There are now thousands of comics delivered on the web, known as webcomics. My foray into the field is an original story called RATFIST. I started my webcomic delivering a page a day on a website of the same name. We started with a few hundred visits and peaked at 14,000 unique visits a day. Over the entire 6 month run, Ratfist got over 1.3 million views. That’s more exposure than all of my other 10 published books combined.

But don’t fret if you’re the old fashioned type, because the RATFIST webcomic just got printed in graphic novel form and published by Image Comics! The story is still a spicy, satirical view of a world gone to Socialism in a hand-basket, but now it can be purchased at your local comic book store! Why should all the pixel pushers have all the fun?

By Doug TenNapel

Yesterday, the Palmetto Family Council and the Southern Baptist Convention released a video addressing the terrible practice of cock fighting. According to the Humane Society of the United States,  ”the blood sport is widespread in South Carolina because of the weakness of the state’s anti-cockfighting law and consists of roosters fighting to the death while spectators gamble on the outcomes.”

The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) and the Clapham Group have partnered to explore the role the faith community plays in addressing modern animal issues. The Faith Outreach program at HSUS engages faith communities, leaders, and institutions with animal protection issues, on the premise that religious values call upon us to act in a kind and merciful way towards all creatures.

The Palmetto Family Council is tackling the issue of cock fighting head-on in a new video that features Dr. Oran Smith, the executive director of Palmetto Family, as well as Dr. Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s ethics and religious liberty commission.

Citing scripture and Biblical principles, Smith and Land expose the cruelty of cockfighting as well as the larger societal effects of the illegal blood sport.

“Religious leaders had a founding role in the humane movement in the 19th century, and today in the 21st century, they remind us of our solemn responsibilities to other creatures,” said Wayne Pacelle, president and CEO of The HSUS. “Their voices can help guide the nation toward better decision-making and behavior when it comes to our treatment of animals.”

“There is no question that the Palmetto State is now the “go-to” location for animal fighting on the Eastern Seaboard,” said Dr. Oran Smith, the executive director of Palmetto Family. “As a matter of state pride, we must strengthen our laws now.”

“Christians should stand up and speak out against this barbaric practice which horrendously abuses God’s creatures” said Dr. Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist convention’s ethics and religious liberty commission.

Though outlawed in all 50 states, cockfighting remains a misdemeanor in 11, including South Carolina, Alabama and others. Cockfighting can be a lucrative crime, with gambling winnings offsetting even the maximum misdemeanor fines. The HSUS and the Palmetto Family Council are pursuing legislation to make cockfighting a felony in all 50 states to ensure the penalty for breaking the law is stronger than the potential gain.

When the Clapham Group heard about the movie Take as a cultural artifact seeking to influence our culture and the legal system on behalf of the restorative justice movement, we got very excited to help. In the end, we partnered with Prison Fellowship and the directors of Take to develop a small group bible study to accompany the movie. Additionally, we developed a website, giveforgiveness.com, which gives people the opportunity to publicly post forgiveness and stories of restorative justice in their lives. The website serves as a poignant testimony of the need for restorative justice in our legal system.

Our legal system works in such a way that when someone commits a gross crime against another person the victim(s) of the crime are protected from ever having to engage with the criminal after the crime. In rightly seeking to protect the victim from having to face unnecessary interaction with the criminal, we have unfortunately built a wall that in many cases prevents the criminal from understanding the full impact of how their crime has tragically altered a real person’s life. Many sociologists believe that this is a significant factor in criminal recidivism.

Image from http://www.abubakarjamil.com/

The problem is that the legal system compartmentalizes the lives of the victim and criminal. Compartmentalizing means building walls to prevent conflict. We all do it, both personally and communally. In our personal lives we compartmentalize thoughts and values we see as being contradictory to each other. In a communal setting, many of us compartmentalize our personal and professional lives, especially in the realms of politics and religion. Compartmentalization is a good and necessary tool to manage conflict, but it is crucial to intentionally seek meaningful conversation in the proper context so that we do not silo our lives off from each other.

