Below is a timely word about some recent sociological works on Christianity that have gained notoriety this year. American Grace (by Robert Putnam & David Campbell) and To Change the World (by James Davison Hunter) both take a look at the effects of Christianity on American culture, highlighting the good and the bad. These are both worth our time and effort to listen and glean from.

Also, Al Mohler recently interviewed Robert Putnam about “American Grace” for his Thinking Out Loud podcast:

http://www.albertmohler.com/2010/10/18/american-grace-a-conversation-on-religion-in-america-with-robert-putnam/

Here is the link for the article below:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/20/opinion/20douthat.html

December 19, 2010

A Tough Season for Believers

By ROSS DOUTHAT

Christmas is hard for everyone. But it’s particularly hard for people who actually believe in it.

In a sense, of course, there’s no better time to be a Christian than the first 25 days of December. But this is also the season when American Christians can feel most embattled. Their piety is overshadowed by materialist ticky-tack. Their great feast is compromised by Christmukkwanzaa multiculturalism. And the once-a-year churchgoers crowding the pews beside them are a reminder of how many Americans regard religion as just another form of midwinter entertainment, wedged in between “The Nutcracker” and “Miracle on 34th Street.”

These anxieties can be overdrawn, and they’re frequently turned to cynical purposes. (Think of the annual “war on Christmas” drumbeat, or last week’s complaints from Republican senators about the supposed “sacrilege” of keeping Congress in session through the holiday.) But they also reflect the peculiar and complicated status of Christian faith in American life. Depending on the angle you take, Christianity is either dominant or under siege, ubiquitous or marginal, the strongest religion in the country or a waning and increasingly archaic faith.

Happily, for those who need a last-minute gift for the anxious Christian in their life, the year just past featured two thick, impressive books that wrestle with exactly these complexities.

The first is “American Grace,” co-written by Harvard’s Robert Putnam (of “Bowling Alone” fame) and Notre Dame’s David Campbell, which examines the role that religion plays in binding up the nation’s social fabric. Over all, they argue, our society reaps enormous benefits from religious engagement, while suffering from few of the potential downsides. Widespread churchgoing seems to make Americans more altruistic and more engaged with their communities, more likely to volunteer and more inclined to give to secular and religious charities. Yet at the same time, thanks to Americans’ ever-increasing tolerance, we’ve been spared the kind of sectarian conflict that often accompanies religious zeal.

But for Christians, this sunny story has a dark side. Religious faith looks more socially beneficial to America than ever, but the institutional Christianity that’s historically generated most of those benefits seems to be gradually losing its appeal.

In the last 50 years, the Christian churches have undergone what “American Grace” describes as a shock and two aftershocks. The initial earthquake was the cultural revolution of the 1960s, which undercut religious authority as it did all authority, while dealing a particular blow to Christian sexual ethics. The first aftershock was the rise of religious conservatism, and particularly evangelical faith, as a backlash against the cultural revolution’s excesses. But now we’re living through the second aftershock, a backlash to that backlash — a revolt against the association between Christian faith and conservative politics, Putnam and Campbell argue, in which millions of Americans (younger Americans, especially) may be abandoning organized Christianity altogether.

Their argument is complemented by the University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter’s “To Change the World,” an often withering account of recent Christian attempts to influence American politics and society. Having popularized the term “culture war” two decades ago, Hunter now argues that the “war” footing has led American Christians into a cul-de-sac. It has encouraged both conservative and liberal believers to frame their mission primarily in terms of conflict, and to express themselves almost exclusively in the “language of loss, disappointment, anger, antipathy, resentment and desire for conquest.”

Thanks in part to this bunker mentality, American Christianity has become what Hunter calls a “weak culture” — one that mobilizes but doesn’t convert, alienates rather than seduces, and looks backward toward a lost past instead of forward to a vibrant future. In spite of their numerical strength and reserves of social capital, he argues, the Christian churches are mainly influential only in the “peripheral areas” of our common life. In the commanding heights of culture, Christianity punches way below its weight.

Putnam and Campbell are quantitative, liberal, and upbeat; Hunter is qualitative, conservative and conflicted. But both books come around to a similar argument: this month’s ubiquitous carols and crèches notwithstanding, believing Christians are no longer what they once were — an overwhelming majority in a self-consciously Christian nation. The question is whether they can become a creative and attractive minority in a different sort of culture, where they’re competing not only with rival faiths but with a host of pseudo-Christian spiritualities, and where the idea of a single religious truth seems increasingly passé.

Or to put it another way, Christians need to find a way to thrive in a society that looks less and less like any sort of Christendom — and more and more like the diverse and complicated Roman Empire where their religion had its beginning, 2,000 years ago this week.

Courtesy: http://thoughtballoonhelium.blogspot.com/2010/09/confessions-of-book-fiend.html

As someone who teaches on a weekly basis and who has been through a lot of classes, I can resonate and learn from this list. From the Chronicle of Higher Education blog “Brainstorm”:

http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/5-more-things-your-students-think-you-need-to-know

5 More Things Your Students Think You Need to Know

Gina Barreca

Today’s points comes from a former student (UConn, ’09) who wishes to remain anonymous. Now a teaching at a middle-school in Chicago, she asked me to let CHE readers know that she is attempting to follow her own advice.

Dear Professor:

1. You might not realize it, but we notice when you’re angry, distracted, annoyed, exhausted, frustrated, nervous, and/or feeling too lazy to bother paying attention. We think that you should be able to put those emotions aside for the fairly brief time we have you as our instructor in the classroom. You don’t allow us to sleep or cry during class, so why should you be allowed to rant about subjects that have nothing to do with the course? If it’s an amusing anecdote, that’s something we’ll welcome, but if you’re tempted to tell us on a regular basis how miserable your life is, how corrupt the administration is, how misguided the government is, or how disappointing we are, then we’d be happier if you would resist the temptation.

2. You might not believe it, but most of the time we don’t think you are funny and we don’t even understand most of the references you make in terms of your attempts at humor. Only a few people still watch Monty Python and we’re not going to start just so we can understand what you mean by “silly walks” and we don’t know all the Simpsons episodes as well as you do. Please don’t get us started on Seinfeld. Our parents think that’s funny. We don’t. We laugh when you pause because you clearly expect it and we want to make you happy and/or get a good grade by getting into your good graces.

3. You might not want to hear this (again, since others have mentioned it) but we spend all our time looking at you and therefore wish you would take even more time to groom yourselves. If you are teaching with coffee stains on your tie, we’ll notice them and then spend time inventing stories about what happened to cause the stains. Did you have a tiff with your partner that morning? Did you hear something shocking on the way to work and spill your coffee in the car? Is this a tie you wore last week and are these the same stains? Please check your fly and your bra strap before standing in front of the class because we don’t know whether what you’re doing is deliberate or not.

4. You might be surprised, but you make a lot of mistakes. Your hand-outs have errors and your power-point presentations, when you can get them to work, often contain mistakes. You omit words, spell terms incorrectly, or supply conflicting pieces of information. Please make it clear to us whether or not you would prefer to hear about these missteps. We hope you do want your mistakes corrected because you spend a lot of time noticing ours.

5. You might be puzzled, but yeah, we talk about you because we see you several times a week. We tell our friends whether or not you are a good teacher and we tell our parents and their friends the same. You are a big part of our lives and so if you see yourself mentioned on those teaching sites or Facebook or wherever, you should not assume we are weird. It would be strange if we didn’t discuss you. This loops back to the first point in this note, which is that we notice whether you give a damn about your teaching and about your students. You can make us feel like we have a chance at grasping a subject or understanding an idea or else make us feel like we’re as ridiculous, pathetic, and useless as we’ve always suspected we might be. It’s easy to make us feel bad and we talk highly of those professors who don’t take the easy way out.

* Bonus note: You probably don’t think it matters, but smiling when you first arrive in the classroom everyday is great.

Kalila and I had the pleasure of seeing Sufjan (pronounced “Sufyan”) Stevens last night at the Orpheum. We both went into the evening very tired and mentally preoccupied. However, we found that the performance captured our attention and succeeded in bringing us to into a different world for a couple hours; a welcome distraction. The show was stimulating for all of the five senses, including the opportunity to sing and dance along at a few points. We felt surrounded by thin 20-something hipsters with skinny jeans and the latest smart phones, but we expected as much. We were glad to have fun.

Here are some reviews:

http://www.boston.com/ae/music/articles/2010/11/12/a_symphony_of_sound_from_stevens/
http://www.bostonherald.com/entertainment/movies/general/view/20101112the_age_of_sufjan_stevens_beckons/

The article below is not stating anything new.  Anyone who has taken psychology in high school or college knows the classic defence mechanisms of denial and self-justification.  Well, I’ve always thought that the rational notion that education or knowledge will cause us to agree and live in harmony is naive.  It doesn’t take into account the reasons for why we disagree or don’t understand things.  In either case, the study reported below is a reminder that we how we present truth is significant to people.  I think this is because of the connection of truth and beauty.  If we can’t see the beauty of truth, we won’t believe it.

Motivation strikes again…

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/11/how_facts_backfire/

How facts backfire

Researchers discover a surprising threat to democracy: our brains
By Joe Keohane | July 11, 2010

It’s one of the great assumptions underlying modern democracy that an informed citizenry is preferable to an uninformed one. “Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1789. This notion, carried down through the years, underlies everything from humble political pamphlets to presidential debates to the very notion of a free press. Mankind may be crooked timber, as Kant put it, uniquely susceptible to ignorance and misinformation, but it’s an article of faith that knowledge is the best remedy. If people are furnished with the facts, they will be clearer thinkers and better citizens. If they are ignorant, facts will enlighten them. If they are mistaken, facts will set them straight.

In the end, truth will out. Won’t it?

Maybe not. Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

This bodes ill for a democracy, because most voters — the people making decisions about how the country runs — aren’t blank slates. They already have beliefs, and a set of facts lodged in their minds. The problem is that sometimes the things they think they know are objectively, provably false. And in the presence of the correct information, such people react very, very differently than the merely uninformed. Instead of changing their minds to reflect the correct information, they can entrench themselves even deeper.

“The general idea is that it’s absolutely threatening to admit you’re wrong,” says political scientist Brendan Nyhan, the lead researcher on the Michigan study. The phenomenon — known as “backfire” — is “a natural defense mechanism to avoid that cognitive dissonance.”

These findings open a long-running argument about the political ignorance of American citizens to broader questions about the interplay between the nature of human intelligence and our democratic ideals. Most of us like to believe that our opinions have been formed over time by careful, rational consideration of facts and ideas, and that the decisions based on those opinions, therefore, have the ring of soundness and intelligence. In reality, we often base our opinions on our beliefs, which can have an uneasy relationship with facts. And rather than facts driving beliefs, our beliefs can dictate the facts we chose to accept. They can cause us to twist facts so they fit better with our preconceived notions. Worst of all, they can lead us to uncritically accept bad information just because it reinforces our beliefs. This reinforcement makes us more confident we’re right, and even less likely to listen to any new information. And then we vote.

This effect is only heightened by the information glut, which offers — alongside an unprecedented amount of good information — endless rumors, misinformation, and questionable variations on the truth. In other words, it’s never been easier for people to be wrong, and at the same time feel more certain that they’re right.

“Area Man Passionate Defender Of What He Imagines Constitution To Be,” read a recent Onion headline. Like the best satire, this nasty little gem elicits a laugh, which is then promptly muffled by the queasy feeling of recognition. The last five decades of political science have definitively established that most modern-day Americans lack even a basic understanding of how their country works. In 1996, Princeton University’s Larry M. Bartels argued, “the political ignorance of the American voter is one of the best documented data in political science.”

On its own, this might not be a problem: People ignorant of the facts could simply choose not to vote. But instead, it appears that misinformed people often have some of the strongest political opinions. A striking recent example was a study done in the year 2000, led by James Kuklinski of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He led an influential experiment in which more than 1,000 Illinois residents were asked questions about welfare — the percentage of the federal budget spent on welfare, the number of people enrolled in the program, the percentage of enrollees who are black, and the average payout. More than half indicated that they were confident that their answers were correct — but in fact only 3 percent of the people got more than half of the questions right. Perhaps more disturbingly, the ones who were the most confident they were right were by and large the ones who knew the least about the topic. (Most of these participants expressed views that suggested a strong antiwelfare bias.)

Studies by other researchers have observed similar phenomena when addressing education, health care reform, immigration, affirmative action, gun control, and other issues that tend to attract strong partisan opinion. Kuklinski calls this sort of response the “I know I’m right” syndrome, and considers it a “potentially formidable problem” in a democratic system. “It implies not only that most people will resist correcting their factual beliefs,” he wrote, “but also that the very people who most need to correct them will be least likely to do so.”

What’s going on? How can we have things so wrong, and be so sure that we’re right? Part of the answer lies in the way our brains are wired. Generally, people tend to seek consistency. There is a substantial body of psychological research showing that people tend to interpret information with an eye toward reinforcing their preexisting views. If we believe something about the world, we are more likely to passively accept as truth any information that confirms our beliefs, and actively dismiss information that doesn’t. This is known as “motivated reasoning.” Whether or not the consistent information is accurate, we might accept it as fact, as confirmation of our beliefs. This makes us more confident in said beliefs, and even less likely to entertain facts that contradict them.

New research, published in the journal Political Behavior last month, suggests that once those facts — or “facts” — are internalized, they are very difficult to budge. In 2005, amid the strident calls for better media fact-checking in the wake of the Iraq war, Michigan’s Nyhan and a colleague devised an experiment in which participants were given mock news stories, each of which contained a provably false, though nonetheless widespread, claim made by a political figure: that there were WMDs found in Iraq (there weren’t), that the Bush tax cuts increased government revenues (revenues actually fell), and that the Bush administration imposed a total ban on stem cell research (only certain federal funding was restricted). Nyhan inserted a clear, direct correction after each piece of misinformation, and then measured the study participants to see if the correction took.

