A Place for Friends

Hello Friends,

As this blog gets going I want to let all of my friends, relatives, and acquaintances know that I have put this blog up as part of my purpose in life. God has given me certain passions and abilities, and given all the guidance and knowledge I have been blessed with in college I believe that this blog is part of my ministry on earth.

Therefore, I want to tackle issues and current events coming from the perspective that I am a Christian and an American, and a person, alive, on this planet, at this time in history. And so are a lot of all the people I know. If they are not a Christian or an American they are still all the other things. What I want to do, together with whomever will join me is recognize that we live in God's creation. It was once created good, but human beings disobeyed God and brought about the Fall. This has significant consequences for how we must address our world's problems.

I think then that the only way to approach issues is from the true realist perspective. The perspective that God does exist, he cares for his creation, we have been given characteristics of his image/personality, we corrupted that gift, Jesus innitiated the restoration of God's creation, but the time has not yet come when this redemptive act will be completed.

So, we must live in the meantime. I ask that all my friends continue to participate in the discussions that I will post on this blog, and that we can somehow strengthen our voices together and begin to shape real change in this country.

I can only hope that what you read about, write about, and think about in this blog will bring you to do something. Write letters to people, certainly pray for people and events, and get involved locally and nationally with organizations and with your vote.

Finally, I just want to thank all of the people I know for how you have contributed to my life and learning, and I can only hope that we can focus on things that challenge our world today and discover the wisdom necessary to be salt and light in this world.

God bless,

Jason Weakley

New and Improved - TheWeakleyReport blog

I have decided to start over in the blogging world. For many reasons this was necessary and some others just convenient.

Over the past few years since I started my website and blog I have thought I had a good purpose to what I was doing. Not to say that I did not, rather I now have gained more knowledge and a greater understanding of who I am in God's creation. And so I will be working to incorporate much of my newfound understandings – points of views and ways of organizing and presenting portions of my website – into the new WeakleyReport.com and The Weakley Report blog.

Specifically I am redirecting my attention from a target audience of the whole world interested in politics to a new audience of Christians of various stages along the journey towards Christ's likeness. A secondary audience will be those who are not yet Christians, however are familiar with Western civilization and the cultural impact of the Christian church.

My goal in redirecting the focus of my website and blog is to help renew in Christians a sense of duty to be salt and light in this world (Matthew 5:12-14). And to my secondary audience my goal is to help make them aware that they truly do live in God's creation, and what the implications of that are.

There is a story, a great story, to history that continues to be written even today. Humans have created a world of cynicism, and hopelessness that leads to relativism, apathy, and resignation. Every time society has tried to solve the world's problems by putting trust in the human spirit or collective strength of humanity, or whatever language you wish to put to it, the result has been an overwhelming failure followed by a disbursement.

For example, the world in 1914 thought that WWI would be the war to end all wars. Afterwards a League of Nations was established, and the economic growth of the Roaring 20's seemed to be the fruit of that generation's labor to usher in a utopian world. Yet the greed for power and money by the leading rulers and upper classes of victorious nations led to the downfall of this early intergovernmental organization after The Great Depression threatened international stability. The greed of men eroded everything which that same generation had thought was possible to build on a foundation of human achievement. The world was divided up between axis and allied powers, and again after WWII into the Free World and the Communist Bloc.

One problem facing this generation is that many of the divisions of the past generation have disappeared. Globalization offers promise for the future of humanity's potential to finally be able to build a good and just society. I believe that the window for this humanist optimism has or is closing. I do not think it is possible for such misguided optimism to last very long, in this case more than a decade. The period from 1919, the end of WWI, to 1929, the start of the Great Depression, is very similar to the period from 1991-2001. The period beginning in 1991 saw the fall of Communist Russia, the opening of markets, and the beginning of globalization. Economic growth around the world, but especially in the United States was punctured and punctuated by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

One thing in particular that I want to leave you with in this post is that if we are to descend into another period of history where cultures are separated by some circumstance like they have been in recent history by German, Japanese, and communist fascism (by the way, the democratic nations that opposed such forces are also known for their modern-day imperialism in the Global South). If this cycle is to continue, then hopelessness, apathy, relativism, and cynicism will continue as well. Christians have a choice. We can either sit by and do nothing (notice I do not say "stand by and do nothing"), or we can be the purifying and preservative salt of the earth and the illuminating and guiding light of the world.

So I am hoping you will participate in this blog and actively with the issues. Tell your friends because the "political things" which are of importance to the world are just that: important to the world.