Restorative justice seeks to reconcile both criminal and victim without compartmentalizing two lives that are forever intertwined by the criminal offense. The heart behind restorative justice isn’t to say that the compartmentalization between the victim and the criminal should not exist. Rather, it honors the humanity of both criminal and victim, seeking to foster true reconciliation that would not be possible without the opportunities for criminals and victims to interact.

Restorative justice is characterized by four key values:

1. Encounter:  Create opportunities for victims, offenders and community members who want to do so to meet to discuss the crime and its aftermath
2. Amends:  Expect offenders to take steps to repair the harm they have caused
3. Reintegration:  Seek to restore victims and offenders  to whole, contributing members of society
4. Inclusion:  Provide opportunities for parties with a stake in a specific crime to participate in its resolution

Here at the Clapham Group, not only do we believe in the redemptive opportunities of restorative justice, but we believe in restoring our culture for the common good. In order to do this we must be able to transcend the walls that we seek to build to protect ourselves from each other. Many believe the answer to doing this is tolerance. But, the tolerance our culture oozes is nothing more than an apathetic coexistence with one another. It does not actively seek to harmonize our lives together. True tolerance seeks to put windows in the walls built by compartmentalization so that we are able to truly acknowledge one another and pursue the true, good, and beautiful for the common good.

We should not and cannot think of any one person’s life as a mere embodiment of profession, religious creed, sexuality, political preference, or criminal record. In the same way the lives of a criminal and a victim are forever interwoven by the injustice of one criminal act, each of our lives are woven together by the metanarrative of God’s story: creation, fall, redemption, and consummation. Therefore, “let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up” (Galatians 6:9).  We know from Scripture how the story ends, for we serve a God who has guaranteed true restorative justice for all creation.

Garrett Cichowitz

As the economy continues to strain families and push some from the edge, one of the contributing factors to poverty that is often overlooked is cultural … the role of entertainment media in the shaping of attitudes and behavior.

One of our clients  is The Ann E. Casey Foundation, and its child poverty indicators released last fall reported that the teen birth rate has dropped from 4.8 to 4.1%. In 2006, the United States saw the first increase in the teen birth rate in more than a decade, a rise that continued through 2007. After the two-year increase, in 2008 the teen birth Rate declined to 41 births per 1,000 females ages 15 to 19.

However the teen birth rate is still historically high for some demographics, most importantly in the African-American community (6.3%) and more alarming in the Hispanic community (7.8%). To make matters worse, currently almost three quarters of African-American babies are born to an unwed mother.

What has not changed is the fact that teen pregnancy contributes to poverty. According to the National Campaign to End Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, two-thirds of families begun by a young unmarried mother are poor, approximately one-quarter of teen mothers go on welfare within three years of the child’s birth and teen mothers are less likely to complete the education necessary to qualify for a well-paying job. Finally, virtually all of the increase in child poverty between 1980 and 1996 was related to the increase in non-marital childbearing. As the Casey report notes, teen parents are “far more likely to be born into families with limited educational and economic resources, which function as barriers to future success.” In their book Creating an Opportunity Society, Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill from the Brookings Institution note that the sequence a young adult must follow to avoid poverty is to graduate from high school, get a job and then get married. They note that teenage pregnancy disrupts this sequence in the earliest stages, with teen pregnancy being a major contributor to dropping out of high school, and thereby further complicates the mother’s ability to retain a job.

Teen pregnancy obviously is a result of teen sexual activity. Although there are certainly numerous cultural variables that contribute to teen sexual activity, recent studies by the Rand Corporation concluded that adolescents who see more sexual content on television are more likely to initiate intercourse over the subsequent year.

On the basis of phone surveys with 718 teens ages 12 to 17, researchers found that girls and boys exposed to high levels of sexual content on TV were twice as likely to be involved in a pregnancy by age 20 as were kids who watched less. This follows research that revealed a link between exposure to sexually oriented TV and earlier initiation of intercourse.