For the most part, it didn’t. The participants who self-identified as conservative believed the misinformation on WMD and taxes even more strongly after being given the correction. With those two issues, the more strongly the participant cared about the topic — a factor known as salience — the stronger the backfire. The effect was slightly different on self-identified liberals: When they read corrected stories about stem cells, the corrections didn’t backfire, but the readers did still ignore the inconvenient fact that the Bush administration’s restrictions weren’t total.

It’s unclear what is driving the behavior — it could range from simple defensiveness, to people working harder to defend their initial beliefs — but as Nyhan dryly put it, “It’s hard to be optimistic about the effectiveness of fact-checking.”

It would be reassuring to think that political scientists and psychologists have come up with a way to counter this problem, but that would be getting ahead of ourselves. The persistence of political misperceptions remains a young field of inquiry. “It’s very much up in the air,” says Nyhan.

But researchers are working on it. One avenue may involve self-esteem. Nyhan worked on one study in which he showed that people who were given a self-affirmation exercise were more likely to consider new information than people who had not. In other words, if you feel good about yourself, you’ll listen — and if you feel insecure or threatened, you won’t. This would also explain why demagogues benefit from keeping people agitated. The more threatened people feel, the less likely they are to listen to dissenting opinions, and the more easily controlled they are.

There are also some cases where directness works. Kuklinski’s welfare study suggested that people will actually update their beliefs if you hit them “between the eyes” with bluntly presented, objective facts that contradict their preconceived ideas. He asked one group of participants what percentage of its budget they believed the federal government spent on welfare, and what percentage they believed the government should spend. Another group was given the same questions, but the second group was immediately told the correct percentage the government spends on welfare (1 percent). They were then asked, with that in mind, what the government should spend. Regardless of how wrong they had been before receiving the information, the second group indeed adjusted their answer to reflect the correct fact.

Kuklinski’s study, however, involved people getting information directly from researchers in a highly interactive way. When Nyhan attempted to deliver the correction in a more real-world fashion, via a news article, it backfired. Even if people do accept the new information, it might not stick over the long term, or it may just have no effect on their opinions. In 2007 John Sides of George Washington University and Jack Citrin of the University of California at Berkeley studied whether providing misled people with correct information about the proportion of immigrants in the US population would affect their views on immigration. It did not.

And if you harbor the notion — popular on both sides of the aisle — that the solution is more education and a higher level of political sophistication in voters overall, well, that’s a start, but not the solution. A 2006 study by Charles Taber and Milton Lodge at Stony Brook University showed that politically sophisticated thinkers were even less open to new information than less sophisticated types. These people may be factually right about 90 percent of things, but their confidence makes it nearly impossible to correct the 10 percent on which they’re totally wrong. Taber and Lodge found this alarming, because engaged, sophisticated thinkers are “the very folks on whom democratic theory relies most heavily.”

In an ideal world, citizens would be able to maintain constant vigilance, monitoring both the information they receive and the way their brains are processing it. But keeping atop the news takes time and effort. And relentless self-questioning, as centuries of philosophers have shown, can be exhausting. Our brains are designed to create cognitive shortcuts — inference, intuition, and so forth — to avoid precisely that sort of discomfort while coping with the rush of information we receive on a daily basis. Without those shortcuts, few things would ever get done. Unfortunately, with them, we’re easily suckered by political falsehoods.

Nyhan ultimately recommends a supply-side approach. Instead of focusing on citizens and consumers of misinformation, he suggests looking at the sources. If you increase the “reputational costs” of peddling bad info, he suggests, you might discourage people from doing it so often. “So if you go on ‘Meet the Press’ and you get hammered for saying something misleading,” he says, “you’d think twice before you go and do it again.”

Unfortunately, this shame-based solution may be as implausible as it is sensible. Fast-talking political pundits have ascended to the realm of highly lucrative popular entertainment, while professional fact-checking operations languish in the dungeons of wonkery. Getting a politician or pundit to argue straight-faced that George W. Bush ordered 9/11, or that Barack Obama is the culmination of a five-decade plot by the government of Kenya to destroy the United States — that’s easy. Getting him to register shame? That isn’t.

Joe Keohane is a writer in New York

Autonomy: People want to have control over their work.
Mastery: People want to get better at what they do.
Purpose: People want to be part of something that is bigger than they are.

Below is a 20 minute summary of the book that he presented at TED in 2009. Although not without its flaws, I found his argument helpful in thinking through the whole subject of motivation.

Hat tip to a reviewer of the book on Amazon for pointing out this talk.

Link to Dan’s site: http://www.danpink.com/

Link for TED: http://www.ted.com/

Link for video: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html

Americans may debate about religion all of the time, but it only portrays our ignorance.  The White Horse Inn has been saying for years that Evangelicals don’t understand the basic tenets of Christianity.  But we are not the only ones in the religious landscape that don’t understand the basics of our faith.  This is to be expected because “pew-sitters” really don’t care.  They just want to feel good about themselves and not work hard to get there, by-and-large.  And we are not requiring education of the world religions or philosophy in public schools.  They are not even required in most colleges, but are mere electives.  So what else do we expect…

Article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/28/us/28religion.html

Pew Survey: http://www.pewforum.org/Other-Beliefs-and-Practices/U-S-Religious-Knowledge-Survey.aspx

September 28, 2010

Basic Religion Test Stumps Many Americans

By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

Americans are by all measures a deeply religious people, but they are also deeply ignorant about religion.

Researchers from the independent Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life phoned more than 3,400 Americans and asked them 32 questions about the Bible, Christianity and other world religions, famous religious figures and the constitutional principles governing religion in public life.

On average, people who took the survey answered half the questions incorrectly, and many flubbed even questions about their own faith.

Those who scored the highest were atheists and agnostics, as well as two religious minorities: Jews and Mormons. The results were the same even after the researchers controlled for factors like age and racial differences.

“Even after all these other factors, including education, are taken into account, atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons still outperform all the other religious groups in our survey,” said Greg Smith, a senior researcher at Pew.

That finding might surprise some, but not Dave Silverman, president of American Atheists, an advocacy group for nonbelievers that was founded by Madalyn Murray O’Hair.

“I have heard many times that atheists know more about religion than religious people,” Mr. Silverman said. “Atheism is an effect of that knowledge, not a lack of knowledge. I gave a Bible to my daughter. That’s how you make atheists.”

Among the topics covered in the survey were: Where was Jesus born? What is Ramadan? Whose writings inspired the Protestant Reformation? Which Biblical figure led the exodus from Egypt? What religion is the Dalai Lama? Joseph Smith? Mother Theresa? In most cases, the format was multiple choice.

The researchers said that the questionnaire was designed to represent a breadth of knowledge about religion, but was not intended to be regarded as a list of the most essential facts about the subject. Most of the questions were easy, but a few were difficult enough to discern which respondents were highly knowledgeable.

On questions about the Bible and Christianity, the groups that answered the most right were Mormons and white evangelical Protestants.

On questions about world religions, like Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism, the groups that did the best were atheists, agnostics and Jews.

One finding that may grab the attention of policy makers is that most Americans wrongly believe that anything having to do with religion is prohibited in public schools.

An overwhelming 89 percent of respondents, asked whether public school teachers are permitted to lead a class in prayer, correctly answered no.

But fewer than one of four knew that a public school teacher is permitted “to read from the Bible as an example of literature.” And only about one third knew that a public school teacher is permitted to offer a class comparing the world’s religions.

The survey’s authors concluded that there was “widespread confusion” about “the line between teaching and preaching.”

Mr. Smith said the survey appeared to be the first comprehensive effort at assessing the basic religious knowledge of Americans, so it is impossible to tell whether they are more or less informed than in the past.

The phone interviews were conducted in English and Spanish in May and June. There were not enough Muslim, Buddhist or Hindu respondents to say how those groups ranked.

Clergy members who are concerned that their congregants know little about the essentials of their own faith will no doubt be appalled by some of these findings:

¶ Fifty-three percent of Protestants could not identify Martin Luther as the man who started the Protestant Reformation.

¶ Forty-five percent of Catholics did not know that their church teaches that the consecrated bread and wine in holy communion are not merely symbols, but actually become the body and blood of Christ.

¶ Forty-three percent of Jews did not know that Maimonides, one of the foremost rabbinical authorities and philosophers, was Jewish.

The question about Maimonides was the one that the fewest people answered correctly. But 51 percent knew that Joseph Smith was Mormon, and 82 percent knew that Mother Teresa was Roman Catholic.

WARNING: This is heavy stuff.

Below is the chilling story about Mitchell Heisman of Somerville who committed suicide on the steps of the Memorial Church in the yard of Havard University on Saturday, September 18.  As if that were not enough of a story, it is the 1900-page suicide note, yeah, manifesto, which took him over 5 years to write that is the jaw-dropper.  According to his book, entitled “Suicide Note”, he began to contemplate the meaninglessness of life when he was 12 years old, after the death of his father.  He steeped himself in the works of Nietzsche among other works of nihilism, and resolved early on that he would end his life upon articulating his rationale in tome form.  It is a sorrowful irony to say, “Life is meaningless, let me tell you why…”.  It seems like he devoted his life to helping others understand what he thought was the meaning of his death.

Here is the article: http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2010/09/27/book_details_motives_for_suicide_at_harvard/
Here is the note/book: http://www.scribd.com/doc/38104189/Mitchell-Heisman-Suicide-Note

What he left behind: A 1,905-page suicide note

Author described nihilistic outlook

By David Abel, Globe Staff  |  September 27, 2010

In the end, no one really knows what led Mitchell Heisman, an erudite, wry, handsome 35-year-old, to walk into Harvard Yard on the holiest day in his faith and fire one shot from a silver revolver into his right temple, on the top step of Memorial Church, where hundreds gathered to observe the Jewish Day of Atonement.

But if the 1,905-page suicide note he left is to be believed — a work he spent five years honing and that his family and others received in a posthumous e-mail after his suicide last Saturday morning on Yom Kippur — Heisman took his life as part of a philosophical exploration he called “an experiment in nihilism.’’

At the end of his note, a dense, scholarly work with 1,433 footnotes, a 20-page bibliography, and more than 1,700 references to God and 200 references to the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, Heisman sums up his experiment:

“Every word, every thought, and every emotion come back to one core problem: life is meaningless,’’ he wrote. “The experiment in nihilism is to seek out and expose every illusion and every myth, wherever it may lead, no matter what, even if it kills us.’’

Over the years, as he became more immersed in his work, often laboring over it 12 hours a day, Heisman shared bits with friends and family but never elaborated on the extent of his nihilism — his hardened view that life is vapid and nonsensical, that values are pretense, that the “unreasoned conviction in the rightness of life over death is like a god or a mass delusion.’’

He told them he was working on a history of the Norman conquest of England, cloistered in a cramped apartment he shared in Somerville. They knew the clean-shaven young man from suburban New Jersey, who always called his elderly godmother on her birthday and once donated $200 to Harvard Hillel for sponsoring services at Memorial Church, to be intensely committed to his work.

Neither his mother, sister, nor the roommates from whom he sought forgiveness in the hours before he died had any idea he was about to kill himself. They and others have been groping for answers to why he did it and in such a public way, on such a holy day.

“He was very cordial, very charming, you would never know that something was wrong,’’ said Lonni Heisman, his mother. He frequently told her he loved her, and had recently visited to help her prepare for a move. “I’m still in shock and I can’t understand how he could have hid this,’’ she said. “He had everything going for him. He was in perfect health. He was handsome, smart, a good person. I’ll never understand it.’’

She said he was a gregarious child who grew introverted after his father, an engineer, died of a heart attack when Mitchell was 12 years old. As he got older, he became increasingly bookish and went on to study psychology at the University at Albany in New York, where he seemed shy to friends and spent much of his time reading.

After college, Heisman worked at bookstores, including the Strand in Manhattan, enabling him to amass a library of thousands of books. About five years ago, he moved to Somerville to focus on writing and be near major university libraries.

He led a Spartan existence, subsisting on microwave meals, chicken wings, and energy bars, and surviving mainly on money left to him after his father’s death. He was tall, with dark eyes, and dated when he needed a break from his solitude, rarely having trouble attracting women. But he broke off the relationships quickly, saying he was too busy writing a book.

To help him concentrate, Heisman often listened to a constant loop of Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier,’’ which he felt synthesized the mind’s competing strains of emotion and reason, went to a gym daily, and took Ritalin, which his mother thinks may have induced depression and led to his suicide.

One of his longtime roommates, David Barnes, described Heisman as quiet and considerate, never angry. He engaged in conversation by asking questions; when he spoke he often gave deliberate, lengthy responses. “He could get intense talking about his book,’’ Barnes said. “There was definitely a lot of emotion pent up in this project.’’

Barnes and relatives said Heisman bought the gun, a .38-caliber pistol, three years ago, though they don’t know where, and they believe he had only one purpose for it: to commit suicide when he finished his book.

“He wasn’t going anywhere dangerous; he wasn’t paranoid; he wasn’t worried about anyone hurting him or breaking in,’’ Barnes said. “I couldn’t imagine him buying a gun for any other reason.’’

A month ago, as he began wrapping up his writing, he asked Barnes if he would be a witness to the signing of his will. Barnes thought it was because he cared so much about his book and wanted to ensure it would be taken care of in case something happened.

Two days before his suicide, Heisman seemed elated. He told his roommates he had finished the book. He spent the next day at the post office, buying stamps and preparing packages for friends and family, with the book on CDs.

On the morning of Yom Kippur, Heisman showered, shaved, and ate a breakfast of chicken fingers and lentils, some of which he left on the kitchen counter, something he rarely did. He put on a white tuxedo, with white shoes, a white tie, and white socks, and donned a ill-fitting trench coat, perhaps to hide the gun.

At about 10 a.m., a half-hour or so before he would commit suicide in front of a group touring Harvard, Heisman walked into Barnes’s room. He told him the white clothing was a Jewish tradition, even though he rarely practiced his religion and had given up on the concept of God. Appearing to be in a buoyant mood, he explained the significance of Yom Kippur.

