Religious News
July 10 , 2009
Evangelical Francis Collins named to head NIH
WASHINGTON (RNS) Francis Collins, the researcher who mapped the human genome and navigated clashes between his Christian faith and science, has been chosen to lead the National Institutes of Health (NIH).Calling Collins "one of the top scientists in the world," President Obama announced his nomination on Wednesday (July 8), one day after the NIH released new stem cell research guidelines that angered many conservative Christians.
Though Collins, a self-described evangelical, will head the nation's primary scientific research agency, the avid supporter of stem cell research seems unlikely to allay the fears fellow evangelicals have over embryonic stem cell research.
"Francis is a great person, a good scientist, but we disagree with his positions on human embryonic stem cell research and on cloning human embryos for experimentation," said David Prentice, senior fellow at the conservative Family Research Council.
Prentice's office, along with the National Association of Evangelicals, Concerned Women for America and other Christian advocacy groups, favor adult stem cell research, but oppose embryonic research because they believe the process destroys nascent forms of human life.
Collins reconciles the research through a process called somatic cell nuclear transfer, which creates an embryo artificially, but is also the first step in cloning.
"Now that is very different in my mind, morally, than the union of sperm and egg," he explained in an interview with Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly. "We do not, in nature, see somatic cell nuclear transfer occurring. This is a purely man-made event."
An atheist who converted to Christianity in his 20s, Collins regularly pushes Christians to reconcile their beliefs with scientific theories such as evolution. He recently launched the BioLogos Foundation, which "emphasizes the compatibility of Christian faith with scientific discoveries."
Collins sees his faith and research informing one another, evident in the speech he gave when former President Clinton announced the first draft of the human genetic blueprint.
"It is humbling for me and awe-inspiring to realize that we have caught the first glimpse of our own instruction book, previously known only to God," Collins said at a White House press conference in 2000.
Collins, who publicly endorsed Obama during his campaign, worked at NIH when he directed the National Human Genome Research Institute from 1993 until 2008. In 2006, Collins authored the New York Times-bestselling "The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief."
-- Tiffany Stanley
July 10 , 2009
Domestic missionaries search for converts online
By AMY GREEN
c. 2009 Religion News Service
ORLANDO, Fla. -- For centuries, missionaries have ventured to the farthest reaches of the globe to share the gospel. Today, the new mission field is just a mouse click away.
Some 2 million surfers a day type keywords like "God" and "Jesus" into search engines, and hundreds of thousands of them end up at one of 91 Web sites operated by Global Media Outreach, a ministry of the Orlando-based Campus Crusade for Christ that dispatches domestic missionaries to the far corners of the World Wide Web.
The sites describe the basics of Christianity, such as who is Jesus, and provide forms where surfers can submit questions and share personal stories with one of the ministry's 3,000 missionaries. The missionaries, in turn, respond via e-mail with personal messages, Bible passages and prayers.
It is the newest way to reach out, said the Rev. Allan Beeber, the Orlando director of Global Media Outreach, which also has offices in Silicon Valley.
"The paradigm of evangelism is changing. In the past, various Christian groups would go door-to-door, or they would hold citywide crusades," he said. "The paradigm change is that people are now coming to us."
The number of these spiritual surfers has grown so much since the ministry launched less than a decade ago that officials now hope to double the number of missionaries by the year's end. In the last year alone, traffic on the ministry's Web sites more than doubled.
Campus Crusade is among the nation's largest nondenominational campus ministries, with some 55,000 students involved at more than 1,090 colleges and universities nationwide. Worldwide, the organization offers 29 ministries in 191 countries.
Global Media Outreach has partnered with Northland, a local megachurch whose pastor is the up-and-coming Joel Hunter, to add missionaries and a church-planting effort to the ministry. Now, when surfers e-mail about how to start a church, Northland can respond with church-planting resources.
The partnership is a fit for Northland, which subscribes to the philosophy that a church is defined by its people and can be as small as three people gathered around a dinner table, said the Rev. Dan Lacich, a pastor at Northland. Some 10,000 people worship each Sundays at one of Northland's multiple locations, including 1,000 online.
"It's another tool," Lacich said. "What we're hoping happens is that missionaries who are in field ... will get encouragement and support from this ministry as we're able to connect them with people who are near them."
Technology is now at a point where Christian leader can track how many people worldwide are exposed to Christianity, and how many want to become Christians, Beeber said. It also is the first time missionaries can reach into dangerous countries, and other hard-to-reach populations, such as teenagers here at home, without ever leaving their desks. What's more, online outreach can be specialized to target a variety of groups, from members of the military to hurricane victims.
One group of pastors handles especially difficult theological questions. Most missionaries respond within 24 hours, Beeber said.
Evangelicals are not the only ones turning to point-and-click proselytizing. Mormon missionaries spend 12 hours fielding questions online as part of their training before being dispatched around the world. Missionaries who can't go overseas for health reasons can instead put in a two-year stint at the Mormons' online referral center in Provo, Utah.
"Absolutely it's the new frontier," said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project. "In advanced economies, the majority of people are online, and ... they begin to think of the Internet as the default starting place for all kinds of information searches.
