I never paid much attention to what Roger Ebert said about movies.
Given that I usually take-in only three or four films a year, Ebert’s analysis of any particular film or actor or “scene” just wasn’t going to be something that would capture my attention.
But the final seven years or so of Ebert’s life offer some seriously thoughtful and thought provoking lessons, for those who still care to learn. Whether you reside on the right or left side of the political and cultural aisle doesn’t much matter. Consider some of the facts of Ebert’s final years, and the implications of his actions.
First, Ebert suffered with multiple bouts of cancer for over a decade, yet he and his wife Chaz Hammelsmith Ebert remained married and supportive of each other. Initially diagnosed with cancer of the thyroid in 2002, Roger would discover cancer in his salivary gland a year later. After being in remission for periods of time, he eventually contracted cancer in his jaw bone (which necessitated the removal of his jaw), and he lost his voice. Through all of this, he and were seemingly inseparable.
The things that the Eberts said and wrote about each other during their roughly twenty years of marriage were sufficiently extraordinary, even for otherwise healthy spouses. Yet despite Roger’s immense health struggles, neither of them seemed to have been deterred. Even in the past few years as a voiceless Roger absolutely needed Chaz to speak on his behalf, both out in public and in television interviews, never once did you see either of them convey anything short of love and respect for the other, and neither of them ever seemed awkward or uncomfortable with Roger’s diminished functioning. In a country where the legal definition of marriage remains a widely contested public policy issue all the while more than half of the nation’s marriages end in divorce, the Eberts, whether they intended to or not, publicly emulated what a marriage should be about -both in sickness and in health.
Secondly, Roger’s determination to remain professionally and publicly active despite his debilitations says some extraordinary things – both about Roger’s character, and about the value of human life itself. Losing your voice and having your face become severely disfigured is undoubtedly awful for anybody, but for someone who makes their living in front of tv cameras, such circumstances could be a career killer.
But not for Roger Ebert. Despite the loss of his voice Roger could still write, and what couldn’t be written Chaz could say for him. That’s how things went for Roger over the last seven years or so. Do an online search and story after story emerges of the Eberts playfully appearing at film festivals and movie premiers, Roger offering his signature “two thumbs up” gestures with Chaz doing the talking.
An extraordinary example of the Eberts’ “grace under fire” appears in a video on Youtube. Roger and Chaz are sitting on the set in a remote studio being interviewed by a CNN Host at the Anchor desk. The Host, noticeably awkward with Roger’s appearance and inaudible gestures, thanks Roger for his courage to continue appearing on TV, noting that Roger had been such a handsome on-camera performer for so many years. Through hand signals, scrawling on a note pad, and some vocal help from Chaz, Roger shoots-back at the host and says “what do you mean I was handsome? I think I’m still looking pretty good!”
The fact is, Roger looked rather odd with his jaw removed, but that apparently didn’t matter to the confident and in-love couple known as Roger and Chaz. The value of one’s life transcends their immediate physical appearance and level of functioning, and Roger’s sustained presence in the public square was a testimony to that ultimate truth. Yet on this point, Roger’s final years were an anathema to those who are quick to advocate for rationed healthcare and euthanasia, believing that people as old and incapacitated as Roger quite naturally have a “duty to die.”
Tragically, during the same week that the courageous Roger Ebert left us, some horrific news broke about Medicare, the federal healthcare program for senior adults. Under the federal Obamacare law, funding for Medicare is being gradually cut to allow for increased expenditures on Medicaid, the federal healthcare program for the poor, and on the Obamacare program itself. As a result, a new trend has emerged: Medicare is increasingly denying treatment to elderly cancer patients (Is this the “change” you were “hoping” for?).
From a raw political standpoint, this makes sense. Sickly senior citizens are a less-viable voter-block than are younger and middle-aged citizens (those who can benefit from Obamacare and Medicaid). But from a moral standpoint this is an abomination. Is the life of every elderly cancer patient as valuable as Roger Ebert’s was? In political terms, the answer is “no.”
Thank you Roger and Chaz for some important lessons. Are Americans willing to learn from them?
As I prepare to spend a week teaching the book of Jeremiah to Chinese pastors in Hong Kong, I’ve been reflecting on the strengths and weaknesses of the Church in America. Regrettably, the list of negatives is longer than the list of positives.
To be clear, though, I’m speaking of the circles in which I travel, meaning evangelical Christian circles, so my observations might not apply to other Christian groups in America.
What are some of the strengths of the American Evangelical Church?
We are at the forefront of feeding the poor and providing disaster relief worldwide. From the earthquake in Haiti to the tsunami in Japan, and from orphanages in Latin America to feeding programs in Africa, organizations like World Vision and Samaritan’s Purse are there, making a difference.
