I’ve I been reading Charles Murray’s troubling and troublesome new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. The opinion class has been talking about the book since it came out in January.  The New York Times mostly hates and the Wall Street Journal mostly loves it.  I mostly agree with both of them.

Murray is a sociologist and a libertarian and with an unrelenting barrage of facts and figures paints a picture of white America (he uses the demographic data for white America because it is more readily available and, he thinks, tells an important story because it remains the story of the majority).

Murray uses his data to argue that white America is coming apart, increasingly divided, with a 20% “new upper class” made up of the cognitive elite on one side and a 30% “new lower class” made up of the socially marginal and unable on the other side. He is harsh in his assessment of the members of elite new upper class who are cloistered in their affluence, living in what are termed the superzips (zip codes where average income and educational attainment are both above the 95th percentile).  But he finds the growing white underclass to be the greater threat to what he calls the American project. Continue reading →

Spring ahead, fall back. This Sunday is the spring ahead Sunday as we move to what we Americans call Daylight Saving Time. In the other parts of the world where clocks are changed twice a year, they call it summer time.  Horário de Verão, summer hours, my friends in Brazil say, except that they went off summer hours a few weeks ago, it being nearly fall in the southern hemisphere.  It gets complicated.

As an early riser, I am going to miss the gray light of dawn that has been greeting me recently as I leave the house each morning, but soon enough Becky and I will be enjoying long evening walks as the summer sun sinks low in the western sky. All in all I like Daylight Saving Time. Continue reading →

I chose my college for all the wrong reasons.  I ended up at the University of California at Santa Cruz mostly because of its location and the brochures with glossy photos of towering redwoods and rolling meadows on the hills above the Monterey Bay. There was no false advertising. The place is more beautiful when you’re there than the photos can possibly show. But I was intrigued, too, by the motto of the particular residential college I applied to at UCSC: “The Pursuit of Truth in the Company of Friends.”

In many ways the college simply could not live up to its billing, though the classroom education and the relational and intellectual integrity of my professors was remarkable; I would not trade my time at UCSC for anything. And in ways the recruiting brochures could not imagine, my college years were an amazing time of the pursuit of Truth in the company of friends – the Truth being the one we meet in the Gospels and the company of friends being brothers and sisters in Christ. Continue reading →

Nothing could be clearer to me than that God has called the people of Langhorne Presbyterian Church to the shores of Lake Atitlan in the Central Highlands of Guatemala.

I know how he issued the call. Typical of God, it is a long story that begins with someone minding his own business, in this case a doctor playing tennis with a friend. There’s a lot more to the story and it is worth telling. Perhaps another time.

I think I know at least some of the why to the call, as well. The people of Atitlan, gentle and joyful, carry a heavy burden of poverty and years of oppression by government corruption and civil war, and now the drug cartels. The Christians in the churches around the lake are faithful, but their material, and, yes, medical, resources are thin. They need help. Continue reading →

Yes, another trip to Guatemala. For the sixteen of us on the “Away Team” these next few hours are full of last minute details, a little anxiety and looking forward to tomorrow morning around nine when the 737 lifts off from Newark on its way to Guatemala City. Sure, there’s still customs to clear and all the details of the mission for which we have been preparing, but there’s a kind of relief; no more preparation, just the work we’re set to do.

For those on the “Home Team” it may be just another Saturday morning and another week full of the things you always do.  But that, too, is the work God has set for you to do.  Many of you will use the Prayer Guide we’ve distributed to guide your prayers for the Away Team. Please know that your week will be covered by the prayers of those of us in Guatemala.  We set aside specific prayer time everyday and are committed to praying for God’s work for you this week just as you are committed to praying for God’s work for us in Guatemala.  Thank you. Continue reading →