“He said he wanted me to know that if he ever did anything to offend me, he apologized and hoped that I would forgive him,’’ Barnes said.

In his book, which he titled “Suicide Note’’ and scheduled to send to hundreds of people as an e-mail attachment about five hours after his death, Heisman produced an extraordinarily lengthy treatise on why life was not worth living.

With chapter titles such as “Philosophy, Cosmology, Singularity, New Jersey’’ and “How to Breed a God,’’ and citing more than a hundred authors from futurist Ray Kurzweil to the biologist E.O. Wilson, Heisman explains how his views took shape.

“The death of my father marked the beginning, or perhaps the acceleration, of a kind of moral collapse, because the total materialization of the world from matter to humans to literal subjective experience went hand in hand with a nihilistic inability to believe in the worth of any goal,’’ he wrote.

He saw his emotions as nothing more than a product of biology, as soulless as the workings of a machine, making them in essence an illusion.

“If life is truly meaningless and there is no rational basis for choosing among fundamental alternatives, then all choices are equal and there is no fundamental ground for choosing life over death,’’ he concluded.

The darkness of his views has been too much for his friends and family, many of whom have yet to read his suicide note.

“It makes me sad and angry that he didn’t care for any facet of life other than the book,’’ Barnes said.

As his sister, Laurel Heisman, spent last week sifting through what remains of his things — a poster in German, a well-made bed, piles of books in a small room shrouded with a dark curtain — she said she received a separate, posthumous note from him asking that she preserve a website he created to publish his book, a burden she has agreed to bear.

“I love you,’’ he wrote to her.

She wishes she could have made him see more of the beauty of life, and how we create our own value and give our own meaning to life. She might have taken him up a mountain or held him more closely.

“He just told us the safe things, because he knew we would have tried to stop him,’’ she said. “It’s really hard. It’s not like someone who was really depressed because they lost a lover. His whole ideology was wrapped in this concept of nihilism. I wish we could have made him see things differently.’’

Right now Kalila is at home, and will head back to work on Monday if she is feeling up to it. She is sore and a little stiff, but she’s looking forward to the start of football season tonight. Psalm 145 has been her meditation.

For pictures: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=217537&id=673181894

Mark Bauerlein wrote a summary in The Chronicle of Higher Education of Ed Hirsch and Robert Pondiscio’s perceptive article in The American Prospect, “There’s No Such Thing as a Reading Test“.  The title of Mark’s review is “Reading is Not a Skill“. As someone who cares about interpretation, I don’t think that title is complete (probably just designed to be controversial) because that is not what the article is about.  As Mark agrees with Hirsh and Pondiscio, their contention is that reading tests in schools are inadequate because the students don’t have knowledge of the reading samples they are being tested on.  If students simply had a familiarity with the subject matter of the samples, their results would improve.  Let me complete Mark’s sentence: “Reading is Not a Skill That is Being Tested Well”.  I think by “reading” we really mean “interpretation”.  The bigger issue is that people don’t know how to engage grammar so as to ascertain meaning from written texts.  That is what is really being tested in “Reading” tests.  Thus, I will continue to beat the drum for the study of Discourse Analysis…

Reading Is Not a Skill

By Mark Bauerlein

Over the years, I’ve spent some time reviewing items on reading-comprehension tests, evaluating the passages selected as texts and checking the following eight or ten questions for accuracy, validity, etc. It can be a draining activity, scanning rather dry and often remote informational text, then spotting ambiguities or confusions in the questions that must be corrected.

One thing, I’ve found, lightens the load: a little knowledge about the passage material. Just a little bit helps a lot. Indeed, the difference between no knowledge and a little knowledge means much more than the difference between a little knowledge and abundant knowledge.

That’s my experience, and it corresponds with long-time arguments made by E. D. Hirsch and others about the importance of “domain knowledge” to reading comprehension. A recent essay in The American Prospect (magazine motto: “Liberal Intelligence”) argues just that. It is by Hirsch and Robert Pondiscio, and it bears the blunt title “There’s No Such Thing as a Reading Test.”

Hirsch and Pondiscio lay out the conventional understanding of reading.

“The culture of testing treats reading ability as a broad, generalized skill that is easily measured and assessed. We judge our schools and increasingly individual teachers based on their ability to improve the reading skills of our children. When you think about your ability to read—if you think about it at all—the chances are good that you perceive it as not just a skill but a readily transferable skill. Once you learn how to read you can competently read a novel, a newspaper article, or the latest memo from corporate headquarters. Reading is reading is reading.”

That outlook sounds common-sensical, Hirsch and Pondiscio admit, and they grant it partial accuracy. “The ability to translate written symbols into sounds, commonly called ‘decoding,’ is indeed a skill that can be taught and mastered,” they write.  One can “read” words that have no meaning (“rigfap,” “churbit”), and one can sound out words in a sentence filled with allusions to something one doesn’t understand (say, a 10-year-old reading a paragraph on the Thirty Years War).

“But,” the authors insist, “clearly there’s more to reading than making sounds. To be fully literate is to have the communicative power of language at your command—to read, write, listen, and speak with understanding. As nearly any elementary schoolteacher can attest, it is possible to decode skillfully yet struggle with comprehension. And reading comprehension, the ability to extract meaning from text, is not transferable.”

Why? Because texts contain embedded assumptions, things the writer assumes the reader will know. Their example: “A-Rod hit into a 6-4-3 double play to end the game.” Think of the implied meanings. One, it’s the ninth inning. Two, a man on first and one out. Three, the Yankees are behind. Etc. If you don’t have the domain knowledge, you’re not a bad reader. “You merely lack the domain-specific knowledge of baseball to fill in the gaps.”

This is why reading is not an abstract transferable skill (except at the most basic levels of literacy). Hirsch and Pondiscio note that “poor readers” do well when faced with a passage whose subject matter is familiar to them, “outperforming even ‘good readers’ who lack relevant background knowledge.” The problem is that knowledge in one area usually doesn’t help you to comprehend a text covering a different area.

The authors quote Dan Willingham on the national implications of the knowledge factor:

“The mistaken idea that reading is a skill—learn to crack the code, practice comprehension strategies, and you can read anything—may be the single biggest factor holding back reading achievement in the country,” Daniel T. Willingham, professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, recently wrote in The Washington Post. “Students will not meet standards that way. The knowledge base problem must be solved.”

You see the problem, though. If reading is not an abstract, transferable skill, if reading comprehension relies upon sufficiently broad knowledge of important cultural, political, scientific, historical, and artistic materials, then we run squarely into delicate Culture War questions of curriculum. The inevitable question arises, “Who’s to say which traditions and histories and literature and philosophies should be required in the classroom?”

I’ll take Hirsch/Pondiscio’s advice: “Rather than idle away precious hours on trivial stories or randomly chosen nonfiction, reading, writing, and listening instruction would be built into the study of ancient civilizations in first grade, for example, Greek mythology in second, or the human body in third. . . . Let’s say a state’s fourth-grade science standards include the circulatory system, atoms and molecules, electricity, and Earth’s geologic layers and weather; and social-studies standards include world geography, Europe in the Middle Ages, the American Revolution, and the U.S. Constitution, among other domains. The state’s reading tests should include not just fiction and poetry but nonfiction readings on those topics and others culled from those specific curriculum standards.”

I am partial to both the books and movies of Lord of the Rings as more compelling, imaginative, and integrative than the Chronicles of Narnia. Thus, I found the following intriguing.

‘Narnia’ vs. ‘Lord of the Rings’: Competing Visions

By Alyssa Rosenberg

As a child, I made it all the way through The Chronicles of Narnia, and read a couple of the books repeatedly, but I never managed to finish the Lord of the Rings trilogy. As an adult, though, I’ve rewatched each of the Lord of the Rings movies more times than I like to admit (if TNT airs a weekend marathon of them, I’m a slave to the couch), but I was unmoved by The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, and have no interest whatsoever in the inert subsequent movies, the next of which is forthcoming shortly:

I wonder if the answer to why Tolkien’s movies are working while Lewis’s aren’t lies in this somewhat abstracted paragraph from Adam Gopnik’s 2005 essay on Lewis:

Tolkien hated the Narnia books, despite Lewis’s avid sponsorship of Tolkien’s own mythology, because he hated to see an imagination constrained by the allegorical impulse. Though Tolkien was certainly a devout Catholic, there is no way in which “The Lord of the Rings” is a Christian book, much less a Catholic allegory. The Blessed Land across the sea is a retreat for the already immortal, not, except for Frodo, a reward for the afflicted; dead is dead. The pathos of Aragorn and Arwen’s marriage is that, after Aragorn’s death, they will never meet again, in Valinor or elsewhere. It is the modernity of the existential arrangement, in tension with the archaicism of the material culture, that makes Tolkien’s myth haunting. In the final Narnia book, “The Last Battle,” the effort to key the fantasy to the Biblical themes of the Apocalypse is genuinely creepy, with an Aslan Antichrist. The best of the books are the ones, like “The Horse and His Boy,” where the allegory is at a minimum and the images just flow.

It seems to me that those writerly sensibilities are matched by those of the filmmakers who took on those competing universes. Peter Jackson was deeply committed to building a complete, coherent world that we could enter entirely, leaving points of reference to our own universe behind because we didn’t need them. By contrast, we always enter Narnia through an earlier version of our own world, and Narnia’s full of references to it, whether religious metaphor, or tea in a faun’s hidey-hole. And the special effects in the movies seem determined to convince us of their miraculousness, not of their reality, it’s about refracting our world back to us with new possibilities, rather than about letting us escape into another one.This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2010/08/narnia-vs-lord-of-the-rings-competing-visions/61551/

Link for TED: http://www.ted.com/

Link for video: http://www.ted.com/talks/j_j_abrams_mystery_box.html

Below are some great observations by a local UCC pastor about the trend of what churches are expecting of their pastors these days.  It seems like a contemporary outworking of 2 Timothy 4: 3-4:

For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, 4 and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/08/opinion/08macdonald.html

Congregations Gone Wild

By G. JEFFREY MacDONALD

Swampscott, Mass.

THE American clergy is suffering from burnout, several new studies show. And part of the problem, as researchers have observed, is that pastors work too much. Many of them need vacations, it’s true. But there’s a more fundamental problem that no amount of rest and relaxation can help solve: congregational pressure to forsake one’s highest calling.

The pastoral vocation is to help people grow spiritually, resist their lowest impulses and adopt higher, more compassionate ways. But churchgoers increasingly want pastors to soothe and entertain them. It’s apparent in the theater-style seating and giant projection screens in churches and in mission trips that involve more sightseeing than listening to the local people.

As a result, pastors are constantly forced to choose, as they work through congregants’ daily wish lists in their e-mail and voice mail, between paths of personal integrity and those that portend greater job security. As religion becomes a consumer experience, the clergy become more unhappy and unhealthy.

The trend toward consumer-driven religion has been gaining momentum for half a century. Consider that in 1955 only 15 percent of Americans said they no longer adhered to the faith of their childhood, according to a Gallup poll. By 2008, 44 percent had switched their religious affiliation at least once, or dropped it altogether, the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found. Americans now sample, dabble and move on when a religious leader fails to satisfy for any reason.

In this transformation, clergy have seen their job descriptions rewritten. They’re no longer expected to offer moral counsel in pastoral care sessions or to deliver sermons that make the comfortable uneasy. Church leaders who continue such ministerial traditions pay dearly. A few years ago, thousands of parishioners quit Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul, Minn., and Community Church of Joy in Glendale, Ariz., when their respective preachers refused to bless the congregations’ preferred political agendas and consumerist lifestyles.

I have faced similar pressures myself. In the early 2000s, the advisory committee of my small congregation in Massachusetts told me to keep my sermons to 10 minutes, tell funny stories and leave people feeling great about themselves. The unspoken message in such instructions is clear: give us the comforting, amusing fare we want or we’ll get our spiritual leadership from someone else.

Congregations that make such demands seem not to realize that most clergy don’t sign up to be soothsayers or entertainers. Pastors believe they’re called to shape lives for the better, and that involves helping people learn to do what’s right in life, even when what’s right is also difficult. When they’re being true to their calling, pastors urge Christians to do the hard work of reconciliation with one another before receiving communion. They lead people to share in the suffering of others, including people they would rather ignore, by experiencing tough circumstances — say, in a shelter, a prison or a nursing home — and seeking relief together with those in need. At their courageous best, clergy lead where people aren’t asking to go, because that’s how the range of issues that concern them expands, and how a holy community gets formed.

Ministry is a profession in which the greatest rewards include meaningfulness and integrity. When those fade under pressure from churchgoers who don’t want to be challenged or edified, pastors become candidates for stress and depression.

Clergy need parishioners who understand that the church exists, as it always has, to save souls by elevating people’s values and desires. They need churchgoers to ask for personal challenges, in areas like daily devotions and outreach ministries.

When such an ethic takes root, as it has in generations past, then pastors will cease to feel like the spiritual equivalents of concierges. They’ll again know joy in ministering among people who share their sense of purpose. They might even be on fire again for their calling, rather than on a path to premature burnout.

I found it curious that an article by Michael Spencer (known as the InternetMonk) published last year in the Christian Science Monitor is now #2 of the most viewed articles on their website.  Even though Michael is no longer with us, his provocative writing still is.  Below is the article which continues to garner attention.

The coming evangelical collapse

An anti-Christian chapter in Western history is about to begin. But out of the ruins, a new vitality and integrity will rise.

By Michael Spencer
posted March 10, 2009 at 12:00 am EDT

Why would someone risk his safety, destroy his schedule, and become dirty and bloody to help a needy person of another race and social class? And why would Jesus tell us “Go and do likewise”? Like the wounded man on the Jericho road, there are needy people in our path- the widow next door, the family strapped with medical bills, the homeless man outside our place of worship. God call us to be ministers of mercy to people in need of shelter, assistance, medical care, or just friendship.

