7.3.07

choose your own adventure

in the vein of your favorite 80's book series and mine (or was it more 90's? i think maybe it spanned the two), choose one from the options below to interact with and respond (?) to...of course, if you're like me, then you used to try one path and then, when you died, came back and tried another, and then when you lived, tried to figure out how to die differently. wow...what a gruesome series. well, anyway...i meant to conclude that sentence by indicating you're welcome to explore more than one option...

democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards had some great thoughts the other day when interviewed for an beliefnet.com. he contends that Christ would be appalled by our self-centeredness, particularly that it comes at the expense of many who have such great need in the world today. while i'm not sold on any presidential candidate yet, there is a lot about Edwards that interests me...including the bits of his healthcare plan that are mentioned at the end of this article.

going totally out of the box, (but over the counter), this non-prof is pushing a drug through the entire beaurocratic process to help people who desperately need it. it also offers a stinging critique (somewhat unwittingly) of the process by which our society only forwards things that are in our own interest (particularly of the profit kind of interest).

sex is always a hot topic, and Lauren Winner wrote an excellent editorial for the New York Times that challenges the way in which the church has been approaching this topic with youth in the last several decades. with Rob Bell's new book, Sex God, xxxchurch, and more books, websites, etc coming out on sexuality and particularly how Christians interact with it, this will continue to be a relevant issue that we desperately need to evaluate how we approach.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm being out-of-the-box here and commenting on the Blogger site.

That black fever thing was disgusting and encouraging at the same time. I wonder how many more there are like that that would save so many people's lives or health if they could be made into money. One of my profs was telling us about some drug that can cut the chances of AIDS developing in kids born to AIDS or HIV (details fuzzy) parents by a huge percent that wasn't being developed because it wasn't profitable.

But he said that some us organizations were taking it up. Sad, isn't it...

joeldaniel said...

yay dan...
glad you're traversing all the way to blogger : )

the drug your professor might be referring to is AZT, a drug that early on was developed because it was believed to be a possibility for curing AIDS. it didn't work out, though they did find that it can drastically cut the transmission from mother to children. without treatment, HIV will be passed from mother to child about 25% of the time...with treatment this can be cut to about 2%. but this drug hasn't been distributed and used in many of the places it's needed most.