Via Strange Herring, there is this piece by Matthew Parris in the U.K. Times: As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God.

Before Christmas I returned, after 45 years, to the country that as a boy I knew as Nyasaland. Today it’s Malawi, and The Times Christmas Appeal includes a small British charity working there. Pump Aid helps rural communities to install a simple pump, letting people keep their village wells sealed and clean. I went to see this work.

It inspired me, renewing my flagging faith in development charities. But travelling in Malawi refreshed another belief, too: one I’ve been trying to banish all my life, but an observation I’ve been unable to avoid since my African childhood. It confounds my ideological beliefs, stubbornly refuses to fit my world view, and has embarrassed my growing belief that there is no God.

Now a confirmed atheist, I’ve become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people’s hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.

I used to avoid this truth by applauding – as you can – the practical work of mission churches in Africa. It’s a pity, I would say, that salvation is part of the package, but Christians black and white, working in Africa, do heal the sick, do teach people to read and write; and only the severest kind of secularist could see a mission hospital or school and say the world would be better without it. I would allow that if faith was needed to motivate missionaries to help, then, fine: but what counted was the help, not the faith.

But this doesn’t fit the facts. Faith does more than support the missionary; it is also transferred to his flock. This is the effect that matters so immensely, and which I cannot help observing.

Read it all for Parris’s more specific and certainly rather significant observations.

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Via BabyBlueOnline, there is this story by Bland Simpson, called “Christmas with Dylan.” It’s a very charming account of the author’s “pilgrimage” from North Carolina to visit Bob in Woodstock in December of 1968. Is it all true? It has the unpretentious ring of simple truth, but naturally only the author and Bob know for sure.

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The estimable Nat Hentoff (even if I would disagree with plenty of his politics) has been laid off by the Village Voice. Wesley J. Smith writes on some aspects of this story here: Selective Memory.

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Feeling chilly where you live? Me too. “Climate scientists,” however, feel that it’s not cold enough for us, and further that the global campaign to reduce carbon emissions and impoverish all those parasitic humans is not moving with sufficient speed, so they’re now calling for the augmentation of these efforts by adding gargantuan quantities of iron filings to the oceans, injecting reflective particles into the atmosphere, and various other absurd actions intended to reduce earthly temperatures. Read about it here. You might well ask why it is even believed that human beings can alter the climate, or should attempt measures to alter it back, when historically no one has even ever succeeded in reliably inducing such a straightforward thing as rain (or non-rain) despite considerable efforts in that direction over the years. You might well ask many things, but good questions don’t necessarily get good answers these days.

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