Other deacon resources from Tim Keller

• Hardcopy of Ministries of Mercy ($10.39 from Amazon)
• Redeemer Deaconate Training Manual ($35 plus 7.50 for shipping)
• Lectures on deacon training at Westminster Theological Seminary (free, but registration/login required)

“The Best Magazine Articles Ever” – Sure the list is subjective. It’s all in English, and heavily slanted toward male writers. But you can’t quibble with this. This curated collection features pieces by some of the finest American writers of the past generation. We’ve highlighted 10 notables ones from a much longer list available here.

1. John Updike, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu.” The New Yorker, October 22, 1960.

2. Norman Mailer, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket.” Esquire, November 1960.

3. Tom Wolfe, ”The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson. Yes!” Esquire, March 1965.

4. Hunter Thompson, ”The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved.” Scanlan’s Monthly, June 1970.

5. Stewart Brand, “Space War: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Dearth Among Computer Bums. Rolling Stone, December 7, 1972.

6. David Foster Wallace, “The String Theory.” Esquire, July 1996.

7. Jon Krakauer, “Into Thin Air.” Outside Magazine, September 1996.

8. Susan Orlean, “Orchid Fever.” The New Yorker, January 23, 1995.

9. Malcolm Gladwell, “The Pitchman.” The New Yorker, October 30, 2000. (Yup, he’s Canadian, I know.)

10. Katie Hafner, “The Epic Saga of The Well.” Wired, May 1997.

via @caitlinroper

Caught a part of this in the car last night and found it totally fascinating.  He makes some very notable remarks about the direction of broader American evangelicalism.  The full transcript is available at the link below.

http://www.wbur.org/npr/128776382

Fresh Air from WHYY

Ousted Evangelical Reflects On Faith, Future

LISTEN NOW

July 28, 2010 9:25 AM

For 10 years, the Rev. Richard Cizik was the chief lobbyist for the National Association of Evangelicals, which represents roughly 30 million constituents across the United States.

But he was forced out of that position in December 2008, after remarks he made on Fresh Air about his support of gay civil unions, among other things.

On Wednesday, Cizik returned to Fresh Air to discuss how his life has changed since he left the association and why he started a new group called the Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good, which he hopes will be an alternative to Christian groups that focus on the culture wars.

Cizik says he has no regrets about what happened to him after appearing on the show.

“In so many ways, this has been good for me,” he tells Terry Gross, adding that his support of same-sex civil unions wasn’t the only reason he was asked to leave the NAE.

“It was a sum total of everything [I said on Fresh Air],” Cizik explains. “It was speaking out on behalf of creation care, climate change, a broader agenda — speaking out on a host of levels that just offended the old guard. Civil unions, well that was just one part of it.”

Cizik says that he still strongly believes that same-sex couples should be allowed to obtain civil unions.

“While I haven’t come to a conclusion on [gay marriage], I am convinced that you can’t deny rights to people based on their sexual orientation. It’s wrong,” he says. “It’s even wrong, I think, as Christians to take that position. Because we should support human rights for all people even when they don’t agree with us.”

He also explains how he believes the evangelical movement has changed in the past several decades — and why he believes the evangelical movement is overdue for another ideological shift.

“Most important, [we need to become] independent of partisanship and ideology rather than subservient to partisanship and ideology,” he says. “Evangelicalism [has] become so subservient to an ideology and to a political party that it needs, as I say, to be born again.”

Interview Highlights

On his comments about same-sex marriage on Fresh Air that forced him to resign from his position at the National Association of Evangelicals

“It came out of the depths of the heart the mouth speaks and so it just came out. I hadn’t planned on saying it, but I had been thinking about it a long time. And that’s because I had been looking at constitutional arguments that are now being weighed by the California Supreme Court. In other words, can we deny rights to others whose rights we don’t especially share? Or, in fact, may disagree with strongly? And yet, yes I agree with what I said then and I agree with it now. What’s changed since then — even over the last year — according to a poll released just this week by Public Religion Research Institute, is that a majority of evangelicals — not just younger evangelicals — say that they agree either with same-sex marriage or civil unions. That’s a majority of white evangelicals in California. And evangelicals around the country are looking at this in new light and new ways and evaluating this in terms of the Constitution and in light of our Christian values. And that’s good.”

On being asked to resign

“We have an evangelical saying that goes like this: ‘When God closes one door, he opens another.’ Well, absolutely right, I found out about that. But [God] doesn’t say anything about catching your fingers in the doorjamb as you leave. What I’d say to people who have been sacked, fired or whatever — don’t get your fingers caught in the doorjamb while leaving. In other words, don’t try to pull yourself back in. … But God is bigger than those events that precipitate your departure from that job. I’m not the only only who lost my job in recent days, weeks, years. So recognize it as an opportunity and see how God is going to help you in the future.”

On how evangelicalism has changed

“It became perceived by millions and millions of Americans as captive to a conservative ideology. Not captive to Jesus or to the Gospel but captive to an ideology that has departed, in so many ways, from historic evangelicalism. The movement has always been a reactionary movement. It was born out of reaction to the 19th century biblical criticism in biology in which evangelicals reacted to that and moved away. The new evangelicals of the 20th century saw the fallacy of that kind of approach towards society but after a number of decades, that kind of neo-evangelicalism that was founded by the National Association of Evangelicals — well it’s fallen back into the same kind of subservience to reactionary-ism. Evangelicalism is [seen] today by what it’s against, not what it’s for. And we’re trying to say, we’re for these things. And among those is this command to first and foremost follow Jesus — not the Republican Party or Rush Limbaugh or anyone else, but to follow what the Gospel says.”

On the Tea Party movement

“The Tea Party movement is irreligious and significantly so. It’s got lots of problems. I wouldn’t join it if I were an evangelical and I would urge others not to or at least to be suspicious of it because it doesn’t bring with it the whole biblical concept of responsibility and the rest to God and so I’m not a Tea Party fan.”

On religious imperialism

“[Religious leaders across the world] look upon our advocacy on behalf of religious freedom as intervention. And they resent that. And so we really have to be careful when engaging overseas that we understand how these pivotal players in these religious communities view us. And not attempt to manipulate them but understand their importance. … And we just can’t view religion through the lens of counterterrorism policy. We have to understand that religions play pivotal roles on all of these issues of poverty, development, disease and the like. Even climate change. And we have to engage these players.”

Related Links

• Rev. Richard Cizik On God And Global Warming

I must say that I am entirely impressed with the New York Times coverage of the oil leak in the Gulf.  It is updated constantly, tracking the presence of the surface oil slick, the coastal impact, the environmental impact, and the clean up efforts.  It is a combination of great information that is easily organized and uses available tools to communicate.  The short (less than 2 minute) video on the blowout of the pump is super helpful.  If you want a primer, a refresher, or one new source to track the spill, I would encourage you to bookmark this page:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/05/01/us/20100501-oil-spill-tracker.html

Be sure to click through each tab:

Where Oil Is in the Gulf
Where Oil Has Made Landfall
Efforts to Stop the Leak
Effects on Wildlife
Investigating the Blowout
Live Video of the Leak

Jim Belcher was at Gordon College (his alma mater) on Monday from 7-9 PM to talk about his book Deep Church (thedeepchurch.com).  I boot-legged the audio from  midway up the lecture hall.  Audio is below.

Here is the blurb:

WENHAM, MA—Jim Belcher graduated from Gordon College in 1987 with a bachelor’s degree in political studies. Today, he is an experienced pastor and scholar whose wisdom has been widely recognized through his award-winning book, Deep Church.

Belcher, the founding pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach, California, will return to campus, Monday, July 19, from 7–9 p.m. for, “A Conversation with Rev. Dr. Jim Belcher.” His talk will take place in the Jenks Library, room 237 with a reception immediately following. Sponsored by the Office of Alumni and Parent Relations, the event will be free and open to the public.

Chosen as one of Christianity Today magazine’s Top 12 Books of 2010, Deep Church: A Third Way Beyond Emerging and Traditional explores the emerging movement in evangelical churches as well as traditional models and offers insights of all sides to forge a third way between the two. Deep Church is a term taken from a letter C.S. Lewis wrote in 1952 to the Church Times to describe the body of believers committed to mere Christianity.

“This book is written for those on the outside who want to understand the debate,” Belcher writes in his book’s introduction. “But this book is also written for . . . those who are attempting to work out their ecclesiology—their theological view of the church, its purpose, structure and goals.”

Belcher, who earned his M.A. from Fuller Seminary and his Ph.D. from Georgetown University, is also the co-founder of the Restoring Community Conference: Integrating Social Interaction, Sacred Space and Beauty in the 21st Century, an annual conference for city officials, planners, builders and architects. He previously led the Twenty-Something Fellowship and co-founded The Warehouse Service at Lake Avenue Church in Pasadena. He has been published several articles, and until recently, he and his wife and four children live in Costa Mesa, California. Next year, Belcher and his family will live in Oxford, England, while he researches a new book.

“As an alumnus, Jim has given Christians good help and perspective on understanding and making decisions about their church connection,” said Nancy Mering, director of alumni and parent relations and organizer of the event. “I’m very excited he can speak to folk in the Gordon community and neighborhood. It’s great to have him back.”

http://www.gordon.edu/article.cfm?iArticleID=986&iReferrerPageID=5&iPrevCatID=30&bLive=1

Amazon has announced that for the first time, their e-book sales have surpassed print book sales.  This is important.  After Gutenberg invented the printing press, there were still those people who preferred scrolls for a time.  Now that computers have been invented, paving the way for “sit-down” reading devices to be created, the shift is happening before our very eyes.  The clock is ticking on the extinction of print media in the developed world.  All it takes is one generation…

E-Books Top Hardcovers at Amazon

By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

Here are some reviews (spoilers included), but read after you watch:

http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/reviews/17388/180225

http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20401172,00.html

http://movies.nytimes.com/2010/07/16/movies/16inception.html

http://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2010/07/inception-summers-best-most-disappointing-blockbuster/59855/

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2010/07/26/100726crci_cinema_denby

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128493953

My wife loves Susan Wise Bauer, so I perked up when I saw her name on the front page of “Books and Culture”.  Her book review was on “In the Land of Believers: An Outsider’s Extraordinary Journey into the Heart of the Evangelical Church“.  This is a fascinating account of a secular Jew pretending to  convert to an evangelical Christian in order to learn what makes them tick.  The author, Gina Welch, did this undercover work at Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, VA (pastored by the late Jerry Falwell).  One wonders if she will do this for other churches or religious groups.

It appears that Susan thinks that Gina missed the point of evangelicalism and mistook it for a mere cultural identity.

The following article is located at: http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/2010/julaug/amongevangelicals.html

Undercover Among the Evangelicals

They’re nice, but they don’t know how to think.

Susan Wise Bauer | posted 6/28/2010

In 2005, Gina Welch put on ugly buckled loafers and a loose purple sweater and joined Thomas Road Baptist Church. She also grew out her short hair, gained some weight (her “temporary church body”), and replaced her gold nail polish with “good girl pink.” The dowdiness was strategic: she was trying to look evangelical.

Welch, a self-described secular Jew, had moved to Virginia for graduate school a couple of years earlier. The relocation was a shock. Suddenly she realized that a Berkeley childhood and four years at Yale had given her a slightly skewed perspective on the American religious landscape. Evangelicalism wasn’t a weird local aberration after all; secular America was actually “limited real estate on the vast territory controlled by Christians.”

She decided to investigate that vast territory as an insider. “I wanted to know what my evangelical neighbors were like as people …. I wanted to try to take them on their own terms,” she writes. “I felt I needed to go unnoticed if I was going to get an authentic understanding.” So she went to Thomas Road, pretending to be a new convert, and spent nearly a year living as an undercover atheist. Unbelieving, she was baptized. (The water was cold, and her mascara ran.) Unbelieving, she took the Lord’s Supper. (“I was hungry. Is it wrong to think of this as a refreshment?”) Unbelieving, she went on a mission trip to Alaska and led a little girl through the sinner’s prayer.

That’s a lot of effort, but Welch was driven by a sense of mission, determined to break through the stereotypes and explain to the world that evangelicals aren’t really all that scary after all. In the Land of Believers, the story of the months she spent as a member of Thomas Road, is her manifesto.

“My hope for this book,” Welch writes on her website, “is that it will provide readers with a vivid portrayal of evangelical hearts and minds to eclipse the old, broad caricatures.” By the end of her sojourn, she has developed an affection for her NASCAR-loving, gun-toting, fry-eating evangelical friends—an affection she recommends to her secular compatriots. In the Land of Believers concludes with this earnest plea:

If we don’t love Evangelicals, if we don’t make an effort to understand and accept them, to eat the fish even as it wriggles in our hands, we’ll always be each other’s nemeses. We’ll always be trying to drown each other out. Threaten them, ridicule them, celebrate their humiliation, and you create a toxic dump, fertile ground for a ferocious adversary to rise, again and again. But listen to them, include them in the public conversation, understand the sentiments behind their convictions, and you invent the possibility of kinship.

Apart from the creepy and inexplicable metaphor, this sounds good—until you realize that “understand the sentiments behind their convictions” is exactly what Welch means. She may claim to be portraying the evangelical mind, but her entire narrative is marked by a determined refusal to comprehend that there is one.

“[H]ow was I to find a place among people indifferent to facts?”, Welch writes in her introduction. It is an opinion that never shifts a millimeter. Listening to Jerry Falwell preach about the offense of the cross, she muses: “By embracing the inscrutable cross, Christians were comfortable not fully comprehending the concepts around which they built their lives.” Christian beliefs bypass the brain altogether; the whole notion of the Trinity, she remarks, “reminded me of nothing more than Dracula’s ability to transmute into a bat or mist.” She is tone-deaf to conviction, unable to comprehend that doctrine has anything to do with the behavior of the people she claims to love.