As the Casey Child Trends report noted, kids are subject to more entertainment content than ever. Although by a traditional definition, television viewing among adolescents has dropped slightly, the report notes that “television content is now available on a variety of devices. Using this more inclusive definition of TV watching, use among 8-18-year-olds increased between 2004 and 2009. Children ages 11-14 watched the most TV content in 2009 (five hours and three minutes daily). And culture consumption is highest among at-risk groups such as the Latino and African American communities. Over the past several years, there have been a number of television shows which have attempted to explore the complexity and challenges of teen parenting following, intentionally, the “success” of the film Juno. However, in a recent Time article “Teen Moms Are Taking over Reality TV. Is That a Good Thing?”  Leslie Kantor, national director of education initiatives for Planned Parenthood Federation of America concludes that “despite their quest for gritty realism, the shows may create a distorted view of teen sexual activity.”

“Showing the consequences of risky behavior can be helpful to some young people,” she says. “What you don’t want is to send the message that everybody is having unprotected sex. These shows create a perception that tremendous numbers of teens are becoming pregnant or becoming parents.”

And in some cases, the “stars” of these shows have gone on to become celebrities in their own right, possibly contributing to the social destygmitization of teen and out-of-wedlock pregnancy. At Clapham, we understand that culture is upstream of politics because it shapes what we believe, and what we believe shapes who we want to be and what we chose to do. Hollywood stars are famous for their cause efforts, but if they really want to be part of the solution and not the problem, I invite them to own up to their role and responsibility to send the right messages that will help give kids a chance to climb out of poverty.

Mark Rodgers

(featured image by Micahael Vincent Manalo)

“There are two ways through life, the way of nature and the way of grace” begins Terrence Malick’s film The Tree of Life.

The history of the Christmas tree is uncertain, but the most likely origin story is that when the Church banned “mystery plays” in the 16th century, the “Paradise tree” (the tree of life and the knowledge of good and evil) moved from the stage to people’s homes. 

The idea of the tree as a symbol of life is shared throughout many cultures and religions, especially the “evergreen” that most likely adorns your living room.  However, in the film The Tree of Life the shadow of death is just as important as is the symbol of life – as it is in the Genesis account of the Tree in the Garden of Eden.  In both cases, life leads to death.  But death is not the end of either story.

The narrator in The Tree of Life affirms that “Nature is willful; it only wants to please itself, to have its own way.”  On the other hand, “grace” is “smiling through all things.”  According to the way of grace, “the only way to be happy is to love.”

Some love and others hate Malick’s introspective film, but none can deny its visual beauty and spiritual poignancy.  I was struck that throughout it Malick rightly presents to the viewer the honest paths that we are continually faced to choose between; life through grace, or death through our nature.

T. S. Eliot concludes his Christmas reflection The Journey of the Magi by exploring this same theme through the reflections of one of the Three Kings:

Were we led all that way for Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death, but had thought they were different; this Birth was hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods. I should be glad of another death.

I am not suggesting that you replace It’s a Wonderful Life with The Tree of Life this Christmas, but I do encourage you to watch it in the context of the season in which we find ourselves. Life and death.  A baby in a manger destined for the cross. Even Clarence the angel taking the dive for George Bailey. The real protagonist in all three stories, and the Christmas story, is Grace. May you experience it in your life this New Year.

What once was hurt
What once was friction
What left a mark
No longer stings
Because grace makes beauty
Out of ugly things
Grace makes beauty out of ugly things

-Grace by U2

Mark Rodgers

There is nothing pleasant about grief, nothing beautiful about loss, but in some unfathomable working of the divine there can be truth, goodness and beauty that comes from a life lived in joyful submission to the baby in a manger.

What follows below is the tribute I gave at my mum’s thanksgiving service. It is my hope and prayer that some small drop of the great ocean inspiration that she was to me might flow to you this Christmas.

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Charles Spurgeon observed that it is far better to carve your name on hearts than on marble. For Dad, Andrew my brother and I, and I know for everyone else here this is true also, because in many different ways, Alex, my mum, carved her name in our hearts. And what was so wonderful about her was that she carved her name in love.

For if there is one word to sum up my mum’s life it would be “love”. As John Stott remarked at my parents wedding “They love God, they love the world, they love each other.” Indeed, to know Mum was to see in her love for the God who saved her, a love for her family and a love for the world and a desire to see it reconciled to God. And so in all this she radiated the very nature of God, the God who is love.

