Eva Cassidy

When I went to Germany for a month in 2001, I roomed with a friend who bought a CD in a local general store by a singer I'd never heard of named Eva Cassidy. He played it over and over again, and I cannot thank him enough for doing so because I absolutely fell head over heals in love with her voice.

I got home and instantly went out and bought the CD and played it to death.

You can find out a lot about her here, here and here. Briefly, she died of cancer in 1996, but I found out just recently that there was an amateur video made of a concert she did in a small venue and most of the clips are posted on YouTube.

Above is my favorite Eva song, and if you like it I recommend you buy the aforementioned CD, called Songbird. You will thank me forever for introducing her to you.

Mike Penner Becomes Christine Daniels

Mike Penner, sports writer for the L.A. Times, announced here that he will leave on vacation and return in a few weeks as Christine Daniels.

As I read this article, my initial response was to feel sorry for a guy who has been constantly afflicted with the "white noise" of really being a woman for over 40 years, and then have people tell him his brain was "wired female" even though they admit transsexualism is "a complicated and widely misunderstood medical condition."

A couple months ago I posted on a story about a 14 year old boy named Tim who became Kim. At that time I wrote:

"What makes a man male? His parts or his nature? In other words, just because his parts changed, does that mean he's no longer male?

If a man lost his "equipment" from cancer, would he no longer be male? What if he lost it, and wore dresses and makeup?

If a woman lost all of her "equipment" in an accident and wore men's clothing and talked with a deep voice, would she cease being female? I don't think so.

What did people do who thought like Tim before sex-change operations? They fought the thoughts in their mind with reality, or gave into them and were miserable.

My point: Just because you think or feel something, doesn't make it true no matter how strong the thought or feeling is. So much for self-control. If I feel it, it must be true?

The reality is Kim is Tim, and just because Tim took hormones to change his body's appearance, and just because he wears women's clothing, doesn't make him Kim. In fact, nothing can make Tim Kim."

I know that will not be persuasive for many of you. In fact, most of the comments I read on the L.A. Times website argued along the lines of "if it makes you happy it must be right and good and true."

Now, there is a lot of courage that goes into this decision. I don't want to minimize that, or the suffering he's gone through. And, I don't want to be like the Christians who posted Romans 1 and a call to repentance in the comments either.

Rather than punting to the sovereignty of God (which is true, and his operation is a prideful spurning of His sovereignty) to explain Mr. Penner's condition, I think more can be said about this.

What he's experiencing is certainly an effect of the Fall. If there was no sin, we would never think of our "software" conflicting with our "hardware."

Homosexuality is certainly a sin, but this article says nothing about his attraction to men. Should we just assume that's going on? I don't know.

Also, the article does not mention a wife or kids, who would trump any considerations of a sex change.

And, regardless of his operation, Mr. Penner is still loved by God and made in His image and in need of the gospel. He has been told the false gospel that his problem is not sin, but a prolonged difficulty with emotions that he can be "saved" from by mean of an operation.

However, I'll leave with these words from Ed Welch's, When People are Big and God is Small, which help me begin to understand what's going on in his mind:

"If you exalt the individual and make emotions the path to truth, then whatever you feel most strongly will be considered both good and necessary for growth. ... That is why the unpardonable sin in today's culture is to either 'deny' or suppress your emotions. Emotions point to needs, and to deny your needs is to deny something God-given and God-like." [But] "just because I feel a 'need'...doesn't mean that this desire is really a 'God-given need,' a 'legitimate need,' or a 'primal need.' Perhaps what I am calling 'need' is really disappointment or grief, or perhaps it is my demandingness and lust" (pgs. 87, 89).

I hope that as these episodes multiply, more and more Christians will write books and articles on gender, transsexuality, and what makes a man a man and not a woman from philosophical, theological and counseling angles.

Virginia Tech Massacre II

First, I am just sick and livid at NBC for airing that psychotic murderer's videos. Even in death, he played them for fools who gave him exactly what he wanted: 15 minutes of fame. I agree with Hugh Hewitt "what is rewarded is repeated." We'll see if he's prophetic.