Which is simpler for her, because she can blame everything she dislikes about evangelicals on cultural influence, and cultivate her affection for them without having to think about what they actually believe. “I expected to go in as a sort of anthropologist,” she writes at the end of her experiment:

I expected to discover the sociological underpinnnings for evangelical wackiness. I never imagined that I would feel a kind of belonging. Because beyond basically appreciating my friends as fellow human beings, I finally understood what it felt like to believe you knew something that had the power to improve the lives of others. You felt compelled to share it. And whose fault was their ignorance? It was hard to blame them entirely.

The answer to the rhetorical question is, apparently, the South. In Welch’s world, Christians have “violently side-parted” hair, buckle their belts under ponderous bellies, think airplane travel is exotic, and leave lousy tips. “Could I be a Christian woman to a Christian man?”, she wonders, considering what it would be like to be a real evangelical instead of the undercover atheist variety. “Could I hold his hand and my zipper-bagged Bible as we hurried into church together? Could I look at him across a basket of bottomless fries and be content?”

The answer, predictably, is no. “I preferred analysis, reason, and the satisfying realism of hard truths,” she concludes, heading back towards her secular life. But she’s fairly sure that, one day, her evangelical friends will wipe the grease off their fingers and follow her. Chronicling a heated discussion about the emergent church among her Thomas Road friends, she predicts that resistance to the movement will inevitably crumble in time: “The emerging church was the future for born-agains, as it acknowledged that Christians needed to mold to the shape of the world–not the other way around. Signs of hope were everywhere.”

That’s a staggeringly stupid thing for anyone who claims to understand evangelicalism to write, but Welch is unable to believe that people she likes could really hold well-thought-out, strongly held beliefs that she finds repellent. (“If somehow Evangelicals were forced to co-exist with gay people,” she suggests brightly, “Evangelicals would eventually learn that their ideas about gayness were wrong.”) Ultimately, Welch is able to love evangelicals because she finds their identity in their culture, which spares her from having to cope with stubborn things like belief.

At the end of In the Land of Believers, Welch quotes a commencement address by David Foster Wallace, in which Wallace recommends that his listeners cultivate peace with others by choosing to see “the mystical oneness of all things deep down …. Not that the mystical stuff is true. The only thing that’s capital-T true is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it.” This, Welch explains, became “the basis of my love for Evangelicals: I was going to choose to see the mystical oneness. And once I started to see it that way, loving them wasn’t very hard to do.” Loving them while grappling with the reality of their beliefs might be a little bit harder.

Despite its many failings, In the Land of Believers demonstrates just how illusory our peace with the secular world can be. I don’t wear my pants too low (in part because I give the bottomless fries a miss) or speak with a banjo twang; I rack up my share of frequent-flyer miles, wear black when I’m in New York, and leave decent tips. In my professional world, I go undercover just as effectively as Welch did at Thomas Road. The people I work with know I’m a Christian, but I don’t look blue-collar Virginia.

Welch’s book reminds me that this probably allows my colleagues to forget about the awkward beliefs I hold. If I spoke of the Trinity, of Christ, of sin and atonement—and if they listened—I suspect that the result would not be love and mystical acceptance. It would be appalled surprise, followed by rapid retreat.

Susan Wise Bauer is the author most recently of The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade (Norton), the second installment in a projected four-volume history of the world.

For sure, the trend of the last 20 years has been to have children and then think about marriage in the future. With the divorce rate what it is, it’s no wonder. This is a good profile piece on the issue. At the end of the day, to me it seems like marriage is becoming like circumcision – a covenantal idea of the past that people have a hard time justifying for the future. Here is the link: http://www.wbur.org/npr/128265730

All Things Considered

Kids First, Marriage Later — If Ever

This is very timely since the modern, popular perceptions of Christian origins are pretty one-sided. Early Christianity is poorly understood (embarrassingly) and under valued in our churches, and this ignorance is very easy to capitalize on (enter Bart Ehrman and John Dominic Crossan). I hope that in endowing this chair that perhaps it might prompt GCTS to require a class on early Christianity for Master of Divinity students beyond the 2 church history classes.  Don’t forget to listen to the interview below.

Donald M. Fairbairn, Ph.D., has been appointed to the newly endowed Robert E. Cooley Chair in Early Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, effective fall 2010.

Since 1999, Dr. Fairbairn has taught at Erskine Theological Seminary in Due West, SC, most recently as Professor of Historical Theology. While there, he taught courses including historical and patristic theology and church history. Dr. Fairbairn also taught for several years at Donetsk Christian University in the Ukraine, and he teaches occasionally at several North American and European seminaries and Bible schools. He has authored books in Russian and English, most recently, Life in the Trinity: An Introduction to Theology with the Help of the Church Fathers, and has written many articles and book reviews on patristics, Eastern Orthodoxy and Christology. He holds an M.Div. from Denver Seminary and a Ph.D. in patristics from the University of Cambridge.

“Dr. Fairbairn brings expertise in the patristic period, expertise rarely found in evangelical institutions of higher learning,” says Dr. Timothy Laniak, Dean of the Charlotte campus of Gordon-Conwell. “As a noted scholar and excellent communicator, he will provide reliable information about these controversial centuries to students and the broader public and will play a strategic role in the development of the Robert C. Cooley Center for the Study of Early Christianity, a Center devoted to exploring the historical foundations of the Christian faith.”

The Robert E. Cooley Chair in Early Christianity is an endowed faculty chair that provides Gordon-Conwell and the wider community in the Southeast with a senior scholar in the area of patristics and historical theology. This chair will allow the seminary to contribute careful scholarship to the growing interest in the early church.

Source: www.gcts.edu

This is an interesting little article from JET Magazine back on June 21, 1999 (pages 20-22).  I have seen the statistics from this article mis-cited as though it were from a USA Today poll in a number of places.  As the article points out, the source is a Lutheran Brotherhood survey.  It’s been over 10 years since the article, and I’m curious if the answers would still be the same.

Here are links to article:
At Google Books
At FindArticles.com

If we were granted the opportunity to come face-to-face with God and could find out the answer to anything, many of us would probably have a plethora of questions to ask.

Still, aside from the many questions that would fill our heads if we could get a direct and immediate answer from God or a supreme being concerning any issue, there is one question that ranks tops for a great majority of people, according to a nationwide Lutheran Brotherhood survey.

Many adults would ask God, “What’s my purpose here?” reported the poll, which was conducted by Yankelovich Partners. Of those surveyed, 34 percent would like to find out the answer to this.

While most Americans (76 percent), the survey reported, believe that a higher being created them for a specific purpose and almost half (45 percent) of them say they understand their purpose very well, many would like to confirm it with God about their purpose on Earth.

The survey found that many people pray about achieving their life’s purpose. Of the Americans who believe they have a special purpose, it was learned that most (89 percent) of them pray for guidance to fulfill that purpose.

People who earn less than $35,000 per year, the survey revealed, are more likely to believe God created them for a reason, compared to people with higher incomes. The more education people have, the less likely they are to believe they have a specific purpose.

In addition to those with low incomes, senior citizens and weekly churchgoers also were more inclined to say they understand their purpose the best, the poll found.

“It’s inspirational to learn that so many people believe they were created to carry out something special and that they know what it is,” says Louise Thoreson, Lutheran Brotherhood’s vice president of fraternal. “Meaning and direction in life are often rooted in people’s spiritual beliefs.”

The second question adults would ask God or their supreme being most if they could get a direct and immediate answer would be, “Will I have life after death?” Nineteen percent of those polled want to know what lies ahead in regards to this question.

Generation Xers, according to the survey, are more likely than older adults to wonder about life after death.

“Why do bad things happen?” is the third most-asked question that adults would want to find out from God; 16 percent of those surveyed want to ask this question.

Surprisingly, 12 percent of those polled weren’t sure what they would ask God if they could get a direct and immediate answer.

Seven percent of those who partook in the survey would like to ask God or their supreme being if they could get a direct or immediate answer, “Is there intelligent life elsewhere?”

The survey found that men are twice as likely as women to say they would ask God about life on other planets (10 percent vs. 5 percent).

Only six percent of those surveyed would like to ask God, “How long will I live?”, while another six percent would ask a variety of other questions.

Yankelovich Partners conducted the survey by telephone among 1,006 randomly selected adult Americans.

“Lutheran Brotherhood Reports” is a comprehensive survey on attitude and issues that face American families.

As a Lauryn Hill fan, it was good to hear this kind of update.  Most people love her work with the Fugees and her solo album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. As much as I liked that element of her career, I am way more interested in her MTV Unplugged work where she took on more of the Dylan-esque folk-prophet. I have found that far more interesting and influential to me personally.  As a matter of fact, I found myself listening to the Unplugged album last week.  It is raw, real, personal, and spiritual.  Good stuff.

June 28, 2010
by Zoe Chace

I interviewed a lot of people for my story about Lauryn Hill’s voice. I had to, because I didn’t know if I’d be able to speak to her myself. The singer and rapper last released a recording eight years ago. She rarely performs in the U.S., and she almost never gives interviews. But her fans haven’t forgotten her — they’re still pleading for her to come back. Hill is a fantastic singer, as well as one of the greatest MCs of all time, and the story of her voice is the story of a generation.

It doesn’t take much for a group of thirtysomethings to get nostalgic about Hill. Put her solo album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, on at a bar, and it takes the crowd right back to college days or high-school summers. I met Daryl Lutz while he was hanging out with a group of friends on the deck of Marvin’s Bar in downtown Washington, D.C.

“We went to school in Hampton, Va., and she came to do a show,” he said. ”It was one of the best times in my life — I mean, she spoke to me! We snuck backstage and I got her to sign my meal card. She said, ‘This is your meal card, brother, you know?’ I said, ‘That’s all I got.’ She signed it, ‘Eat well — L. Boogie.’ That’s something I’ll never forget. I love her. I love her to death.”

I heard tons of stories like Lutz’s that night — mostly closed with this plea: “Come back, Lauryn. We need you. Come back!” People spoke directly into the microphone, as if it were a telephone line.

From New Ark To Israel

Hill became a star with the hip-hop trio The Fugees. Their second album, The Score, came out in 1996, and it was an instant classic. The group — Hill, Wyclef Jean and Prakazrel Michel — sounded like they were in perfect sync. On the first single, “Fu-gee-la,” Hill sang the hook, rhymed a verse, then sang again. She was the total package, more so than any other rapper, male or female, has been.

She’s one of slickest rappers ever: Her rhymes are dexterous, spiritual, hilarious, surprising. Without a doubt, she was the best-looking rapper the world had ever seen. And Hill was a soul singer with a real old-school, almost militant, politic. The second single was Hill’s cover of Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly.” That recording has never really gone away, and its success built the expectations for Hill’s solo record to a fever pitch. Particularly to women and young girls who listened to her then, she was a revelation. There was steel in her voice when she rapped; she sang like she really cared about our hopeless crushes and our impotent rages, like she really loved us. We thought maybe we could grow up to be like her.

The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill came out in 1998. It was like LeBron James’ rookie year in the NBA. You knew he had the potential to be great after seeing him in high school — and then, right out of the gate, he’s one of the best ball players in the league.

Jayson Jackson, part of Hill’s management team, described the recording process this way: “The record was already inside her. She would go into the studio, and it would just pour out of her.”

Lenesha Randolph sang backing vocals on Miseducation, and she describes herself today as the backing vocals “to all your favorite artists.” She’s on tour with Lady Gaga right now, but a formative influence on her singing was her work in the studio singing backup for Hill.

“I don’t know if people are gonna like this album, because I’m just singing, and nobody wants to hear rappers sing,” Hill told Randolph at the time. Randolph says she couldn’t believe it. “I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ ” Randolph says. “I would just stare at her, like, look in her mouth! Because when you hear her sing, and then hear her speak — it had such power and volume and rasp. It was something to strive for.”

Everything Is Everything

In 1998, everyone was listening to her sing: mothers, daughters, college students and little kids. As the rapper Nas described his audience, “listeners, bluntheads, fine ladies and prisoners.” Miseducation crossed demographics and genres. It made people dance and cry and blast it from their speakers as they drove around with their best friends.

Jay Smooth, a longtime radio DJ, remembers there was a little sadness in the hip-hop community that there was less rhyming on the album than during Hill’s time with The Fugees. “We may have missed out on the best rap album of all time,” he says. Nevertheless, the album was a note that longtime fans of hip-hop had been craving for someone to hit. Smooth says that for people his age — the same age as Hill, the same age as people like Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls — “we saw our generation create something so powerful and innovative. They were speaking with a love and righteousness that we, perhaps naively, believed could change the world at that time.”

Smooth compares the idealism of the hip-hop generation to the hippies before it. But just as the optimism of the ’60s gave way to what he describes as “the malaise of the ’70s,” Smooth says that hip-hop had lost its way. The music grew more commercialized, and consequently more violent and self-involved, culminating in the deaths of Tupac in 1996, and then Biggie Smalls in 1997.

“It was right after that, in 1998, that Lauryn Hill’s album came out,” Smooth says. ”And it seemed that she was that voice inside our soul — coming out and asking all of us, ‘How could we have gone so wrong?’ and ‘Can we have some grown folks talking about loving ourselves, before it’s too late? If it’s not already too late?’ ”

‘Look At Your Career,’ They Said. ‘Lauryn, Baby, Use Your Head’

Hill raked in the Grammys, including Album of the Year. But that same year, some of her collaborators filed suit, saying they weren’t properly credited on the album. They settled out of court, and the stir over the suit prompted what seemed like a fall from grace for Lauryn Hill.

Shortly after the Grammys, in the winter of 1999, Hill disappeared from public life. For years afterward, her fans traded rumors — the prevailing theory was that she’d had some kind of breakdown. Smooth says he thinks the pressure put on her to save the hip-hop generation from itself might have broken her. She was also a busy mother: Over the past 10 years, she’s had five children. Her MTV Unplugged album, which came out in 2002, seemed to reveal a person worn thin.

After Unplugged, those of us who grew up listening to her missed her voice in the same way we missed our hopeful youth. That powerful sound that represented great potential being fulfilled was silent.

