Month: August 2024

Unificationist Perspectives on the LGBTQ Phenomenon

By Mark Lincoln

About ten years ago, I was working for a large corporation in my hometown of Omaha, Nebraska. The company, like many large corporations, was eager to develop a reputation for diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) by supporting groups within the company. Groups already existed for veterans, African-American employees, and those with disabilities. A new employee resource group for gays and lesbians had just been created.

While the campaign for gay rights had been framed as a civil rights issue, I had always seen it as a moral issue. I let my views be made known in our online company chat room. At one point, my manager called me to his office to explain that if I continued airing my views in the company chat room, I could be in danger of losing my job.

Preferring not to interrupt my breadwinner status for my family, I ended my participation in the online discussion. So ended my first public experience with the LGBTQ phenomenon. The issue was highly emotional and politicized; a hot topic with little middle ground.

About five years later, I approached a middle-aged lady in the Family Dollar parking lot asking if she would help us with our One Million Family Blessing campaign. She immediately asked me what I thought about gay people. I told her I felt sorry for them because they could not have children. That offended her. She became upset and complained to the manager. He came out to talk to me because he could see how upset the lady was, but he had received the Blessing a few days before.

So ended my second experience with the LBGTQ phenomenon leaving me dissatisfied regarding my ability to relate with the people of that community.

A few years later, after I retired, I was doing American Clergy Leadership Conference (ACLC) ministerial outreach at an Episcopal Church. I was aware that this denomination had a very liberal policy on gay ordination and marriage. Father John, the pastor, was kind enough to sit down with me for a chat. I brought up the topic of the need for the body of Christ (i.e., all Christian churches) to unite as one and use their combined strength to fight evil in the world. Seemingly out-of-the-blue, Father John asked me what I thought about homosexuals. 

This time, I was not in a parking lot talking to a local shopper. We were two ministers with a background in Biblical scriptures; a strong common base, I thought. When I answered that the Bible is very clear about homosexuality calling it wrong (Lev. 18:22), he disagreed with me, arguing that “God is a God of love, not judgment.” 

I chose the word “phenomenon” in my title because a “phenomenon” is defined as a fact or situation that is observed to exist or happen, especially one whose cause or explanation is in question. If I have learned anything about the LGBTQ phenomenon, it is that the phenomenon is very complex with a constellation of issues. 

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‘Twisters’: Taming Nature’s Fury

By Kathy Winings

Tornados were a constant for me as a child in Indiana.

Each summer, when a violent storm took place, we listened attentively to the radio for alerts warning us about a possible tornado. Our family rehearsed what to do in case one actually touched down in our neighborhood.

Fortunately, I never personally experienced a tornado or its destructive force. The closest I got to them was providing disaster relief and mitigation to the families and businesses who did experience one.

Throughout my extensive career directing the work of IRFF, a sustainable development and disaster response agency, I have witnessed the devastation that even a relatively weak tornado can do to someone’s home or business. Having witnessed first-hand the pain and devastation that results, I could relate to the disaster-based movie, Twisters, currently in theaters.

This film, directed by Lee Isaac Chung, who helmed 2020’s multiple Academy Award-nominated Minari, picks up where the 1996 movie, Twister, left off. Whereas the storm chasers in that film were trying to get special sensors into the heart of a tornado to collect vital data on its inner workings to create a more effective early warning system, now the study of tornadoes has developed beyond data collection.

In this new film, the focus is on developing a chemical compound that, once launched into the tornadoes center, will stop a formed tornado. Kate Cooper (Daisy Edgar Jones), a young, bright-eyed doctoral student who has a sixth sense about storms and tornadoes, is committed to finding a way to stop tornadoes in their tracks to prevent the loss of more homes and towns. The chemical compound is the brainchild of Kate and her fellow researchers.

However, when Kate and her research team encounter an EF-5 level tornado, the strongest kind, she loses all but one of her teammates when they are trapped by the tornado and sucked up into the storm. Her grief and sense of guilt over the loss drives her to drop her studies and leave the Oklahoma tornado alley for the safe confines of a meteorological research center in New York. 

As with many disaster-themed movies, Cooper is drawn back into the fray when the other surviving team member from her past, Javi (Anthony Ramos), contacts her and invites her to return to Oklahoma to provide much-needed wisdom and advice to his new team of storm chasers. She reluctantly agrees to give the team one week, which becomes one filled with old ghosts, nightmare images of that earlier storm, and new possibilities. 

She quickly learns how much the field of storm chasers has changed during her five-year absence. Not only did the technology become more sophisticated and powerful, but those engaged in the chase now represent a broad spectrum of individuals and groups who are not all concerned with the science of tornadoes.

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Mental Health is a Spiritual Topic

By Esfand Zahedi

What comes to mind when we hear the term “mental health?” We often consider mental unwellness to mean the presence of undesirable qualities such as anger, depression, guilt, or other negative emotions. Being mentally ill might also mean being a threat to oneself or others.

If these tendencies are not present, suppressed, or visible, we may consider a person to be in a more or less healthy state. This is a narrow way of discussing mental health because we are defining it by a negative condition. To say that mental health consists of the presence of good characteristics is to define it in positive terms. We will understand mental health better if we have a positive and objective definition of mental well-being.

Jesus described this health in terms of a person either “having life” or being “dead,” terms used to refer to people alive from a physical point of view. A person who is truly alive and fruitful is exceptional, and these individuals are the light of the world. Spiritual vitality and not belief in a doctrine is what “having life” means. Many people who are about their worldly business in truth resemble a barren fig tree and are not truly aware and therefore not healthy. Mental health in this sense is not the norm but the exception. The goal of conventional psychology it seems, is not true mental health but adjustment to a minimum standard.

Let us expand our concept of mental wellness to that of well-being for the whole person. This considers the entirety of what it means for a person to be well, embracing the body and mind as well as the character and spiritual state of the individual. In light of this definition, we can understand mental health in relation to other things, including excellence, integrity, productivity, intelligence, and self-control. Moral and spiritual is mental health. A morally and mentally healthy person is one who expresses excellence. An excellent person does not merely pass a test of mental health, but flourishes and stands out as unique, capable, and successful. 

Mental illness in today’s world is increasing and is not improving by treatment with medications or by a true understanding of psychology. This means that many medical practices are based on error and must be discontinued and replaced with sound practices. Whether mental illness is produced by the negative influence of new technologies, the lack of a God-centered culture, or the overeating of processed food (who knows the real cause?), we will not solve it by watching the news, increasing funds, or putting more trust in the medical establishment. 

What is certain is that our human problems will not be helped by clinging to the latest form of technology or a new medication as the long-sought solution. We must change our ideas. A human problem needs a human solution, and the solution will involve a true understanding of what it means to be human and structuring everyday life after the pattern of the unchanging truth.

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