This weekend’s Midwest Emergent Gathering, held July 20-21 in Rolling Meadows, Illinois, was an event that I enjoyed participating in immensely. I was invited, by my friend Mike Clawson of up/rooted (Chicago), to answer several questions in a plenary session. I was billed as a friendly “outsider.” We laughed about this designation since many of my critics now assume that I am a “heretical insider” to Emergent. The truth is that neither is totally true. I am not so much a part of this movement, at least not in any recognizable or formal way, as I am a real friend of all things missional that sincerely address the basic questions that I feel very strongly must be faced by Christians within Western culture.

It is a basic fact that the church regularly reduces the gospel, to something less or other than than the gospel, in its various attempts to translate the good news into a faithful witness within any culture. This is true in Asia, Latin America and Africa as well. (Witness the cover story of the current Christianity Today on the impact of the prosperity gospel in Africa, where the greatest church growth is also taking place.) This does not mean the church is no longer the church. It does mean reformation is always necessary, thus the faithful church must be semper reformanda, always reforming. This realization grows out of a sober view of the humanity of the church. (The church is a divine organism with the life of Christ in it but it is also very human at the same time.) But many conservative Christians, especially if they are over forty, tend to think serious criticism of the church, or questioning the ways Christians think and believe (epistemology), is tantamount to arrogance and undermining the faith itself. Because I want to open a wide discussion of epistemology (i.e., the ways that we know what is true and not true) I am routinely questioned about whether I still believe in truth at all. When I say that I clearly and strongly do believe in the truth then I am then called a liar, or given some similar flattering insightful response.

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Over at the Becker-Posner blog, the gentlemen consider the question, “Do National Security and Environmental Energy Policies Conflict?” (a topic also discussed here.)

Becker predicts, “Driven by environmental and security concerns, more extensive government intervention in the supply and demand for energy are to be expected during the next few years in all economically important countries. Policies that meet both these concerns are feasible, and clearly would have greater political support than the many approaches that advance one of these goals at the expense of the other.”

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Senator and Presidential candidate Barack Obama has gained support from some Evangelical Christians. I recall some students and faculty at the Wesleyan Evangelical seminary that I attended supported Obama. Jim Wallis of Sojourners, when on the lecture circuit, constantly compares Obama with famed British Parliamentarian William Wilberforce.

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A big tip o’ the hat to Joe Carter over at evangelical outpost for including the Acton PowerBlog in The EO 100, which he describes as “the top 100 blogs that I have found to be the most convicting, enlightening, frustrating, illuminating, maddening, stimulating, right-on and/or wrongheaded by Christians expressing a Christian worldview.”

Read more on PowerBlog Cracks EO’s Top 10…

Acton continues its award winning ad campaign by looking at how the entrepreneurial calling begins at an early age. A child who sets up a lemonade stand outside of his house is an entrepreneur, assuming a certain amount of risk and responsibility and providing a product that will increase the happiness of passers by. Adults often praise the hard work of children, especially children who find ways to earn something through their hard work, but often this attitude changes as the child becomes a successful business person or entrepreneur.

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Arnold Kling had the opportunity to screen The Call of the Entrepreneur and published his reactions to it on Tech Central Station. In this rave review Mr. Kling, in the first paragraph, calls The Call both the “most subversive film” he has ever seen, and “a threat to tyranny everywhere.” He points out that while the film uses the so-called “G-word,” it avoids the scare-tactics that “An Inconvenient Truth,” also a religious film in his view, makes use of and is based around a much more rational exploration of evidence.

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Bringing to your attention two recent publications by Journal of Markets & Morality contributors:

The first is Less Than Two Dollars a Day: A Christian View of World Poverty aand the Free Market, by Kent Van Til, published by Eerdmans.

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Readings in Social Ethics: John Chrysostom, On Wealth and Poverty, part 3 of 3. There are six sermons in this text, based on the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. This post deals with the third and final pair. The first four sermons dealt directly with Chrysostom’s exegesis of the parable of Lazarus and the rich man. These latter two sermons were given on different occasions. References are to page numbers.

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Here’s an interesting report from the Media Research Center’s Business & Media Institute on the cyclical nature of media coverage on the issue of climate change. We all know about the global cooling craze of the 1970′s, but who knew that the issue goes back more than a century?

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How do you “end poverty” in the developing world? Well, certainly not by promoting a “poverty agenda” that has proven to be a failure again and again. The two items below both appeared yesterday. The first is from a review of “The Elephant and the Dragon,” a book by Robyn Meredith, a Hong Kong-based correspondent for Forbes magazine. The second is from a commentary by the chairman of Microsoft India in the Wall Street Journal (reg. req’d).

Read more on OK, Let’s Review…