Dear Concerned Citizen,

  
September 12, 2005

A couple of weeks ago hurricane Katrina turned New Orleans, the laid back adult entertainment capital of America, into the Big Uneasy. Katrina unmasked the city's over-reliance on ineffective city, state, and federal governance. When levees surrounding New Orleans broke, a flood of water, looting, rape, and violence horrified the world. How can this be happening in America? Can the streets of New Orleans overnight become as dangerous as the streets of Baghdad?

They not only can. They did.

Headlines quickly morphed from Mother Nature's anything but maternal behavior into the failure of governance. Mayor Ray Nagin and Governor Kathleen Blanco and FEMA Director Michael Brown and President Bush all scrambled to avoid blame.

But these are not the most significant stories following Katrina. We all know that hurricanes cause disaster and that government is largely ineffective.

The most significant story following Katrina is that America's most robust first responders remain its families and its churches. In the first hours of Katrina's fury, families and local churches snapped to action. Thousands of local parishes donated hundreds of millions of dollars and countless hours of volunteer time as they reached out to others in need. This response of strength and love masked the flatfooted bickering of politicians and exposed the vulnerability of our over-secularized culture.

We expect families to care for each other. This is a key reason to promote their stability and unique contribution. But given how archaic and irrelevant churches continue to be portrayed in the press and in politics, many were amazed by their essential contribution in this time of need.

tothesource has been saying this for three years. The hard cultural assets of faith and family are not the fluff of our nation, they are its bedrock. tothesource will continue to expose the arrogance of the modern state when it attempts to dismantle these institutions. It is our position that our government's very existence is based on the strength and dignity of these communities of family and faith.

Faith and family sustain us. Government regulates us. Government in a limited way can enable us, but faith and family empower us. Therefore, government must not aid in their deconstruction. Instead, paradoxically, for government to be effective faith and family must flourish.

What we are witnessing again in the aftermath of Katrina is that the strength of America remains in our communities of faith and family.

We hope that story gets reported.

Responses to "Right to Die or Duty to Die" :

Hi, I love your newsletters! I'm excited to receive them each week, and happy to discover I can access older articles written before I subscribed. I'm writing to ask if you can direct me to any of your former editions that address the value of senior citizen women (specifically). I'm doing a Bible study titled "'Crone'ing Glory with Proverbs 16:31 as the text. I want to emphasize the important time of life for a woman of age (49 and up, pre and peri menoupausal), and that it should be embraced, modeled and projected, not dreaded, de-valued, leading to depression and bitterness; but I fear my resources to make a worthy presentation are too limited. New Age teaching on honoring the crone is huge. As a Christian I believe it's vital to emphatically provide a positive biblical view and plan of action to this minority who will soon be a majority. HELP! Please. - C. A. S.

How does this combining of adult and embryonic stem cells differ from cloning? Why is all the focus on embryonic stem cells when adult stem cells are already helping to create cures in humans and are being wasted daily? In 2002, I attempted to have the cord blood from my youngest child's birth donated for either curing people or research and was told that would not be possible. This valuable resource of stem cells is literally being thrown away, and we are arguing over whether we should create babies to kill them. Where are our priorities as a nation? - L. J.

I feel rather sorry for the editor(s)of TOTHESOURCE, cloaked in anonymity, arguing that they are misunderstood. In pursuit of an obviously partisan political agenda, they seem to have left their integrity lying on the road somewhere along the way. If Marshall McCluhan was right, and "The medium IS the message", what does that say about a moral values forum where article after article reeks of pride, half-truths, and utter contempt for one's neighbor? You insist that dissenting Christians don't dissect the articles carefully enough. I think we understand more than you know. Sign me a fellow Concerned Citizen, separated by a common religion - A. L. G.

We thank God that we have President Bush as our President. His critics are so unfair in their reporting and actions. We often wonder if the polls that are taken are done in a strong Democratic area, we never know of anyone that receives a call for our opinions and thoughts. - M. J. B.

We spotted a letter to the editor of Newsweek magazine this week responding to a recent Newsweek article critiquing Intelligent Design advocates. The message of the letter gets right to the point of a recent tothesource article so we contacted the sender and he agreed that we could share his response with our tothesource readers.

Jonathan Alter unfortunately reveals muddled thinking in his August 15 column about intelligent design, "Monkey See, Monkey Do." He castigates ID advocates for inappropriately mixing science and philosophy, stating that ID may "be good enough for a graduate course in the philosophy of science" but for little else. Yet he fails to see that proponents of Darwinist evolution regularly commit the very same offense. By demanding a view of life's origins that requires random chance as its cause, Darwinists interject into their theory purely philosophical points that can be neither verified nor falsified. Perhaps in the "last true marketplace of ideas," ID advocates are merely responding to philosophical truth claims by Darwinists with appropriately philosophical responses.

Clay J. Brown, Associate Pastor
Grace Presbyterian Church
Houston Texas

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We live complex lives. We strive to sort out priorities that sometimes conflict or seem incompatible. A moral framework is needed to help us understand the reality around us. Our Judeo-Christian heritage provides a framework to help us comprehend the choices we make and the conflicts that arise over them. It is not only the main source of our spiritual values, but also many of the secular values we depend on.

tothesource is a forum for integrating thinking and action within a moral framework that takes into account our contemporary situation. We will report the insights of cultural experts to the specific issues we face believing these sources will embolden people to greater faith and action.
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