“No one ever stops missing her,” Smooth says. ”Every time you say her name — like, ‘Lauryn Hill walked into Home Depot’ — you’ll be hoping she starts tapping on a table and making a beat and singing.”

This could be the year.

After Winter Must Come Spring

Lauryn Hill took the stage at the Harmony Festival in Santa Rosa, Calif., just a few weeks ago. She’s barely performed at all in the U.S. in the past 10 years. The band was restless and loud behind her, almost drowning her out at times. She looked completely regal, even in a carnival balloon-style jumpsuit, with her hair blown out and dyed maroon to match. She pranced around the stage in huge heels, shouting directions to the band, as though they were in rehearsal. When she rapped, her words flew by so fast, it seemed she was barely breathing. But when the sound guy brought her mic up and the band would breathe for a moment, her voice soared over the crowd. It was the same voice I’d grown up with, just as raw and present and full of soul as I remembered.

The reputation that surrounds Hill is wild — it’s hard to know what to believe, because she does so few interviews. She’s got handlers on top of handlers, publicists and managers who you think will lead you to her, and then they turn out to be red herrings. My editor and I chased them all down during the weekend of the Harmony Festival. I was told by various people to not touch her, don’t look her in the eye; that instead of talking directly to you, she writes on a Post-It note and sticks it to your chest. I’ve also been told repeatedly not to call her “Lauryn” anything — she goes by Ms. Hill. This is the only rumor that turns out to be true, in my case. Because after her performance in Santa Rosa, when we ask Ms. Hill if we can ride with her back to the hotel and ask her some questions, she tells us to get in the car.

I ask her the question her fans have been asking each other for years: Why did you stop putting out music?

“There were a number of different reasons,” she says. ”But partly, the support system that I needed was not necessarily in place. There were things about myself, personal-growth things, that I had to go through in order to feel like it was worth it. In fact, as musicians and artists, it’s important we have an environment — and I guess when I say environment, I really mean the [music] industry, that really nurtures these gifts. Oftentimes, the machine can overlook the need to take care of the people who produce the sounds that have a lot to do with the health and well-being of society, or at least some aspect of society. And it’s important that people be given the time that they need to go through, to grow, so that the consciousness level of the general public is properly affected.  Oftentimes, I think people are forced to make decisions prematurely. And then that sound radiates.”

This would sound self-important coming from many other artists, especially popular artists. But to someone who grew up with Hill, it makes sense. She did have a hand in shaping how we were feeling, or it seemed that she did. And the disappointment of her disappearance is just one in a catalog of disappointments that we experienced as we grew up.

Her voice sounds just the same: low and raspy, full of intensity and soul. It’s no wonder. She tells me she grew up singing along with mostly male soul singers — “the Donny Hathaways, the Stevie Wonders, the Jackie Wilsons.” As for her rhyming skills, she says she used to have a rapping voice and a singing voice. But now the voices have to become one, in order for her to get the kind of music mix that she wants in a live performance. It’s a work in progress. It’s so funny to hear that Hill is still working on her extraordinary voice — holding it out in front of her, waving it like a sheet to see what more she can shake out of it.

“I’m trying to open up my range and really sing more,” she says. ”With The Fugees initially, and even with Miseducation, it was very hip-hop — always a singing over beats. I don’t think people have really heard me sing out. So if I do record again, perhaps it will have an expanded context. Where people can hear a bit more.”

How You Gonna Win When You Ain’t Right Within?

I ask her what it feels like to sing, and she flips the question on me — “Well, what’s it like to hear me?” I tell her listening to her sing makes me feel both happy and sad. It feels like her voice comes from a higher place. I’m paraphrasing all the people I’ve interviewed about her.

“The feeling that you get,” she says, “I get first. I think you have a delayed experience with the feeling that I usually get. When I have a creative insight, there is a high. I think back in the day, I made music as much as I did because it made me feel so good. I think you could argue that there is a creative addiction — but, you know, the healthy kind.”

I ask her about having a voice that moves so many people, if there isn’t a certain amount of responsibility that comes along with that.

“I think about it, and yet I don’t think about it,” she says. We pull into the hotel parking lot and she’s about to continue, but we’re interrupted by one of the festival employees, who comes up to the car to ask if someone-or-other’s keys are in the Suburban we’re riding in.

“No,” Hill says with a laugh. “No one in here has those keys.” After all, it’s just Hill, me, the driver and my editor in the car. As the man walks away, Hill says, “He looks just like Matthew McConaughey. First, second cousin. He does! … What I was I saying? Oh, I think if I was created with such power or an ability, then what’s also been put in me is the blueprint for the responsibility part, as well. I have to take care of myself in order to take care of this gift, which has affected so many. I don’t treat it lightly. It’s important to me to be healthy and to be whole.”

And Hill seems healthy and whole, squished up next to me in the car, making cracks about ridiculous-looking actors, chin in her hand as she thinks through the answers to my questions. She doesn’t tell me to move back, or that she doesn’t want to answer something. Watching her perform earlier in the day made me uneasy. I felt like I was watching a captain who had spent a life at sea, then lived on land for 10 years, stumbling a bit her first time back on the deck of a boat. But hearing her steadiness now, I feel hopeful. It’s also a reality check: Why did we demand so much of this woman?

“I don’t know if you know this, but I have five children,” she says. ”The youngest is 2 now, so she’s old enough that I can leave her for a period of time and know she’s going to be okay. That’s one reason [Hill is starting to perform again]. And I think it’s just time. I’m starting to get excited again. Believe it or not, I think what people are attracted to about me, if anything, is my passion. People got exposed to my passion through music and song first. I think people might realize, you know, ‘We love the way she sounds, we love the music, but I think we just love how fearless she is. How boundless she is, when it comes to what she wants to do.’ And I think that can be infectious.”

This closes the interview. I thank her. She says, “You’re welcome,” and my editor and I leave the car. We sit on the stairs for a few minutes to catch our breath. We spent all weekend chasing Lauryn Hill, hoping to have this conversation about her voice. I compared it to a video game with infinite levels you didn’t even know existed, like when you beat a level and you think you won, but then you go through a door and there’s a whole other world you have to conquer. Getting to Lauryn Hill was like that.

Sara Sarasohn, my editor, compared the chase to the Israelites rising up and following the cloud over the Tent of Meeting. In the Torah, when the Israelites are wandering in the desert, there was a cloud over the Tent of Meeting, where the Ark of the Covenant was kept. Moses would go to the Tent of Meeting to communicate with God. At night, the cloud looked like fire. When the cloud lifted and moved, the Israelites would see it and know that it was time for them to move as well in their journey through the desert. It was like the presence of Hill was this cloud that we could see in the distance, and we were trying to follow it, and finally, we got to the Tent of Meeting.

Sitting on the stairs together, Sara and I couldn’t help but cry, just a little. We talked to Lauryn Hill. And she’s doing fine.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128149135

Interesting developments with the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL).  Ronald Handel of UC Berkely has recently published an article in Biblical Archaeology Review (BAR) about why he is stepping away from SBL.  He feels that SBL has slipped in their commitment to “reason” and “critical scholarship” with regards to biblical studies which has opened the door to conservatives and evangelicals to increase the dimension of faith in the conversation.  Below is the article and then SBL’s response.  Fascinating…

BAR  36:04, Jul/Aug 2010

Biblical Views: Farewell to SBL

Faith and Reason in Biblical Studies
By Ronald S. Hendel

“The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.” This famous line from Pascal’s Pensées draws a wise distinction between religious faith and intellectual inquiry. The two have different motivations and pertain to different domains of experience. They are like oil and water, things that do not mix and should not be confused. Pascal was a brilliant mathematician, and he did not allow his Catholic beliefs to interfere with his scholarly investigations. He regarded the authority of the church to be meaningless in such matters. He argued that “all the powers in the world can by their authority no more persuade people of a point of fact than they can change it.”1 That is to say, facts are facts, and faith has no business dealing in the world of facts. Faith resides in the heart and in one’s way of living in the world.

In the same year as the appearance of the Pensées (1670), another book appeared that changed the practice of Biblical scholarship—Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise. In it he showed that the Bible can be the subject of systematic rational inquiry. In the course of his study, he gave persuasive reasons to show that Moses could not have written the Pentateuch. For this and other conclusions, Spinoza was branded a heretic and his book was widely condemned. But Biblical scholarship persisted, and over the last few centuries it has become a full-blooded academic field. Pascal would not have been happy with Spinoza’s conclusions, but in a curious way they agreed on the careful distinction between the paths of faith and reason.

Let’s fast forward to the present. My focus is the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL), the main organization for Biblical scholarship in North America. In recent years it has changed its position on the relationship between faith and reason in the study of the Bible. I think that it has forgotten the lessons of both Pascal and Spinoza, and is falling into a confused domain of dissension and hypocrisy. The problem, as I understand it, has to do with money.

SBL used to share its annual meeting with the major American organizations for Near Eastern archaeology (the American Schools of Oriental Research, ASOR) and for the study of religion (the American Association of Religion, AAR). But due to petty disputes among the leaders of these groups, ASOR and AAR have dissolved their links with SBL. In order to keep up its numbers at its annual meeting, SBL has reached out to evangelical and fundamentalist groups, promising them a place within the SBL meeting. So instead of distinguished academic organizations like ASOR and AAR in the fold, we now have fundamentalist groups like the Society of Pentecostal Studies and the Adventist Society for Religious Studies as our intimate partners. These groups now hold SBL sessions at the annual meeting. The participation of these and other groups presumably boosts attendance—and SBL’s income—to previous levels.

What’s wrong with bringing in such groups? Well, some of them proselytize at the SBL meetings. One group invited some Jewish scholars to their session, asked them if they observed the Sabbath, and handed them materials intended to convert them. And recently the SBL online book review journal (Review of Biblical Literature) has featured explicit condemnations of the ordinary methods of critical scholarly inquiry, extolling instead the religious authority of orthodox Christian faith. Listen to this, from Bruce Waltke, widely regarded as the dean of evangelical Biblical studies:

By their faith in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, [evangelical scholars] … hear the voice of higher biblical criticism, which replaces faith in God’s revelation with faith in the sufficiency of human reason, as the grating of an old scratched record.  Review of Michael V. Fox, Proverbs 10–31 (Anchor Yale Bible), in Review of Biblical Literature (http://bookreviews.org/pdf/7219_7855.pdf)

This is a quaintly stated position, which directly attacks the applicability of human reason to the study of the Bible. Instead of reason, “faith in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob”—as interpreted by evangelical scholars—should be the rule in Biblical scholarship. Waltke dismisses critical inquiry as an annoying nuisance, like the scratchy sound of an old LP. This is in the midst of a review of a brilliant scholarly commentary on the Book of Proverbs, written by a Jewish scholar, in the Anchor Yale Bible series.

On the one hand, I give Waltke the respect he has earned as a scholar, and I am happy to listen to his views. But when he says such rationally absurd things as “the factual data validates Solomon’s authorship of Prov[erbs] 1:1–24:33” (which belongs to a post-Solomonic stratum of Hebrew, as Waltke ought to know), and when he asserts that Moses wrote the laws of Deuteronomy (which are written in post-Mosaic Hebrew), we are clearly not in the world of critical Biblical scholarship at all. This is religious dogma, plain and simple.

Why is this a problem? Certainly Waltke is entitled to his views. The problem is that the SBL has loosened its own definition of Biblical scholarship, such that partisan attacks of this type are now entirely valid. When I learned of the new move to include fundamentalist groups within the SBL, I wrote to the director and cited the mission statement in the SBL’s official history: “The object of the Society is to stimulate the critical investigation of the classical biblical literatures.”3 The director informed me that in 2004 the SBL revised its mission statement and removed the phrase “critical investigation” from its official standards. Now the mission statement is simply to “foster biblical scholarship.” So critical inquiry—that is to say, reason—has been deliberately deleted as a criterion for the SBL. The views of creationists, snake-handlers and faith-healers now count among the kinds of Biblical scholarship that the society seeks to foster.

The battle royal between faith and reason is now in the center ring at the SBL circus. While the cultured despisers of reason may rejoice—including some postmodernists, feminists4 and eco-theologians—I find it dispiriting. I don’t want to belong to a professional society where people want to convert me, and where they hint in their book reviews that I’m going to hell. As a scholar of the humanities—and I might add, as a Jew—I do not feel at home in such a place. What to do? Well, I’ve let my membership in SBL lapse. Maybe that’s a cowardly response, but sometimes, as Shakespeare wrote, “The better part of valor is discretion.” Sometimes it’s reasonable to avoid conflict. And like Pascal and Spinoza, I’m partial to reason in matters of scholarship. But my heart, for reasons of its own, gently grieves.

http://www.bib-arch.org/bar/article.asp?PubID=BSBA&Volume=36&Issue=04&ArticleID=09&Page=0&UserID=0&

Discussing Faith and Reason in Biblical Studies

Professor Ronald S. Hendel recently published an opinion piece in Biblical Archaeology Review (see “Farewell to SBL: Faith and Reason in Biblical Studies,” available online here) in which he argues that “[in] recent years [SBL] has changed its position on the relationship between faith and reason in the study of the Bible.” We encourage all SBL members and other interested individuals to read the article in its entirety, then to join a conversation about the SBL and its standards for membership and organizational affiliations (see further below).

The questions that Professor Hendel raises are interesting and important, and we look forward to the discussion that follows. However, we first must clarify a few points of fact with regard to the article in question. In what follows, each “claim” is a summary of one of Professor Hendel’s main points, not a verbatim quotation.

Claim: The SBL has diluted its standards of critical scholarship, as evidenced in the 2004 change to the Society mission statement.

