Sorry for the lack of posting, but a flood in my area and the events in Virginia Tech has disrupted my week so far. I would like to make a brief statement about the shooting. By now, 33 people is dead and nothing we can do could bring them back. What we could have or should have done is not important. It’s time to look to the future. I think my blog has emphasized not dwelling in the past but to deal with the present and the future.

So I hope we learn that as free individuals we must stand up to the many faces of evil, whether it that is Kim Jong-Il or Cho Seung-Hui. Take it from defectors that voluntarily return to North Korea whether to help feed their families or spread the faith. If we must die, we must die knowing that evil men do not rule over us unchallenged.

Please pray for the victims and the obviously very sick shooter.

I’m reading the BBC report on the 7 women that arrived in Thailand and I have not felt so much anger since watching 9/11 unfold on the television. This passage got me the worst

Hanah is just 21. She described chronic stomach pain as a child when her family were reduced to eating dumplings made from tree-bark.

From the age of 15 she tried to escape seven times, her young age apparently saving her from severe punishment when she was caught and sent back.

During these escapes she was separated from her parents, who were also trying to flee.

21, that’s my age. While I’m typing in the comforts of a University computer lab, Hanah is in a Thai prison uncertain of her fate while a coup is going on in the rest of the country. While I spent my summer at home or at the beach, she is traversing across China and Laos, battling the elements and hiding in the shadows.

Worse, both countries are willing to send her back to North Korea to die without hesitation. All I could do was to get as many people to hear their story. Is that all I’m capable of doing?

There’s a lot of pent up rage from reading such stories. Frankly, writing on a blog does not alleviate that. My hope is that anyone reading this could do more for these refugees and thousands of others still hiding in China and Southeast Asia than I could. I hope one feels the same way as I do.

Christian Evangelicals , great preachers, terrible policymakers

When evangelical pastor and best-selling author Rick Warren announced he would undertake a preaching mission to North Korea next year, it raised a number of eyebrows in the conservative religious community.

North Korea, after all, is a keystone in President Bush’s “axis of evil” and, according to the State Department and human rights organizations, a gross violator of human rights and religious freedom.

Warren, author of the hugely popular Purpose-Driven Life books, cancelled a preliminary July 17 trip to Pyongyang in the wake of heightened tensions between the reclusive regime and the West over North Korea’s July 5 test of seven missiles.

But while Warren’s trip was canceled, he insisted his preaching visit would go on next year despite criticism from other evangelicals and the Bush administration’s efforts to totally isolate the country. “Regardless of politics, I will go anywhere I am invited to preach the gospel,” Warren said.

Warren’s stance is just one of a number of indications that, at least on foreign policy issues, the president can no longer automatically count on the support—or at least quiet acquiescence—of conservative and moderate evangelicals as he did in the run-up to the war in Iraq.

Okay, evangelicals do not agree with the President. Who doesn’t? So what do they think the President should do? Read on…