Recently there has been an almost incessant call for President Bush to demonstrate moral leadership in relation to the festivities of the inauguration. According to some quarters, President Bush’s apparent extravagance in the pomp and festivities of the inauguration has been suggested to be a sorry demonstration of the lack of moral leadership in a time of grave need, tragedy and suffering both within this country and globally. More urgent matters evidently require the President to set an example of frugality, generosity and courage.

Is moral leadership required as an essential quality of a leader? Are leaders required to exhibit moral leadership in order to qualify as leaders? In other words, if a leader were to fail to demonstrate moral leadership when the opportunity to do so present itself, has that leader relinquished his or her position as leader? What is moral leadership?

Some suggest the need for modeling of moral character and qualities, especially in circumstances that warrant such a demonstration. For example, in the recent debate of the purportedly frivolous pomp and fanfare of the festivities of the inauguration, critics point to the extravagant price tag of the affair in light of the President’s call for Americans not only to tighten their belt but also to give generously to the needs around the world, especially in light of the tragedies surrounding the recent earthquake and tsunamis in Asia.

Some have suggested that the obstinacy and apparent arrogance of the President and his office to not only go ahead with the celebrations but to not acknowledge the need to scale down nor to funnel some of the funds to benefit the victims of the tragedies are indication of the lack of moral leadership from Bush. This is especially so, when two former presidents are leading an effort for the rest of America to give and give generously, yet it appears that the President is sparing no expense to throw parties and celebrate unabashedly the inauguration of his second term. Others question his arrogance for claiming a mandate when it isn’t clear that there is one.

If such are examples of moral deficiency in Bush’s character, does that make him a poorer leader, and perhaps even make him disqualified as a leader in character, although he maintains the position of one?

If a leader is someone who by position, title or function is placed in front of a group of people, does he or she also have the responsibility to demonstrate morally that he or she deserves to be followed by virtue of having the character of one who is morally excellent? In other words, is moral leadership more about the actions and character of the leader than about his words and statements? If a group of people by choice or by function has accorded this person the right and power to lead that group, is the leader required to be an example–a model–for the group in more ways than one?

Messy Christian is thinking about ghosts, here and here. Many of us who grow up in Eastern cultures are familiar with ghost stories and supernatural experiences and encounters. Haunted buildings, dreams and memories linger on in some of our psyches. In Eastern societies ghosts are commonplace in a co-existence with the living, sometimes in harmony, and sometimes in uneasy discomposure.

For those of us who cross-cultures, or in the words of my wife’s grandfather, who used to say that we are like sailors who have either of our feet on a different boat (one on the Western boat, and the other on the Eastern boat, as it were), we live in uneasy awareness of the ghosts of our past invading into the naturalistic, empirical Western mindset of our present. Sometimes, some of us successfully exorcize our past, dismissing such predilections to superstition and uninformed beliefs while at other times we find these ghostly hauntings invade the peace and harmony of our Western, modern lifestyle.

Among those of us who become Christians, the journey can either be comfortably compartmentalized as a past from which we have been saved. Just as the Scriptures declare, the old has passed away, and all has become new, so the ghosts of our past along with our idol-worshipping and other sinful religious practices have been banished, and we have been saved from the enslavement of not only religious bondage but also all that has once spooked us, to newness in Christ.

Yet, every now and then, a memory, an experience, or a story return to haunt us. Surely those were not just imaginations? Or superstition? Ah, our Christian spiritual advisors/teachers/pastors tell us, “But, this is just the deception of the Evil One. In fact, these experiences that people have of ghosts are the masquerading of the Devil, to deceive us. There are no ghosts, you see, there are but demons, who deceive us into believing that ghosts, or the departed spirits still roam the earth.”

So, that is often the accepted Christian doctrine that departed spirits do not really come back to haunt the living. According to Eastern sentiments ghosts are spirits of those who have died but who have somehow “unfinished business” and therefore continue to roam the earth. Not all ghosts are necessarily malevolent and not all ghostly encounters are necessarily sinister. But, as far as the official Christian doctrine is concerned, all “ghosts” are evil, spiritually detrimental, even demonic.

Incidentally, Chinese cosmology teaches that there are three levels of existence: the living souls, the deceased souls and nature, and the three levels of existence must be in harmony with each other in order for the cosmos to be in balance. It is the responsibility of the living to take care of the dead and of nature in order to maintain the balance of the cosmos. This cosmology, over the centuries, have been intertwined with religious mythology, doctrine and practices from Taoism,Buddhism and the syncrestic folk religions of East and South East Asian societies.

Therefore, often these philosophical views are grouped with religious doctrines as false even demonic, and are banished by the earliest Wesern missionaries. So, perhaps, even if there are some truth to some of the underlying philosophies, along with modernism and Westernization, all these are lost to our modern sensibilities.

Since there are so much about Chrsitian religion and theology that we need to grapple with, there hasn’t been much effort directed to thinking and theologizing what it means to be an authentic Eastern Christian living in an authentic Eastern society, because after all, there isn’t probably a quintessential Eastern society anymore. So, are there ghosts? Or are ghosts a fiction of our (or their) imagination? Perhaps a couple more important questions are: Would it be worthwhile for Christians to explicate a theology to interact with the Chinese cosmology divorced from its religious connotations? Would it be worth the while to work towards a basis for cross -cultural theologizing that attempts to take Eastern philosophies seriously and address them in order to construct an authentic Christian theology in an Eastern cultural setting?

…but for some reason I have been bumped up to Large Mammal in the TTLB Ecosystem! I don’t know how or what happened, but it probably has something to do with the Church Directory project that Joe Carter started at the evangelical outpost. See the post over at Razorskiss about the effect this endeavor has had on the overall positioning of evangelical blogs on the ecosystem.

I must say that I am utterly surprised at how much I have jumped in the rankings over the past couple of days. Although I might have about two hundred or so hits daily thanks to the various traffic generators, BlogExplosion, BlogClicker and BlogCrowd, I suspect that there are at most only about 10 or so regular readers on this blog. I think I can only identify 2-3 that I know for sure frequent this blog, and can only assume that a few of the others come by here every now and then). Now, most Large Mammals I know have hundreds and sometimes thousands of regular hits per day, so I don’t see how I deserve to be in such esteemed company. Oh, well, it probably won’t last, so I’ll just enjoy my “status” while it does!