Despite being the language of Shakespeare, English is sometimes limited in its expressiveness. We use the word “love” to both describe our favorite food and express our deepest feelings. However, in other languages, ancient Greek for example, there are four words for love. And one I think particularly captures the life of my mum, that is agape love, sacrificial love, Calvary love.

It is this word the eyewitnesses to Jesus’ life used to describe his, and God’s love for each and every one of us. And it is this love that God calls each of those who believe in him to demonstrate. And it is this love that so many of us knew from my mum. This “other person centeredness”, a desire to serve and help, even when it is costly or hard was the cornerstone of her being.

It is our nature when we hear a phrase like “God loves us” to imbue it with our experience of love. Yet in our brokenness, in our bent out of shape lives, we cannot grasp this divine love in its full depth. Yet we can catch glimpses of what this perfect love is. For most of us this first understanding of love comes from our parents. And so for me, this is my mother’s greatest gift, a life of love.

Shakespeare observed “all the world’s a stage” and in so doing showed he understood that we all have a story to tell, that we all live out that story, each and every day. We may not decide all the characters or every part of the plot, but we do shape how it plays out, we shape what sort of story it is going to be.

And my mum chose to have her story be one of sacrificial love, it was one that sought to show, in both word and deed the fingerprints of the Author of the great story, that sought to show God’s love, to model His grace and to live His truth.

My mum’s life showed me what it means to live out a sacrificial love story. For perhaps the greatest film about love is not Titanic or Romeo and Juliet, but The Passion. My mum’s life has taught me that our stories matter, each and every one of us.

She taught me that our stories can be good, can illustrate the sacrificial love that she so magnificently showed, but the greatest lesson of my mum’s story, is that if we want our story to be the most true, the most loving, the most inspiring, the most wonderful that it can be, it needs to be written by the great Author, the Creator,

God.

In closing I’d like to share some words from CS Lewis about this.

And for us this is the end of her story here on earth. But for her, it is only the beginning of the real story. All her life in this world has only been the cover and the title page: now at last she is beginning Chapter One of the Great Story. A story which no one on earth has ever read: but which goes on for all eternity: and in which every chapter is better than the one before.

Amen.

Peter Mitchell

I took my wife to the film Take Shelter recently to see how its writer, Jeff Nichols, unpacks his and our society’s angst through a parable of a family at the brink.

The film follows the journey of a working class family haunted by the fathers’ dreams that could be a result of mental illness or a premonition of something catastrophic about to come.

“I wrote Take Shelter,” says Nichols, “because I believed there was a feeling out in the world that was palpable. It was an anxiety that was very real in my life, and I had the notion it was very real in the lives of other Americans as well as other people around the world. This film was a way for me to talk about that fear and that anxiety.”

It is very real. It comes up over Thanksgiving dinner with in-laws, at Starbucks with friends, on your walk with neighbors. Your coworkers feel it. So do your children.

Take Shelter has a remarkable 94% rating on Rottentomatoes.com, so something is resonating. Nichols says on the film’s website that he had “a nagging feeling that the world at large was heading for harder times. This free-floating anxiety was part economic, part just growing up, but it mainly came from the fact that I finally had things in my life that I didn’t want to lose.”

Unemployment, instability in the world, lack of upward mobility, bank foreclosures. Is it all coming to a head? How should we respond?

One possible response is reflected in the recent installment Patriots of the video game shooter franchise Rainbow 6 by Tom Clancy. Patriots is not a Cold War redux or latest iteration of Muslim extremism, but explores the possibility of a movement of “True Patriots” who take matters into their own hands.

“Americans are angry, and why shouldn’t they be?” opens a review of the game.
“In response to the gradual erosion of our beloved nation, resentful citizens of all kinds of political backgrounds are rising up …. America’s volatile political climate serves as the jumping-off point … placing the players in the roles of the elite tactical unit, the homegrown terrorists and the civilians caught in the crossfire.”

But is taking up arms the right response to our anxiety and frustration? In Phillipians 4 Paul encourages us to “not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.”

And in Matthew 6, Jesus reminds us “not to be anxious and worry about our lives” but rather “seek first His Kingdom and His righteousness.” Seek Shalom. Seek peace and wholeness.