"So it's not surprising that when people have spiritual questions or have concerns about the direction of their lives, a lot of them now sort of start their search for answers online."
Maria Rodriguez, a Campus Crusade accountant who heard about the project around the office, said sharing the gospel is now akin to "going on a mission trip without stepping out of the house."
Rodriguez helps oversee the ministry's Spanish speakers and enjoys developing online relationships with those who write in, including a woman from Peru who is moving to Canada but worries about leaving her mother, who is in poor health, behind.
"We go back and forth, praying for each other, praying for her mother and her decision," said Rodriguez, 48. "Mostly people want to be heard. They want to tell their stories. ... The family of God is so huge that we can reach others from such a distance."
July 09 , 2009
In McNamara, competing visions of morality, ethics, war and peace
By CHRIS HERLINGER
c. 2009 Religion News Service
NEW YORK -- When he died Monday (July 6) at age 93, former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara was still viewed by many with harsh opprobrium as the chief architect of the Vietnam War. Others praised his efforts, however late in life, to publicly wrestle with his inner demons and the moral consequences of a failed war.
Few figures in the last half century were as polarizing as McNamara. In the days since his death, reaction has ranged from the notably harsh to the mildly conciliatory for a man whose career personified the rise and promise, and subsequent troubles and decline, of post-war America.
New York Times columnist Bob Herbert blasted McNamara as an "icy-veined, cold-visaged and rigidly intellectual point man for a war that sent thousands upon thousands of people (most of them young) to their utterly pointless deaths."
Journalist Walter Pincus, meanwhile, who was a friend of McNamara, evoked McNamara's efforts to fight global poverty during his 13 years as head of the World Bank and his post-government opposition to nuclear weapons.
Pincus, writing in The Washington Post, reported that McNamara's last message to his wife expressed the hope that others would continue "to pursue the objectives which I have sought (very imperfectly at times) to move the world toward peace among people and nations, and to accelerate economic and social progress for the least advantaged among us."
The competing visions of McNamara reflect a man who was defined by war but who tried, however imperfectly, to lay claim to some legacy of peace. And while he was not a religious figure, nor a particularly religious man, McNamara came to embody weighty moral issues of war and peace in one of the most emotionally charged ethical debates of the country's recent history.
McNamara's contrasting image was perhaps best displayed in Errol Morris's Oscar-winning 2003 documentary, "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara," which portrayed him as a figure at one moment horrifying, the next startlingly human.
The horror comes as McNamara reflects on his role as a military aide to Gen. Curtis E. LeMay during the firebombing of Japan during World War II. He practically leaped into Morris' camera and loudly declared: "On (a) single night, we burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo -- men, women and children."
The human, even vulnerable, moment came with the candid acknowledgement that LeMay later told the young McNamara, "If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals."
"And I think he's right. He -- and I'd say I -- were behaving as war criminals," McNamara says. "What makes it immoral if you lose, and not immoral if you win?"
McNamara's public grappling with the dilemmas of that war, and with the subsequent war for which he would forever be linked, rarely though occasionally had a religious element. The product of a lower middle-class California family with a mixed Roman Catholic-Protestant heritage, McNamara was nominally a Presbyterian.
When serving as an executive of the Ford Motor Co. prior to being named John F. Kennedy's Pentagon chief in 1961, McNamara became a Presbyterian elder. In her 1993 biography of McNamara, journalist Deborah Shapley noted that while he served as Defense Secretary, McNamara and his first wife occasionally attended a Presbyterian church in Washington, D.C.
At the Pentagon, McNamara was known to take an interest in moral theology and had at least one meeting with clergy who opposed the war. Perhaps most notably, Shapley notes, was McNamara's heart-felt horror and shock when a Quaker anti-war activist, Norman Morrison, set himself on fire in a parking lot just below McNamara's Pentagon office in November 1965.
An understated but notable Presbyterian element emerged later in life when The New York Times attacked McNamara in 1995 after he wrote in a memoir that Vietnam was "wrong, terribly wrong."
"Mr. McNamara must not escape the lasting moral condemnation of his countrymen," The Times said, " ... (his) regret cannot be huge enough to balance the books for our dead soldiers. The ghosts of those unlived lives circle close around Mr. McNamara."
It added: "What he took from them cannot be repaid by prime-time apology and stale tears, three decades late."
Yet coming to McNamara's defense was an old critic, the late Robert McAfee Brown, the renowned liberal Presbyterian theologian and an ardent opponent of the Vietnam War.
McAfee Brown wrote the Times in protest, saying that "it is a great and almost unprecedented moral achievement for a man in public life to have offered such an honest accounting of how people like himself, with initially good intentions, became enmeshed in structures of their own creation from which it was finally impossible to escape. ... All honor, therefore, to Mr. McNamara for having set a pattern virtually unknown in our nation's public life."
Reflecting this week on McNamara's life, Donald W. Shriver Jr., another Presbyterian theologian and ethicist who was written about the political dynamics of forgiveness, noted that, indeed, McNamara expressed public remorse -- a rarity for an American public official.
But it was all a bit too little, too late, Shriver said.
"He came close to apologizing but didn't quite get there," Shriver said, "and he said in the `90s what he should have said in the late `60s."