We are a generous people when it comes to funding gospel work in America and abroad. While we can sometimes be self-indulgent as we build our latest mega-edifice, we are a giving people overall.
We have produced an abundance of Christian resources. If you’re looking for the latest translation of the Bible or a book on any aspect of Christian living, and if you’d like to download it to your phone, look no further.
We have a positive, can-do mentality. This is part of the American psyche, but it comports well with the biblical message of “All things are possible with God.”
Our churches offer many practical programs to help everyone from recovering drug addicts to couples needing marital counseling. To this day, ministries like Teen Challenge, which help people with drug and alcohol addictions, put government organizations to shame in terms of consistent rates of success.
We are strongly pro-life and pro-morality. This is especially true compared to Christians in many other nations, who seem oblivious to the evil of abortion and who fail to take moral stands on other issues.
We are strongly pro-Israel. Even the Israeli Knesset recognizes that American evangelicals are its best friends in the world, although in recent years, some evangelicals have challenged this consistent support for Israel.
We have sent many missionaries to the nations, also providing them with financial support. Beginning in 1812, this has been a great part of our spiritual history, and it has not primarily been for the purpose colonizing foreign peoples or making them into Westerners.
What are some of the weaknesses of the American Evangelical Church?
Our Christian expression is often shallow and superficial. It has often been said that American Christianity is 3,000 miles wide and one mile deep.
We have been plagued with scandals among our leaders. Hardly a month (or week?) goes by without news of the moral failure of another one of our leaders.
We preach a carnal prosperity message. This is not the Protestant work ethic of old; it is the message of, “Jesus died on the cross to make me financially rich.”
We export our false teaching around the world. The latest teaching coming from professing evangelicals is that you can practice homosexuality and follow Jesus at the same time, and from our shores, this message is going to the nations.
We have created a worldly, cultural Christianity. Rather than preaching a Jesus who radically changes us, we preach a Jesus who radically empowers us. That’s why we have “Christian” lingerie models and “Christian” rappers who frequent strip clubs.
We have perfected the gospel enterprise. We have learned how to make everything “Christian” and then market it. Someone once said, “What began as a movement in Jerusalem became a philosophy in Greece, a monument in Rome, a culture in Europe, and an enterprise in America.”
We run our churches like businesses. It is one thing to implement good business principles where applicable, but our “corporate Christianity,” especially in our bigger churches, is another thing, and the pastor has become the CEO.
We are self-dependent. Who needs God’s help and we can make it happen on our own? If you want a performance, just visit our church on Sunday morning.
We are heavily politicized. Rather than being a prophetic witness to the society, calling on political leaders to do the right thing, we have sold our souls to the political system.
We have produced super-star preachers. Didn’t Jesus teach that leaders were supposed to be the servants of all?
We are exceptionally gullible. Only in America can a TV minister be convicted of various kinds of scams, only to be back on TV racking in the big bucks and selling all kinds of cheap gospel gimmicks. We have confused simple faith with gullibility.
Our “pep talk gospel” is hardly the gospel at all. Being positive and encouraging is great, but not when it comes at the expense of leaving out the rest of the message. Put another way, Jesus was not a motivational preacher.
The bad news is that the list of negatives can go on. The good news is that American history has been marked by great awakenings and revivals, and if ever we needed one, it is now.
My suspicion is that the next great awakening will also be quite a rude awakening.
Many of my friends and readers are disheartened by recent cultural and political trends. Many blame our universities and wonder whether we can ever restore sanity in our nation, given that the enemy seems to control the modern university. They see no chance to win in the war of ideas as long as they are forced to support the public university and, therefore, forced to fund a war against their own cherished values.
But I know something they don't know. The public university that has declined so steadily in recent years will cease to exist in just a few short decades. The moral bankruptcy we have seen over the last twenty years is about to be followed by another sort of bankruptcy. Before long, many of the universities that have betrayed taxpayers and alumni will be forced out of business. It will happen for the following reasons:
Federal funding reductions. LBJ got us deeply entrenched in the business of federal funding for institutions of higher education. When he did, tuition began to skyrocket. More recently, the federal government has gotten us deeply entrenched in the business of individual student loans. This has had the same effect. When a lot of people are able to borrow a lot of money to purchase goods or services, the effect on the price of those goods and services is dramatic. Supply and demand is not a rule; it is a law.
State university administrators seized upon the increased demand for higher education by raising tuition. This was done for three reasons: a) because they could, b) because they wanted to give themselves raises, and c) because they /wanted to hire associate and assistant administrators to do their work for them.
Now, the federal deficit is spinning out of control. As a result, the federal government will soon have to cut aid to state universities. This will confront administrators with this important decision: will they a) cut administrative spending, or b) raise tuition? The answer will be "b."
