following, come into conflict with the authorities, and be killed or flee. Those followers that weren’t put to the sword would scatter, and it was back to square one. And on this day almost 2,000 years ago, it looked very much like the wheel of history had ground another one under. This time Rome had seemed more reluctant than usual. Its vassal ruler, Herod Antipas, and its Judean prefect, Pilate, passed Jesus around like a hot potato. Pilate had sought to punish him and then he appealed to the mob. Yet ultimately it was Rome’s right hand who gave the kill order. This is memorialized in the creed: “He was crucified under Pontius Pilate. He suffered, died, and was buried…” That’s what Good Friday is about: suffering, death, burial — failure, really, and what we do about it. Jesus’ closest followers were betrayed, taken by surprise and scattered. Their likely leader Peter denied his association with this messiah so forcefully that any regrouping looked impossible. They had thought this man the anointed one, but his lonely, embarrassing death had proved otherwise. Crucifixion was a particularly heinous way to go: it was humiliation, torture, and slow suffocation wrapped into a neat, splintered wooden package. The condemned would be stripped down to nothing, or almost nothing, and nailed to a cross at the joints: wrists and ankles. The nails would exert constant pain and as the victim pressed on upper and then lower nails for relief, it would become more difficult and then impossible to breathe. All of this would take place in front of a taunting crowd. No wonder many today prefer to hurry past the events of Good Friday and think about Easter instead. That is a mistake, I think. For people who believe in the truth of the Gospel stories, today ought to be a day of prayer, of fasting, of scripture reading and somber reflection. Besides, those that hurry to Easter too quickly, might miss a few things. Like what? Here are a couple of lessons I’ve gleaned from Good Friday readings past: One, when the high priest Caiaphas
