When a quarterback is chosen as the most Valuable Player in the National Football League for the second time in three years, time is money. He can rake in big bucks for appearing in ads, and he can also do his bit for charity by appearing in a United Way commercial.

What he will not be, unless he's unusual, is a compassionate conservative willing to work directly with the poor in offering them challenging, personal, and spiritual help. Who has the time? Who needs the aggravation?

An attempted hijacking last week went largely unnoticed by the press. While pro-lifers marched publicly in Washington, pro-aborts stealthily tried to seize not a plane but the First Amendment. Their target: not two towers but crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) in the New York City area. The perpetrator: not a Saudi but the attorney general of New York, Eliot Spitzer. And the outcome, if pro-lifers rise to the challenge and build alliances: a victory for life and free speech.

Now that New York City, we hope, has left behind its year of terrorist assault, it's also time to leave behind a century of theological assault. Sad but true: The "social gospel" from 1900 on so emphasized material improvement for the poor that it tended to ignore the need for spiritual improvement as well. Some ministers tried to combine the two with the goal of helping both body and soul, but that was relatively rare.

Twenty-nine years ago, seven men in black robes issued a fatwa. They disregarded the will of the various tribes, as expressed in public opinion polls and in a referendum in one of the northern provinces just two months earlier.

Allies of the black robes controlled the airwaves and the state madrassas and not much else, but that proved to be enough. Television broadcasts said the peasants were jubilant about the fatwa, and even though anyone who spent time in the villages knew that wasn't true, it was said often enough that some viewers believed it.

Just as the last pre-Christmas Sunday brings to church doors some folks unseen all year, so the last pre-Christmas newspaper leads some columnists to bring out references to Jesus unseen since the last convenient time.

In both cases we need to welcome the strangers, because perhaps God will move them to come again at a non-holiday time. But when the visitor or pundit gets up and claims to offer a prophetic utterance, it's important to offer correction.

In the mid-1990s Bill Clinton was going with the flow and announcing that the big government era was over. Late in 2001 liberals and neoconservatives have been saying that the easy U.S. victory in the first stage of the war on terrorism shows that big government is popular again. That's illogical spin, and they should not be allowed to get away with it.

John Ashcroft is our fourth Dan of the Year. We inaugurated our response to Time's Man of the Year (recently changed to Person of the Year) in 1998 by putting Ken Starr on the cover and applauding his perseverance in the face of press and Clinton administration defamation. In 1999 we recognized Generation WWJD, Christian teens who asked "what would Jesus do?" and then did it.