Sunday roundup

A study, which claims that those pesky Europeans who came to the Americas back in the 1490 - 1700 period caused climate chaos, reported on by CNN is just a little too chock-full of all the right accusations:

Does anybody else think this sounds a little contrived?

I mean, this theory has it all. Horrible white people flaunting their privilege and taking whatever they want? Check. Indigenous people of color suffering at the hands of racist invaders? Check. Nature avenging this cold cruelty with plummeting temperatures of her own? Checkaroo. If this got any more woke, they could mix it with high fructose corn syrup and go head to head with Bawls Guarana.

Give CNN credit though, as they at least acknowledged the obvious:

Before this study, some scientists had argued the temperature change in the 1600s, called the Little Ice Age, was caused only by natural forces.

One of those forces being something called the Maunder Minimum, an period of time during which sunspot activity had diminished precipitously. To give you an idea of just how much, observers noted fewer than 50 sunspots during this minimum—compared to between 40,000 and 50,000 in the modern era.

And when did all this happen take place? During the Little Ice Age.

What was once the defining feature of a declining mainline Protestantism, as well as pockets of Catholicism of a certain odor - that is, replacing focus on the saving blood of Jesus with a social-justice preoccupation - is now infecting evangelicalism:

In a recent podcast, the current president of the Southern Baptist Convention (until now a theologically conservative body), J.D. Greear, highlighted "white privilege" as a serious moral issue for Christians.  Likewise, David Platt, former president of the SBC's International Mission Board, browbeat evangelicals for having too much of the same skin color: "Why are so many of our churches so white?"

At another historically conservative denomination, the Presbyterian Church of America, things are not any better.  Its institution and my own alma mater, Covenant Seminary, hosted a conference on race whose onetime director was a Black Lives Matter activist.  Furthermore, the seminary and the PCA denomination as a whole have been embroiled in controversy over the Revoice Conference, which promotes the idea of LGBT victimhood.

The result? A diminishment of individual agency and culpability:

Terrorism, riots, murder, bullying, and genocide have all been excused as justified responses to victimization, real or imagined.  In his book The Vanishing Conscience, California pastor John MacArthur comments, "Anyone can escape responsibility for his or her wrongdoing simply by claiming the status of a victim."  Along with leftist victimhood ideology, he noted that the psychotherapeutic outlook has contributed significantly to the muting of conscience in modern churches.  For instance, many church leaders are convinced that instruction about personal sin and guilt wounds self-esteem.

The UN behaves true to form:

The United Nations is again facing accusations of anti-Israel bias for erasing from display the location of an Israeli-made bottle of wine during a recent Holocaust remembrance event, according to pictures provided to the Washington Free Beacon.

During a U.N. Holocaust memorial event sponsored by Austria and Norway earlier this week, an Israeli-made wine was served. However, "Golan Heights Winery," where the wine was produced, appears to have been blacked out on the label so it can no longer be viewed, according to pictures.

The overall arc of Sohrab Ahmari's journey from secular agnostic to Christian is compelling, but it's also full of aspects that are surprising on their own. For instance, did you know there were still pockets of cosmopolitanism in Iranian society several years after the revolution?

Contrary to some internet misinformation, Ahmari came to Christianity from Western materialism and relativism, not from Islam. Of his conversion, he writes that “I had turned my back against Marx, Nietzsche and Foucault, not the prophet Muhammad, whose religion had left only faint imprints on my soul by the time I entered adulthood.”

His childhood recollections of Iran are fascinating nonetheless. Born in the 1980s, Sohrab was raised in middle-class comfort amid the circumspect remnants of artistic and bohemian circles. His parents drank alcohol and had an excellent supplier of contraband VHS tapes. Their faith “amounted to a kind of liberal sentimental ecumenism.” Despite mandatory religion classes in school, Shiite Islam never gained much purchase in his soul.

The moment of saying yes to the Lord years later sounds a lot like the way it was for me:

He had become too comfortable in half-belief, and tarried there without reaching the rest of Christ and his kingdom. But “the house on the Cape of Olives warned me that there was no time to waste. I, too, had to throw myself at the foot of the Cross without delay.” The embarrassment, pride, and comfortable hesitation that held him back were overcome.

There was now urgency to his knowledge that “our Lord’s gift of radical absolution on the Cross was the only thing capable of repairing the brokenness in me and around me.”

Great piece at The Bulwark by Kimberly Ross and Andrea Ruth entitled "Why We Are Quitting Red State." I'd started checking out Red State again even after the big Salem purge, but lately I'd noticed a turn of editorial tone that struck me as irreversible.