And in our rush to find out what caused this senseless massacre, I just heard a radio host suggest that maybe it was the chemical in the murderer's parents dry cleaning business that threw his serotonin levels off and made him do this!

So much for personal responsibility for one's actions! How long until we're pushed to feel sympathy for this devil because his crimes against humanity really aren't his fault?

Enough of that. The real reason I opened this post was to tell you about Liviu Librescu.

I know this wonderful man I am singling out is well-known now, but I have to talk about him on the off-chance you don't know about him already. What follows comes from an excellent tribute to the victims on msnbc.com:

"Liviu Librescu, 76, an engineering science and mechanics lecturer. Born in Romania, he survived the Nazi Holocaust and emigrated to Israel in 1978 before moving to Virginia in 1985.

An Israeli citizen, he had taught at Virginia Tech for 20 years and was internationally known for his work in aeronautical engineering.

"His research has enabled better aircraft, superior composite materials, and more robust aerospace structures," said Ishwar Puri, the head of the engineering science and mechanics department.

After surviving the Nazi killings, Librescu escaped from communist Romania and made his way to the United States before he was killed in Monday’s massacre, which coincided with Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Librescu's son, Joe, said his father's students sent e-mails detailing how the professor saved their lives by blocking the doorway of his classroom from the approaching gunman before he was fatally shot.

“My father blocked the doorway with his body and asked the students to flee,” Joe Librescu said from his home outside Tel Aviv, Israel. “Students started opening windows and jumping out.”

There are so many more profiles to read here, here and here on msnbc.com. I cried as I read and know I'd cry more if I stayed on the site longer.

Please take the time to at least scan the photos and personalize this. Put real faces to the vague "32 killed" we see and hear in the news. I think it helps us see the massacre and that piece of human scum in the correct light.

Killing Preemies

This story, about the Nuffield Council on Bioethics concluding that preemie babies born before 22 weeks should not receive medical treatment, is making it's rounds, now appearing on the front page of msn.com. What is the clifnotes version of their conclusion? "We recommend infanticide." And tragically, the Church of England agrees with them. Listen to one of the committee members:

"Natural instincts are to try to save all babies, even if the baby’s chances of survival are low,” said Professor Margaret Brazier who chaired the committee that produced the report. "However, we don’t think it is always right to put a baby through the stress and pain of invasive treatment if the baby is unlikely to get better and death is inevitable.”

First, it is very dangerous to explain away our natural instincts. Our intuitions are often more right and more reliable than all the lofty philosophical arguments put together because God wrote His law on our hearts (Rom 2:14-15) so that we have an intuitive sense of right and wrong. That doesn't mean that we can't silence it, or that every intuition is from God, but no argument is needed to know the difference between the Holocaust and the cow death thanks to McDonald's. We just know one is evil and other is not.

Next, on non-religious grounds, if I was an evolutionist, survival is the highest good and goal of life, that is, the passing of my genes into the next generation (if I remember correctly, this is the argument of Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene). Therefore, even evolutionists should see this as evil because it deprives the preemie of even a chance at it's highest good: survival.

Third, it seems to me that living is worth "stress and pain," just ask those who endure chemotherapy or dialysis week in and week out in order to live. We cling tightly to things we value most. Contrary to the Islamofacists, life is more valuable than death. That's another moral intuition that tells us the health of 22 week old preemies should be sought after.

Also, one might say that since the baby can't speak we can't know whether they'd want to live or now. But, does it follow that since we don't know what they'd want, we should kill them. Should we assume they'd want to die, even if they knew the "struggle and pain" they'd go through? Whether it's here, or abortion, or euthanasia, it seems we should give the benefit of doubt to life. It seems we should err on the side of life.

Finally, it does not follow that we shouldn't treat severely ill patients, whether 22 week old preemies or not, simply because "death is inevitable." I don't know if this escaped Mrs. Brazier's notice, but death is inevitable for everybody. The logic of her argument leads to no treatment for any illness, which then leads to the shutting down of all hospitals. That's one of the ways you know your argument might be a little off, when it would lead to effects like hers.

One of the criteria by which civilizations are judged is how do they treat their most vulnerable. The West's report card isn't looking too good right now.