Sunday School Class, September 28 and October 5, 2008

Leader:  Jim Mahaffey

Topic:  Nuclear Energy and Biblical Stewardship

Psalm 24:  1) The earth is the LORD's, and the fullness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein. 2) For he hath founded it upon the seas, and established it upon the floods.

A former Georgia Tech professor and a published physicist,  Jim will lead our discussions for two weeks on a topic now in the forefront in both the Presidential election and in the mind of a public worried about global warming and foreign oil.

Jim has been asked to address some of these questions and your questions:

"If the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof...." (the 24th Psalm), does that include Yucca Mountain?"  Can we in good conscience put nuclear waste anywhere in the Lord's world?

As to nuclear waste, "How happy would we be if we were still having to store all the horse manure that horses excreted in the time of Henry VIII?"  With the half-life, is that not an appropriate analogy?

Last, we have seen O-rings on the Challenger, we have seen the mighty Titanic on the bottom, we have seen Vioxx injure those it was meant to help, we have seen Chernobyl.  Is not nuclear energy plainly the modern Tower of Babel, i.e. man's incredible hubris in the face of the near certainty of engineering limitations.  Our arrogance leads us away from the simple proposition that the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof.  If we seek to ignore this, will the Tower of Babel come down and the natural forces will consume us?

September 21, 2008

Quotes about The Irony of American History by Reinhold Niebuhr:


One Source:  Forged during the tumultuous but triumphant postwar years when America came of age as a world power, The Irony of American History is more relevant now than ever before. Cited by politicians as diverse as Hillary Clinton and John McCain, Niebuhr’s masterpiece on the incongruity between personal ideals and political reality is both an indictment of American moral complacency and a warning against the arrogance of virtue. Impassioned, eloquent, and deeply perceptive, Niebuhr’s wisdom will cause readers to rethink their assumptions about right and wrong, war and peace.


Another Source:  In 1952, he wrote The Irony of American History, in which he shared with his readers the various struggles (political, ideological, moral and religious) in which he participated. His writings reflect a penetrating criticism of the social gospel liberalism of his youth and his search for alternatives. For a while he tried to synthesize various elements of Marxism and Christianity. Both his political experience and his deepening Christian values, however, caused him to abandon the work in favor of an ideology he called Christian Realism. Its views combined elements of the Augustinianism of the Reformation with his own hard-won political wisdom. His concepts were crystallized in the Gifford Lectures of Edinburgh University in 1940 as The Nature and Destiny of Man, which is his magnum opus. In it he comes as close as he ever did to a systematic presentation of his theology.