Seek Shalom. Seek peace and wholeness.

In Patriots, the rebellion is not for Shalom, which we know will not be ushered in by our doing much less through violence. (To be fair to the game producers, they are “making a game … to provoke discussion and deeper thought” not promoting violence.)

The good news is that we are promised peace. But that peace exists in a paradox. On one hand our response to the challenges and uncertainties of our times ought to be prayer and the pursuit of God’s Kingdom. Yet, God ultimately ushers in this Kingdom of peace forcing us into a sort of beautiful hopeful helplessness. It is very much in this tension that faith and trust is strengthened. And in that strengthening, “the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 4:7)

What is the true purpose of education? It is an honest question that each of us with the opportunity for higher education must ask.

In the recent article from Q Ideas called Learning for the Common Good, Byron Borge offers a review of two books that critique the educational mindset of America. He specifically draws out from his review of Postman’s The End of Education; Redefining the Value of School that the true purpose of education has gone astray in America. Borge identifies the “American educational myth” and suggests that education is largely focused on “passing the right sorts of tests to enable one to get to the right kind of college whereby one can (of course) be done with learning and enter a lucrative career.”

Sadly, this seems to be the most that many students and universities have come to expect from each other. Even at the most esteemed universities students aren’t “learning” as much as they are simply filling their brains with facts and then dumping them out on paper. There seems to be a divorce between factual knowledge and what Nobel Prize winning chemist and scholar Michael Polanyi called personal or tacit knowledge.

True learning cannot happen without taking the ownership required to seek true knowledge. The type of knowledge our educational institutions and our culture value most today is disconnected, dispassionate, and depersonalized. This knowledge is often thought of as “objective” and superior to “subjective” beliefs about how a person should use what he knows to relate to the world and those around him. In other words, knowledge is divorced from a consistent and coherent worldview.

What I mean, is that many students and professors alike treat learning, for example, like handing a seven year old a one page summary on the physics and mechanics of riding a bicycle and telling the child, “everything you need to know about riding a bike is on that paper.” The seven year old would probably tell you no thanks I already know how to ride a bike, I just got my training wheels off last week. True learning is holistic, driven by passion, and personally empirical. It coherently relates the objective and subjective realities of life. It cannot be separated from real life or one’s character, which our culture wants to label as subjective experience. True learning must be applied to how we live.

True learning must be applied to how we live.

The consequences of not doing this are dire. In the words of Wendell Berry, we have created a “lesser economy” of education that is now in tension with the “greater economy” of life. The lesser economy of American education is based on the currency of “objective” knowledge – disconnected, dispassionate, and depersonalized. The greater economy is the ultimate reality in which we live that creates the rules we must play by if we are to promote the common good in all facets of life: economics, politics, the arts, education, entertainment, etc. The tension between our created lesser economy of “objective” knowledge and ultimate reality is that objective knowledge can be used to promote allusions of false realities. Both students and professors have the responsibility to engage true learning and true knowledge by attempting to apply what they learn to the reality of life.

A few weeks ago I was having breakfast with my professor and dear friend Dr. Steve Garber who founded the Washington Institute for Faith, Vocation, and Culture.  We were discussing the idea of ‘calling’ in life. During our time he asked me what some of my favorite classes were at Grove City College. I couldn’t name a specific topic or course, but rather said the courses I loved most were one’s that were taught by great professors who were passionate about what they taught. Truly great professors, had a way of opening my eyes to the subject at hand. They made it meaningful, pragmatic, and applicable to ‘real life’ and things that ‘really mattered’. This is the difference that Dr. Garber talks about between “getting straight A’s in school, but flunking life.”

Getting straight A’s in school, but flunking life

As a proud graduate of Grove City College I can say thankfully that my education has made a profound impact on the trajectory of my life. I have been transformed by the renewing of my mind to realize that education is more than just a ticket to affluence. Education – personal, holistic, and passionate – has provided me with the tools to understand how I am personally and uniquely suited to engage the world. In short, my education has equipped me to be a lifelong learner of the world, because education is more than just a means to an end, but also an end in and of itself.

Garrett Cichowitz