Dr. Jay Richards made an appearance this morning on AM Tampa Bay, the morning news show on Newsradio 970 WFLA, to discuss how the pro-Kyoto side of the global warming debate has become something akin to a religious movement. You can listen to the interview by clicking here (800K mp3 file). If you want to hear more of Jay, and you’re in or around Medford, Oregon, you can tune in today to AM 1440 KMED today at 10:00 Eastern/8:00 Mountain as Jay chats with host Bill Meyer on the same topic.

UPDATE: Jay’s interview wrapped up a little bit ago. If you missed it, it looks like there’s a chance that it may be archived on this page today or tomorrow.

Anthony Bradley is also making the media rounds this week to discuss the minimum wage raise that just took effect. He’ll be on a number of shows in the coming days, the biggest being the Mancow show out of Chicago on Thursday morning at 8:10 Eastern. Check out Mancow.com for more info on where to catch the broadcast in your area.

UPDATE: Anthony Bradley talks Hot Ghetto Mess on KFBK in Sacramento, California (850K mp3 file).

UPDATE II: Anthony just put in an appearance on The Helen Glover Show on WHJJ radio in Providence, Rhode Island on the same topic. Listen here (3.5 mb mp3 file).

The National Urban League forgot to invite me to be one of the keynote speakers at their annual conference meeting in St. Louis this week, July 25-28. I’m not mad. I’m sure it was just an oversight. I would have been much cheaper than Hilary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards. But, if had a platform at the conference I would make the case that black America will self-destruct if we don’t address the following issues immediately:

(1) The marriage and family crisis--nearly 70 percent of all black kids are born to single parents; 43 percent of black women and nearly 53 percent of black men will never marry

(2) Abortion--over 43 percent of all black pregnancies end in abortion

(3) Education--almost half of the black kids in urban schools don’t graduate and of those who do they are primarily female.

(4) Nearly all black colleges and universities have become women’s colleges--most black colleges average 60-67 percent female populations

(5) The declining significance of the black church among the hip hop generation (those 40-years-old and under).

(6) HIV/AIDS--Black women make up almost 70 percent (7,586 out of 11,859) of all new AIDS cases among women.

(7) Ghetto culture and misogyny in some segments of hip hop culture.

(8) Rhetoric vs. Reality--Do massive government programs help poor blacks in the long run?

(9) The need for promotion of Black Enterprise Magazine’s “Declaration of Financial Empowerment”--A wonderful savings and investing tool!!

(10) Saving Black Men--Black men in America are in trouble. Low high-school graduation rates, fatherlessness, high incarceration rates, lack of moral and spiritual formation, and, worst of all, black men have no venue to discuss personal pain and heal from deep woundedness (physical or psychological). The League has a “Women of Power” workshop and that’s part of the problem. What is needed is a “Men of Power” workshop. There’s been such an emphasis on developing black women that black men are being left behind.

There are wonderful workshops this year as well ranging from entrepreneurial activities, to professional development, to health. Maybe I’ll get to speak there next year.

I was thinking this morning about the moral calculus that goes into discussions about climate change policy. It’s the case that for any even or action, there are an infinite number of causes (conditions that are necessary but not sufficient for the event to occur).

But only a finite number of causes, perhaps in most cases a single cause, can have any moral relevance. For a cause to be a moral cause, it has to have be related to a moral agent. So, for instance, if the earth is warming, one of the contributing causes is the energy output of the sun. Since the sun isn’t a moral agent (as far as I know), solar activity isn’t a moral cause of climate change.

But if human activity is changing the makeup of the earth’s atmosphere so that it retains relatively more of the solar output of energy, that’s a cause that has moral relevance. Even though the sun’s activity is a prior cause (both logically and temporally) to any human activity, only human activity has any moral bearing. This might be a major reason why folks in not only policy circles, but also in more popular discourse, tend to focus on what humans are or are not doing that is affecting the climate.

It’s a truism that the perspective of human beings is essentially anthropocentric, but this truism is valid even for those who like to think of themselves as more enlightened. So, environmentalists and other activists instinctively focus on the moral causes of various policy issues. For climate change, that means the focus is almost exclusively on the human contributions to climate change, even if these are objectively a rather small contributing cause compared to other factors.

This holds true in the most recent reaction to the flooding that has hit London. One commentator observes that “The prophets of Biblical times, who warned of the misfortune that would befall those who turned away from God, have been replaced by computer-generated models which apparently conclusively prove that ‘The End is Nigh!’”

Climate change prophets point directly to the “sin” of emitting carbon. There is a real reason to question the validity of this moral reasoning, not least of which because it resembles Pharisaical moral calculation. When a man born blind came to Jesus, the spiritual authorities inquired as to the direct moral cause of the blindness. Had this man sinned or had his parents? Jesus rejects their attempts to find individual or personal moral cause of the blindness.

If the London floods are a case of God’s judgment, it’s likely that the divine reaction isn’t exclusively, or even primarily, to the chosen mode of human transportation. When John Chrysostom preached a sermon following a huge earthquake, it did cause him to reflect on the moral causes of the disaster.

What Chrysostom didn’t do was point to specific human actions that would naturally occasion an earthquake. He wondered instead, “Have you seen the mortality of the human race? When the earthquake came, I reflected with myself and said, where is theft? Where is greed? Where is tyranny? Where is arrogance? Where is domination? Where is oppression? Where is the plundering of the poor? Where is the arrogance of the rich? Where is the domination of the powerful? Where is intimidation? Where is fear?”

Following Chrysostom’s lead, which better follows the biblical precedent than the latest eco-prophets, would lead us to question a far greater range of moral failings than filling up an SUV: “So I was not afraid because of the earthquake, but because of the cause of the earthquake; for the cause of the earthquake was the anger of God, and the cause of His anger was our sins. Never fear punishment, but fear sin, the mother of punishment.”

It’s also important to note that Chrysostom links punishment to love, in the sense that the punishment is intended to bring repentance and reconciliation. Divine wrath is one form of treatment for sin, and in this way can actually be an expression of God’s love. So, God’s love and God’s wrath might not be so easy to juxtapose as some others have done in the wake of the recent flooding.

More reading: “Blaming the Victims: An Ecumenical Disaster”