Student loan bubble. People are easily enticed into taking the bait when offered unlimited funds to pursue education. This applies to those who are not qualified to attend college at all. (Think about the housing bubble for just a moment). As tuition continues to rise, many more students who enroll will figure out that they have been duped long before they graduate. The universities have lied to them during recruitment. Departments in the social sciences and other disciplines have betrayed them by exaggerating the pay scale and availability of jobs they could likely expect upon graduation. These realizations will result in a massive upswing in the dropout rate over the next few years. These dropouts are many times more likely to default on their college loans than students who graduate.
When the whole college loan industry collapses, people will actually have to pay for school as they go. That will result in many empty seats in many college classrooms. Universities will have to make up the difference by turning to alumni donors.
Declining donations. Consider the following scenario: just two weeks ago, a fraternity of 80 men was ejected from a public university campus. They were investigated for hazing but then exonerated. They were also investigated for an alcohol violation that was so minor that police declined to arrest anyone. They were found to be guilty of only one offense, which was dubbed "failure to cooperate with the investigation." This was another way of saying the university thought but could not prove they were guilty because they refused to confess. At the end of the day, the 80-man fraternity was banned from campus for three years.
This real life incident will have two real life repercussions: a) the administrator who led the investigation will be promoted for expelling a politically incorrect fraternity (one of their flags has a Confederate symbol embedded within it). b) 80 future alumni will respond to the administrative overreach by refusing to donate for the rest of their adult lives.
This issue is serious. As the university administration has grown, it has assumed more control over the lives of students. In recent years, students have been prosecuted with increasing frequency for increasingly petty offenses with drastically decreasing respect for their due process rights. This includes petty prosecutions for speech code violations that amount to stripping students of the right to participate in the free exchange of ideas - the very reason many came to college in the first place. Is anyone foolish enough to believe this will have no effect on their willingness to donate?
The army of administrators that grew in the 1990s as a result of generous federal funding and the explosion in student loans will soon have to beg in order to retain their positions. Alumni will wisely apply the norm of reciprocity by exercising their power over these overpaid and underworked administrators who once practiced authoritarianism on them. They will wisely withhold donations and instead focus on paying their entirely-too-high student loan payments.
For all of these reasons, the public universities will eventually go bankrupt. And that is good news for a nation that is going morally bankrupt in the shadow of the ivory tower. They had a good thing going but the party is close to being over. The hangover will soon begin.
Dennis Prager discusses our core human nature. Are we basically good? How you answer this question says a lot about your world view. After attending this Prager University course, that view may change.
A British hotel replaces the in-room Gideon Bibles with copies of Fifty Shades of Grey (aka Mommy porn). A Christian organization is banned by the Advertising Standards Authority from announcing that God can heal sickness today. And a recent poll indicates that only 37% of people in England say they have always believed in God, as opposed to 81% of Americans. Christian England, what has become of you?
The hotel in question was the Damson Dene Hotel in Cumbria, Northwest England, and the idea to replace the Bibles with the racy novel came earlier this month from Wayne Bartholomew, general manager of the hotel and “reportedly a choir member at his local church.” (One wonders what kind of church Mr. Bartholomew attends.)
But that is just one hotel, and there was some outrage over the general manager’s decision. What happened to a Christian group in Bath England in February was far more telling. The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) banned a ministry named Healing on the Streets Bath from announcing on its website and in leaflets that God can heal today, ruling that “this is a ‘misleading’ ad which could sow ‘false hope’ amongst sections of the public.” And the ASA made this decision despite the fact that the message of healing in Jesus’ name is as old as the Gospels while the group simply offered to pray for sick people without making any guarantees. (Saying “can” is different than saying “will.”)
Cutting-edge columnist Brendan O'Neill could not resist taking a swipe at the ASA’s ban, writing, “The ASA has been itching to ban the words ‘God heals’ for quite a while. Last June, it rapped the knuckles of a church in Nottingham for putting up a poster that said ‘God can heal you today!’ after the church was grassed up to the ASA by some snitch in Nottingham’s Secular Society. And now it has actually banned a Christian group from proselytising about God’s healing powers. What next? Should we ban groups from declaring that ‘Jesus loves you!’, considering that is probably also technically untrue and could promote ‘false hope’?”
Not to be outdone, in June, “Three church groups [were] suspended from preaching at a secondary school after a leaflet containing homophobic scripture was delivered to homes in Walthamstow.”
In other words, because the leaflets contained a Bible verse that spoke against homosexual practice (part of a list of ten sinful behaviors in the verse; see 1 Corinthians 6:9-10), they were suspended from using a public school for their meetings. (It should also be noted that the verse was one of several on the leaflet, and homosexual practice was absolutely not the focus of the leaflet.)