Clarification: The Society’s mission has been changed a number of times, but in no case did such a revision reflect a decreased commitment to the standards of academic excellence, nor did the changes dilute the standards of critical scholarship. One iteration of the Society mission, quoted in Hans Dieter Betz’s 1997 presidential address, seems worthy of consideration here. The SBL’s purpose includes “stimulat[ing] the critical investigation of biblical literature … [and] widen[ing] the conversation partners of all interested in biblical literature” (JBL 117 [1998]: 4). Throughout its history, the SBL has seen no inherent contradiction between “critical investigation” and including in the conversation “all interested in biblical literature,” a perspective that is consistent with the SBL’s current mission statement: “to foster biblical scholarship.” In short, “critical inquiry—that is to say, reason” has not been “deliberately deleted” from the SBL mission. SBL has never “removed the phrase ‘critical investigation’” from any initiative.

Claim: ASOR and AAR stopped meeting with the SBL “due to petty disputes among the leaders of these groups.”

Clarification: ASOR began meeting independently from the SBL in the late 1990s and has reaffirmed on several occasions since then its preference for a meeting in the same locale and just prior to, but independent of, the SBL Annual Meeting. In 2003, the AAR decided unilaterally to discontinue its joint meeting with the SBL. The SBL was informed of this decision at the same time as AAR members, who had no voice in the decision. Very soon after that decision, AAR began an intense review of the decision. In fact, part of the review led to the decision to meet in San Francisco at the same time, since SBL had already contracted to meet there. Since then, the SBL has worked tirelessly to restore a return to meeting in the same city and at the same time. In sum, the issues of SBL’s past and future partnerships with ASOR and AAR are complex and not due simply to “petty disputes among leaders.”

Claim: Since the AAR decision to discontinue joint meetings, the SBL has loosened its standards as to the types of organizations that can be included at the SBL Annual Meeting.

Clarification: The presence of affiliate organizations at the Annual Meeting has a long history, as evidenced by the 2001 program book’s listing of 237 “additional meetings” (i.e., meetings by groups other than AAR- or SBL-sponsored program units), some of which were sponsored by confessionally oriented or denominationally based groups. Further, even granting that the Society for (not “of”) Pentecostal Studies began meeting with the SBL only recently, one doubts that they would agree that they are “fundamentalist,” in light of the prominence they give to their dialogues with the Faith and Order Commission of the National Council of Churches U.S.A., the Wesleyan Theological Society, and the Roman Catholic Church. Finally, the Adventist Society for Religious Studies, the second example provided, began meeting with the SBL-AAR in 1972 and became part of the Annual Meeting program in 1993. The ASRS has met with the SBL continually. Suffice it to say that the ASRS’s meeting with the SBL is by no means a recent development, let alone somehow related to a claimed loosening of standards.

Claim: The current SBL environment, which includes instances of proselytizing activity as well as veiled theological denunciations of certain individuals or groups, is hostile to a critical approach to biblical studies.

Clarification: Although SBL invites vigorous discussion of all relevant topics, proselytizing activity is neither welcome nor permitted in SBL-sponsored events and publications and is inconsistent with the SBL’s core values: accountability, inclusiveness, collaboration, leadership in biblical scholarship, collegiality, productivity, commitment, responsiveness to change, communication, scholarly integrity, efficiency, and tolerance. Consequently, any instances of proselytizing activity should be reported to SBL staff. Further, we are unaware of any RBL reviews that even “hint” that anyone is “going to hell.” If any SBL member can point us to such a review, we will immediately remove the review and disavow its sentiments.

Discussion: We invite all SBL members to respond to the issues that have been raised. Please send your responses to this email address. All responses will be vetted before being posted to the SBL website; comments containing personal attacks or disparaging remarks about any group or individual will not be posted. Among the type of issues that might be discussed:

• To what extent do you believe that the Society successfully balances its commitment to scholarly integrity while maintaining an atmosphere in which all voices may be heard (specific, first-hand examples are encouraged)?

• Should the Society establish a standards-based approach to membership? That is, should there be a set of minimum standards, qualifications, or achievements for SBL membership?

• If you favor a standards-based approach, what specific standards would you advocate for SBL membership?

http://www.sbl-site.org/membership/farewell.aspx

Big downer in our community.  Below are the details.  Here is the link: http://www.salemnews.com/local/x1617554686/2-under-arrest-in-Beverly-homicide.

June 18, 2010

2 under arrest in Beverly homicide

Homeless-on-homeless crime suspected, DA’s office says

By Bruno Matarazzo Jr. Staff Writer

BEVERLY — Two homeless men will be arraigned today on murder charges following the death of another homeless man at a shuttered rooming house near the post office downtown.

The 52-year-old man died at Beverly Hospital around 6 p.m., the Essex County district attorney’s office said. The victim was found by police and EMTs, who performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

Eric Roberts, 33, and Michael Bryson, 49, were arrested shortly after police received the report. They will be arraigned today in Salem District Court.

No word on a possible motive or what led police to the two men.

Police learned of the crime when a friend of the victim went to the police station at 5:40 p.m. to report a possible homicide at the closed rooming house at 45 Broadway, said Stephen O’Connell, spokesman for the district attorney’s office.

Neighbors said the rooming house, which has 16 units, closed within the past month.

Access to the former dwelling was blocked by police tape as state police investigators waited outside for a warrant in order to begin processing the evidence.

Earlier in the evening, police and investigators began their operations around a public park directly across the street from the post office. None would speak about the investigation or the incident that prompted it.

Questions about what happened in the area were on the minds of many people last night, especially commuters getting off the commuter rail.

Taxi driver Ollie Marley said people had been asking him for hours what happened.

“I don’t know what’s going on,” Marley would tell them.

Alexander Sharrett, 26, who lives near the crime scene, said he was walking home from work when he saw two men sitting on the bench that police investigators were so interested in last night.

Hours later when he came from the grocery store, the entire park was cordoned off with police tape.

“I didn’t think anything of it because I see the people sitting there all day,” Sharrett said.

Neighbors who knew the victim would always see him around the park area pushing a shopping carriage and collecting cans.

“He was harmless,” Sharrett said.

Greg L. Bahnsen, (1948-1995), was an ordained minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and a full time Scholar in Residence for the Southern California Center for Christian Studies. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Southern California, specializing in the theory of knowledge. He previously received the B.A. (magna cum laude, philosophy) from Westmont College, and then simultaneously earned the M.Div. and Th.M. degrees from Westminster Theological Seminary. Dr. Bahnsen lectured to a broad range of evangelical Christian groups at many colleges and conferences. He was an experienced apologist and debater, a clear and cogent teacher of the Christian worldview who was devoted to training believers in understanding and applying the Christian faith to every area of life.  His 2 works on apologetics are  Always Ready: Directions for Defending the Faith and  Van Til’s Apologetic: Readings and Analysis.

• PA098-”Ready to Reason”, (VI:12; December, 1990)
• PA099-”The Heart of the Matter: Knowing and Believing”, (VII:1; Jan, 1991)
• PA100-”Answering Objections”, (VII:2; Feb, 1991)
• PA101-”Tools of Apologetics”, (Part I-VII:4; Apr, 1991)(Part II-VII:7; Jul, 1991)
• PA103-”Apologetics in Practice”, [Bertrand Russell as example] (Part I-VII:8; Aug, 1991) (Part II-VII:9; Sep, 1991)
• PA105-”The Problem of Evil”, (Part I-VII:10; Oct, 1991) (Part II-VII:12 Dec, 1991)
• PA107-”The Problem of Knowing the ‘Super-Natural’”,(Part I-VII:11; Nov, 1991) (Part II-VIII:1; Jan, 1992) (Part III-VIII:2; Feb, 1992)
• PA110-”The Problem of Faith”, (Part I-Vol. VIII:5; May, 1992) (Part II-Vol. VIII:6; Jun, 1992)
• PA146-”The Problem of Religious Language”, (Part I-Vol. VIII:9 Sept. 1992) (Part II-Vol. IX:1 Jan. 1993) (Part III-Vol. IX:5 May 1993)
• PA165-”The Problem of Miracles”,(Part I-Vol. IX:7 July 1993) (Part II-Vol. IX:9 Sept. 1993)
• PA112-”A World Without Religion?”, Penpoint I:2 (December 1990)
• PA115-”Dead Wrong”, Penpoint II:2 (April, 1991) [afterlife according to the movies]
• PA123-”Dr. Bahnsen Represents Christianity in Dialogue with Islam and Judaism at Orange Coast College”, Penpoint Vol. II:6 (November., 1991)
• PA137-”The JFK Assassination and Apologetics”, Penpoint Vol. III:3 (May 1992)
• PA142-”Where the Rubber Hits the Road”, Penpoint Vol. III:5 (August 1992)
• PA143-”The Mind/Body Problem in Biblical Perspective”, (1972)
• PA166-”Cross-Examination: What Does it Mean to Believe?”, The Counsel of Chalcedon Vol. X:5 & 6 (July/August 1993)
• PA167-”Reflections on My Russia Trip”, Penpoint Vol. IV:6 (July-August 1993)
• PA186-”Dr. Bahnsen Debates Atheist Lawyer”, Penpoint Vol. V:1 (January 1994)
• PA191-”Van Til and Self-Deception”, Penpoint Vol. V:8 (Sept. 1994) NOTE: [Reprinted Penpoint Vol. V:10 (December, 1994)]
• PA195-”Van Til’s ‘Presuppositionalism’”, Penpoint Vol. VI:1 (January, 1995)
• PA196-”Van Til’s Challenge to Illegitimate Common Ground”, Penpoint Vol. VI:2 (February, 1995)
• PA197-”Van Til’s Why I Believe in God”, Penpoint Vol. VI:3 (March, 1995)
• PA199-”Van Til’s Call For a Distinctive Christian Mindset”, Penpoint VI:4 (April, 1995)
• PA200-”Van Til’s Life and Impact”, Penpoint VI:5 (May 1995)
• PA205-”Radical Empiricism Made Foolish”, Penpoint VI:10 (October, 1995)
• PA206-”Evidential Apologetics: The Right Way”, Penpoint VI:11 (November 1995)
• PA207-”The Crucial Concept of Self-Deception in Presuppositional Apologetics”, Westminster Theological Journal LVII (1995) 1-31
• PA208-”Presuppositional Reasoning With False Faiths”, Penpoint VII:2 (Feb/Mar 1996)
• PA210-”Presuppositional Procedure”, Penpoint VII:8 (September, 1996)
• PA212-”Another Cup of Coffee”, Penpoint VII:10 (November, 1996)

Jun 14 2010, 1:12 PM ET

There are lots of great beer styles available right now, but you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s all about imperial stouts. They count for 16 of the top 25 beers on beeradvocate.com and 17 of the top 25 at ratebeer.com.

The style originated in 18th-Century England, reputedly as a gift to the court of Catherine the Great—hence its original name, Russian Imperial. In recent decades American brewers have been crafting their own version, often called “double imperial.” Confusingly, the newer, American style is often called simply “imperial stout.” Take that, Anglo-Russian Entente.

Both styles pour like motor oil; they’re high in alcohol, between 7 percent and 12 percent, with strong chocolate and malt notes. But Rocky Balboa would be proud: American doubles are even bigger than Russians—they’re sweeter, more alcoholic, and much hoppier. And many American doubles bring a little something extra to the table: they’re often aged, sometimes with vanilla beans, sometimes in whiskey barrels. Other times, they’re brewed with coffee.

Imperial stouts are about as far from pale lagers as you can get. Which, in fact, may explain their popularity. They’re the crowd-pleasing Cabernets of the beer world—heavy, boozy quaffs with popular flavors like chocolate, caramel, and spice. Think German chocolate cake in a bottle, doused in alcohol. High-alcohol beers of all kinds are hot right now, and the popularity of imperial stouts may come partly from the fact that, at 10 percent alcohol by volume or higher, all those flavors are needed for balance.

Imperial stouts resemble wine in another way. Any beer with ABV above 9 percent or so can be stored, and some—particularly imperial stouts—actually need a few years to mellow in the bottle. As a result, people collect, store, and sell them, just like they would fine wines. In some ways, they’re even better than wine: for the price of a cellar-quality wine, a collector could buy a six-pack of an imperial stout, then drink one a year to see how it changes over time.

But there’s something else going on with imperial stouts. They’re not just highly regarded; they inspire cult-like behavior among their fans. That’s in part because, like a Trans Am, imperial stouts are easy to customize. Brew them with cherries, age them in Scotch barrels, throw in some coffee beans from a prize-winning roaster, whatever you want. Release them in a limited edition, and suddenly people who might buy just a bottle or two will want one of each. Goose Island, in Chicago, has got this figured out: not only does it make Bourbon County Stout, aged in Heaven Hill whiskey barrels, but it makes hard-to-find varieties like Bourbon County Brand Coffee Stout, brewed with Intelligentsia espresso beans, and Bourbon County Stout Rare, aged for two years in barrels that formerly held 23-year-old Pappy Van Winkle, among the most expensive bourbons on the market.

Then there’s the beer’s extreme characteristics. Sure, you can do a keg stand, but are you man enough to down an entire bottle of Dogfish Head’s World Wide Stout, at 18 percent ABV?

Then again, you’d be stupid to chug an imperial stout. Not only are they among the most expensive domestic beers, but they’re also among the hardest to find. It takes a lot of skill, time, and resources to make a barrel-aged beer, something only the better craft brewers can handle. And despite imperial stouts’ popularity, they’re hardly session beers, and they’re no fun on a hot summer day; as a result, most brewers limit their production to seasonal runs, producing limited amounts for a limited amount of time.

For reasons I’ve never fully fathomed, some of the best imperial stouts are released just one day a year. Like hajjis to Mecca, fans will travel to places like Portsmouth, New Hampshire, home of Portsmouth Brewing’s Kate the Great, or Munster, Indiana, home of Three Floyds’s Dark Lord, to get their hands on a few bottles.

