Merry Christmas 2007

I've thought a lot about my faith in Jesus Christ during the last few months and feel so grateful for my belief in Him as a Savior. There's nothing this world needs more right now than peace and goodwill, which is what His message and sacrifice is all about. As this wonderful editorial in the Washington Post outlines, it's hard to imagine how this peace will be achieved amidst all these wars. Even still, I am full of optimism that great things can be accomplished out of small seeds. Nothing has rejuvinated this optimism more than the experience of becoming a father. This beautiful girl growing inside Sarah quite literally grew from our small seeds and will grow to become a beautiful woman. It's true I haven't seen her yet and don't know her personality, but if as her mother's daughter I'm confident she'll be my greatest contribution to the world so far. This is a picture of Sarah and I opening up her very first Christmas gift. For the record, it was a beautiful sweater and hat that my mom crocheted for her. In the background is my step-sister Tiffany and her fiance Fred who will be married in 3 weeks!

Christmas in Mesa

Didn't I marry the cutest girl? I took this picture of us in front of the Mesa, Arizona temple after attending a session with my Grandparents. This is one of the oldest LDS temples I've been to, and of the really old ones I've seen, this might be the best example of renovations improving the building and temple experience without losing its historic feel. Because I'm kind of a nerd about keeping spreadsheets to track things like running, I have a record of every time I've been to a temple. For example, I know the exact number of endowments I've done, or the number of temples I've attended, and the exact number of times I've been to each. In case you're wondering, I've been to 20 temples with Montreal the most frequented. The rest of the list is: Manhattan, Idaho Falls, Boise, Bolivia, Provo, Washington DC, Boston, Salt Lake, Logan, Bountiful, Mt Timpanagos (UT), Jordan River (UT), Ogden, St. George, Manti, Las Vegas, Raleigh and Edmonton.

Inside the temple visitors center was a beautiful display of nativity scenes created by artists all over the world, including a beautiful collection of french pieces. We loved our private time with Grandma and Grandpa before the rest of the crowd arrived.

Tales from the road

It's Sunday morning, December 23rd in Mesa, AZ; day 4 of our 17 day journey through Arizona, Utah and Idaho. After going to the UNC basketball game and staying up way too late on Wednesday night, we were up at 4:45am to get to the airport (thanks for the ride dad!). It's great to be with my Bingham grandparents and all the other family that's coming into town. I'm real dissapointed to be sick (I blame everyone in Chapel Hill who was sick last week), though I'm starting to feel better. I've been really looking forward to running in a place that's warm, flat and not humid, so I've decided that I'm going running on Monday regardless of what I feel like.

We really haven't done too much other than hang out with family and eat some wonderful meals, but we'll get some pictures uploaded soon.

HPAA Grad in Congress

Perhaps you heard about the special election yesterday in the Virginia 1st Congressional district to fill the seat of Rep. Joann Davis (R-VA) who died earlier this year. Robert Wittman (R), a 1 term member of the VA House of Delegates comfortably won with more than 61% of the vote which wasn't really a surprise to anyone. The interesting thing though, is that he has an MPH degree from my department at UNC, Health Policy and Administration (HPAA). He's the only HPAA grad in congress that I know of, and I feel a bit of pride for his accomplishment.

We're having a girl!!

As Sarah posted on our blog, we had our ultrasound on Thursday and are thrilled to announce we'll be having a baby girl. It was an unbelievable experience to watch my 8 inch daugther move around on the screen, showing us her toes, thumbs, arms and all the other appendages that she seems just as enthralled by. We would of course been just as excited to have a boy, but it's wonderful to finally be able to start referring to our baby as "her" instead of "it." My world feels like it's been completely changed and I didn't know I could be this happy. It's pretty wonderful. I hope you enjoy the following pics, though they are not nearly as great as watching her move in real time.

I love the shot of her little foot! As I look at the other two, I'm reminded of a scene from the West Wing I saw recently. Toby is looking at the ultrasound of his twins when the technician announces, "Mr. Ziegler, here are your babies' heads." To which he reacts with much more emotion than his character usually shows, "My babies have heads!" That's what I felt like saying each time we saw something new, like the four chambers of the heart, the spine, her thumbs, her nose, ears, toes, etc. I've always thought of the creation of life to be a miracle, but now that it's actually happening to me, it seems to be even more than a miracle, though I don't quite know what word to use.

These are some of the 4D pictures of my daughter. They didn't turn out amazingly well since she's still so young (18 weeks). The tech said that if she had been around 24 weeks, we would have been able to see her features really well, but at this point, they all just look like old men.

Mormonism in the Media

There has been LOTS written about Mormonism in the media lately due to Mitt Romney's presidential aspirations. As a young democrat Mormon who has in the past and expects to work in government/politics in the future, I feel I have a lot at stake in how Romney handles questions about his faith and the stereotypes and frames that get developed as a result. He's not who I will vote for next November, though I think he has done a very good job dealing with these questions and paved the way for aspiring young Mormons like myself. Here are some snapshots of the media coverage.



This is one of my favorite videos in the mainstream media, because it shows that we are truly a worldwide church now, now simply dominated by the Utah culture.



Since he got in the race, many have suggested Romney would eventually have to give a speech about his faith like JFK did in 1960. Once former Baptist Minister and Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee passed him in the Iowa polls, the timing was suddenly right for Romney to deliver such a speech.



This is the full video of his speech pulled from the Romney youtube page. All in all I think he did a good job of discussing the role of religion in society without defending the specifics of his faith.

It's too soon to tell if this speech will help Romney's campaign in Iowa, but here is some of the press coverage so far:

The New Republic, where former Clinton speechwriter David Kusnet concludes, "Mitt Romney, you're no Jack Kennedy."

EJ Dionne's Washington Post article, which described the speech as both "brilliant and frustrating," as well as "inspiring, yet also transparently political in its effort to find the precise balance that would satisfy Republican primary voters." I agree with Dionne that one of the weakest parts of the speech was the assertion that freedom requires religion. Does it?

Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson (the one who wrote term "Axis of Evil" but has since criticized the Bush White House) wrote that JFK's speech remains a landmark of American rhetoric, Romney's bold and intellectually serious speech deserves to be read along side it.

Finally, David Brooks column in the NY Times which suggests that while the speech might down as a historic event for Mormons, his reaction is more muted. Even still, he concludes it was not a mistake for Romney to deliver the speech and that he threaded the needle well.