Remarkably, all three church groups denied distributing the leaflets, with one theory being that it was the work of a “rogue parishioner.” The spokesman for one of the church groups stated that, “It is ill advised to put that sort of thing on a leaflet and we would certainly never do it,” while a local atheist who received the leaflet said, “People who preach this sort of thing shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near a school.” Perhaps verses like this should just be cut out of the Bible to avoid all offense?
And then there was the case of Eunice and Owen Johns, a Christian couple in their 60’s who had cared for 15 foster children in the past. Last year, England’s High Court ruled that they could no longer take in children after a gay activist organization brought a complaint against them, concerned that kids in their care could be “infected” with Christianity.
As Eunice Johns explained, “All we wanted to do was to offer a loving home to a child in need. We have a good track record as foster parents, but because we are Christians with mainstream views on sexual ethics, we are apparently unsuitable as foster parents.”
In May, the courts again ruled that the Johns’ could not provide care for a 16th child. As Eunice stated, “The judges have suggested that our views might harm children.” (She had previously told a social worker who pressed her about her faith that she would provide love and care for a child who identified as homosexual but would not tell the child that homosexuality was “okay.”) She continued, “We have been told by the Equality and Human Rights Commission that our moral views may ‘infect’ a child. We do not believe that this is so.”
Ironically, the initial court ruling against the Johns’ came down just weeks after magazine covers around the world breathlessly announced the news that Elton John and his partner David Furnish now had a baby boy, all of which leads me to ask: Christian England, home of men like John Bunyan, John Wesley, William Wilberforce, G. K. Chesterton, J. R. R. Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis, home of cities named Christ Church and of once-Christian universities like Oxford and Cambridge, what has become of you?
Rep. Paul Ryan, (R-Wis), chairman of the House budget committee, provoked some angry push back when he claimed that not only is his proposed sweeping revamp of the US budget fiscally sound but also morally sound.
In a CBN interview, Ryan said he draws inspiration from his Catholic faith.
He argues that Catholic priority for caring for the poor should focus on helping folks move out of poverty. “…..don’t make people dependent on government so they stay stuck in their station in life, help people get out of poverty out onto life of independence.”
Catholics criticizing Ryan don’t see it this way. They see him cutting back on welfare programs that focus on the needy.
But this is not a new debate, and it’s not limited to Catholics. Those on the religious left of all religious persuasions have long been criticizing religious conservatives, claiming they’re indifferent to poverty and care only about abortion and homosexuality.
It’s a critical discussion for our nation today and Ryan deserves credit for casting his proposed reforms in moral as well economic terms. It provides the opportunity to challenge today’s conventional wisdom that morality and economy are separate universes having little to do with each other.
It’s not true.
I can speak from personal experience going back to my years on welfare. The intent of federal welfare programs might have been to help the poor, but they caused far more damage than benefit.
When you tell a poor mother that to qualify for her check, she must demonstrate that she is single, not working, and has no savings, what are the chances she’ll get married, look for a job, and put money in the bank? When this goes on for generations, what do you think this does to a community?
It’s no accident that in 1960, according to the Pew Research Center, five years before President Johnson signed into law his War on Poverty, 61 percent of black adults were married. By 2008 this was down to 32 percent. In 1960, 2 percent of black children had a parent that had never been married. By 2008, this was up to 41 percent.
Consider Social Security. Social Security’s Board of Trustees just issued a devastating annual report. They project the system going into the red in 2035, three years earlier than predicted last year. The system’s long term unfunded liabilities – the amount by which projected obligations exceed projected revenues - are $8.6 trillion, more than half the size of the entire US economy.
Discussions about how to fix the system focus on numbers and accounting. But the numbers are symptoms, not causes.
The Social Security payments that current retirees get are from the payroll taxes that those currently working pay. What is driving the system into bankruptcy is the shrinking number of those working per retiree. In 1950 the average was 16.5 workers per retiree. Now it is 2.9. The Trustees report projects this to be down to 2.0 by 2035.
What happened?
One major factor is we’re having fewer children. Fertility rates - the average number of births per woman - have fallen dramatically. The average U.S. fertility rate, per the UN, in the period 2005-2010 was 40 percent lower than during 1950-1955.
John Mueller of the Ethics and Public Policy Center argues convincingly of the major impact of legal abortion to this dramatic drop in the ratio of those working to retirees.
To solve our national crisis we need to sort out symptoms from causes. The bankruptcy of our entitlement programs is the symptom.
The cause is loss of individual freedom and breakdown of values, personal responsibility and marriage caused by entitlement culture materialism.
Paul Ryan is right to see this in moral terms. We must change, and all change begins with character and personal transformation.
I never paid much attention to what Roger Ebert said about movies.