At first glance, this makes no sense. Why would a brewery so severely limit the output of its best-known product? Most folks, even most beer lovers, will never taste a drop of Kate the Great. Then again, that’s a great way to make sure everyone wants to try your beer.

http://www.theatlantic.com/food/archive/2010/06/in-the-beer-world-chocolate-and-spice-rule/58122/

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/the-very-angry-tea-party/

He is interested in what is truly motivating this anger.  Here are some highlights:

Sometimes it is hard to know where politics ends and metaphysics begins: when, that is, the stakes of a political dispute concern not simply a clash of competing ideas and values but a clash about what is real and what is not, what can be said to exist on its own and what owes its existence to an other.

When it comes to the Tea Party’s concrete policy proposals, things get fuzzier and more contradictory: keep the government out of health care, but leave Medicare alone; balance the budget, but don’t raise taxes; let individuals take care of themselves, but leave Social Security alone; and, of course, the paradoxical demand not to support Wall Street, to let the hard-working producers of wealth get on with it without regulation and government stimulus, but also to make sure the banks can lend to small businesses and responsible homeowners in a stable but growing economy.

My hypothesis is that what all the events precipitating the Tea Party movement share is that they demonstrated, emphatically and unconditionally, the depths of the absolute dependence of us all on government action, and in so doing they undermined the deeply held fiction of individual autonomy and self-sufficiency that are intrinsic parts of Americans’ collective self-understanding.

Tea Party anger is, at bottom, metaphysical, not political: what has been undone by the economic crisis is the belief that each individual is metaphysically self-sufficient, that  one’s very standing and being as a rational agent owes nothing to other individuals or institutions.    The opposing metaphysical claim, the one I take to be true, is that the very idea of the autonomous subject is an institution, an artifact created by the practices of modern life: the intimate family, the market economy, the liberal state.  Each of these social arrangements articulate and express the value and the authority of the individual; they give to the individual a standing she would not have without them.

The great and inspiring metaphysical fantasy of independence and freedom is simply a fantasy of destruction.

This is the rage and anger I hear in the Tea Party movement; it is the sound of jilted lovers furious that the other — the anonymous blob called simply “government” — has suddenly let them down, suddenly made clear that they are dependent and limited beings, suddenly revealed them as vulnerable.  And just as in love, the one-sided reminder of dependence is experienced as an injury.  All the rhetoric of self-sufficiency, all the grand talk of wanting to be left alone is just the hollow insistence of the bereft lover that she can and will survive without her beloved.  However, in political life, unlike love, there are no second marriages; we have only the one partner, and although we can rework our relationship, nothing can remove the actuality of dependence.  That is permanent.

In truth, there is nothing that the Tea Party movement wants; terrifyingly, it wants nothing.  Lilla calls the Tea Party “Jacobins”; I would urge that they are nihilists.  To date, the Tea Party has committed only the minor, almost atmospheric violences of propagating falsehoods, calumny and the disruption of the occasions for political speech — the last already to great and distorting effect.  But if their nihilistic rage is deprived of interrupting political meetings as an outlet, where might it now go? With such rage driving the Tea Party, might we anticipate this atmospheric violence becoming actual violence, becoming what Hegel called, referring to the original Jacobins’ fantasy of total freedom, “a fury of destruction”? There is indeed something not just disturbing, but frightening, in the anger of the Tea Party.

Most often, bloggers don’t shut off comments because they are not open-minded, but because the comments have gotten ugly.  After having ignored comments on so many posts and articles that I have read online and then returning back to read them selectively, it occurred to me that blog posts can reveal our hearts in profound ways.  Duh, call me “Captain Obvious” for this “stunning revelation”.

As someone who is trying to understand what motivates people, I’ve simply ignored blog comments as a window into this because I often don’t like what I see.  Friction-filled blog comments (and reality shows) have had a repulsive effect on me.  Why?  Do I think I am better than these people?  Is it because I don’t feel that I have an answer?  Is it because I do feel that I have an answer but won’t be heard?  Most of the time I simply can’t stand the poor ways in which some people communicate with each other.  It is ugly, and I don’t like to look at ugly things.

Of course, without any voices narrating the comments, I am left to narrate them the best I can.  Either way, blog comments are reactions, and reactions are large windows into people’s souls.  So if we care about what motivates people, we have something to learn – especially when it gets ugly.  So if you have time, perhaps keep this in mind the next time you see a long comment thread.

Here is a Morning Edition piece on NPR on how college grads are coming out of school unprepared for professional life.  I think that what made a difference for me in college was a work-study position that I had my sophomore year.  I new what to expect when I entered a cubicle farm.

Here is an entertaining review by Amy Sullivan of Eileen Yuhr’s book, Witnessing Suburbia: Conservatives and Christian Youth Culture, from the Harvard Divinity Bulletin.  I can resonate with Eileen’s description and Amy’s review having grown up on and off participating in a youth group (which met in my parent’s basement for 2 years).  Sounds like a fascinating re-telling of christian culture for the last 30 years.

The 1970s and early 1980s were good times to be a young Jesus geek. Christians may have endured periods of persecution and ridicule from ancient times through the Scopes Trial and beyond. But in the suburban evangelical church where I grew up, being Christian was not just expected—it was actually cool.

VeggieTales hadn’t been created yet, but we had Psalty, the anthropomorphic singing praise-songbook. We read Spire comics, a Christian offshoot of the secular Archie series, in which Archie, Jughead, and the whole Riverdale gang go on mission trips and talk about the Beatitudes. We grew our hair long, not to copy Marcia Brady but Amy Grant. And we strutted down our public school hallways in T-shirts from the latest Michael W. Smith or DC Talk concert.

My youth group friends and I didn’t realize it at the time, but we were part of the first wave of evangelicals to consume Christianity as a brand in addition to a religious and theological tradition. It was the moment when Christian popular culture took off, and a new Christian identity—of pride, not persecution—formed. The era is at the heart of Eileen Luhr’s recent book, Witnessing Suburbia, a fascinating look at the emergence of Christianity™ and the development of Christian popular youth culture.

The story Luhr tells about the growth of Christianity into a global marketing force is unfamiliar for the simple reason that it took place at the same time as the more controversial rise of the Religious Right. The bombastic Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson commanded media attention, whereas the enterprising pastors who founded megachurches and changed the face of evangelical worship went largely unnoticed. Book burners and lyric banners generated debate; Christian music producers and concert promoters generated profits but little notoriety.

And yet without the background and context that Luhr, a history professor at California State University, Long Beach, sketches in detail, it is nearly impossible to understand the current American evangelical community and the seismic changes that may reshape it for a new generation.

As evangelicals moved into the latter half of the twentieth century, many remained in a self-imposed exile, intent on following the biblical injunction to be “in the world but not of it.” This meant abstaining from temptations and corrupting influences, including secular popular culture. These conservative Christians had begun to develop their own parallel institutions, including entertainment outlets, but the offerings were largely limited to programs such as “The Radio Revival Hour” or “The Family Bible Hour.”

The separatist impulse held firm into the 1960s when it ran into the youth revolution. In the face of changing cultural mores and newly popular music forms like rock and roll, evangelicals were divided. One camp responded by condemning popular culture and seeking to limit its influence. But the other, sensing an opportunity to keep young evangelicals engaged, sought to appropriate the culture for Christian themes and purposes. The two conflicting approaches—let’s call them separatist evangelicals and engagement evangelicals—vied for several decades, and the ultimate triumph of one over the other directly explains the vibrancy of American evangelicalism today.

The first group of evangelicals, Luhr argues, was driven by two main beliefs about youth and culture. “Beginning in the late 1970s,” she writes, “youth came to be viewed as endangered, rather than dangerous. While the paradigmatic youth of the 1960s was a young hippie or student protester, that of the 1980s was a younger, innocent white child capable of devout belief but in need of parental guidance and protection.” This conviction that teenagers and young adults were not themselves threats to Christian morality, but were instead passive victims of a dangerous culture, allowed the separatist evangelicals to focus on battling popular culture, not their own children.

The emphasis on protecting children also enabled separatist evangelicals to mainstream their efforts by speaking as parents, not just as theological conservatives. As Luhr notes, a variety of organizations such as the Parents’ Music Resource Center, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and the National Federation of Parents for Drug-Free Youth were all formed around the same time and also promoted the idea that America’s youth were imperiled innocents.

At the same time, separatist evangelicals were convinced that the problem with popular culture was not just the content or message, but the medium itself, particularly rock music. Luhr quotes a music professor at the fundamentalist Bob Jones University who, in 1971, made the case that rock was inherently dangerous, attracting—among others—”drug addicts, revolutionaries, rioters, Satan worshippers, drop-outs, draft-dodgers, homosexuals and other sex deviates, rebels, juvenile criminals, Black Panthers and white panthers, motorcycle gangs . . . and on and on the list could go almost indefinitely.”

The university’s president, Bob Jones III, trained his fire on other aspects of the counterculture that he viewed as incompatible with a Christian lifestyle. Jones criticized the Jesus Movement, the most visible Christian youth movement at the time, because it allowed converts to retain their hippie dress and embraced more modern worship styles. Sounding for all the world like a stock character from the movie Footloose, Jones wrote: “Revival is not spawned in pot parties, love-ins, hippie pads, dens of iniquity, and rock orgies; but that is where the Jesus Movement was spawned.”

Not even seemingly innocuous secular entertainment for children was safe from judgment. Decades before Jerry Falwell denounced Teletubbies for supposedly including a secretly gay character, anti-rock critics like David Noebel went after a series of children’s folk recordings that had been endorsed by such upstanding outlets as Good Housekeeping and Parents Magazine for promoting radical political messages by communist folk singers. Noebel and others reserved a special contempt for Bob Dylan and his leftie sympathies—until the musician became a born-again Christian during the 1970s and recorded several Christian albums. (Once Dylan returned to Judaism a decade later, he became fair game again.)

The goal of separatist evangelicals was to limit the exposure of children—and, occasionally, all citizens—to objectionable pop culture. Activists affiliated with Parents Against Subliminal Seduction (PASS) successfully lobbied for a San Antonio ordinance that restricted attendance at “obscene” rock concerts to those above the age of 14. In 1983, Ronald Reagan’s evangelical secretary of the interior, James Watt, banned rock acts from the annual Fourth of July celebration on the National Mall. The previous year, concert performers had included such subversive acts as Wayne Newton and the Beach Boys.

While separatist evangelicals were busy bashing folk musicians or wringing their hands about possible satanic subliminal messages in rock songs, another group of evangelicals was more interested in adapting cultural forms for their own purposes instead of condemning popular culture outright. These engagement evangelicals drew inspiration from the theologian Frances Schaeffer, who urged them to compete in the “marketplace of ideas” rather than the “hidden censorship” of separatism.

In the aftermath of the 1960s, Luhr writes, “these evangelicals sought to fit within, rather than react to, suburban consumer culture.” Like their secular peers, young evangelicals thought in terms of rebellion against the larger culture. But, for them, the maverick path involved proudly proclaiming their Christian identity at a time when many believed the United States was becoming a post-religious society. These evangelicals reclaimed rock music for themselves by identifying its roots in gospel music. Elvis, they noted, came from a Pentecostal background, as did Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash, and their earliest musical influence was gospel. Young evangelicals saw that it was possible to embrace rock music while rejecting the content.

Separatist evangelicals argued that rock music destroyed the Christian message— one critic said that listening to Christian music was like “trying to get my meals from the garbage can”—but engagement evangelicals saw a way to appropriate the art form and even infuse popular culture with Christianity. “Proponents of Christian rock,” writes Luhr, “argued that the genre provided a tool for evangelism and a way for believers to enjoy contemporary entertainment while enhancing their faith.”

Christian music really took off in the 1980s, aided by the fact that rock music had become so commercial that it was no longer easily associated with rebellion. In 1984, Christian artists sold 20 million albums, and the next year they outsold jazz and classical music combined. Christian radio stations expanded across the country, providing platforms for artists ranging from Sandi Patty to the metal band Stryper, while also promoting themselves as outlets for “family-friendly listening.” Some evangelicals even started looking for ways to sanction acceptable secular music for their children. One article for Christian parents argued that parents who played their kids’ records backwards in search of evil messages were missing a valuable opportunity to engage productively with youth culture. “Believers should scrutinize secular music for Christian—not satanic—content,” wrote the author. “Should Madonna’s repulsive ideals and behavior invalidate the profoundly anti-abortion message of ‘Papa Don’t Preach’? Do Janet Jackson’s recent sleazy videos make her bold song urging sexual restraint, ‘Let’s Wait Awhile,’ any less true? We think not.”

And while music was the most visible part of Christian popular culture, other merchandise—including clothing, toys, and books—was aggressively developed for and marketed to evangelical Christians as well. Luhr notes that Christian bookstores “cater[ed] to a growing evangelical population that believed Christianity was a lifestyle as well as a belief system.” Between 1965 and 1975, Christian bookstores grew from 725 nationwide to 1,850, and in 2000 alone, Christian merchandise produced $4 billion in sales. (The advent of online shopping has shuttered many independent Christian bookstores, as has the sale of books from evangelical authors like Rick Warren and Tim LaHaye through Wal-Mart and other mainstream stores.)

Just as megachurch pastors have learned to co-opt elements of popular culture to spice up their worship services—weaving clips from Saturday Night Live into multimedia sermons or rewriting the lyrics of popular songs to tell Bible stories—Christian songwriters have adapted every conceivable musical genre, from pop to rap to punk to metal. For the more popular artists, a tension sometimes exists between them and their fans, many of whom fear that the bands will be tempted to water down their messages in an attempt to break into secular markets. Yet it is through that cross-over that Christianity has gained a foothold in popular culture. In summer 2008, the Southern rock band Third Day became the first Christian act to land on the cover of Billboard magazine. That same year, millions of Americans listened at home as the contestants on American Idol sang “Shout to the Lord” for a special fund-raising episode.

Christian culture has undoubtedly provided a way to make the Good News palatable for secular listeners. But its booming popularity is due in large part to the fact that it allows—and in fact encourages—evangelicals to focus on themselves.

Outdoor music festivals have become perhaps the most popular way for young Christians to pursue that goal of affirming their religious identities. Dozens of gatherings take place around the country every summer, each featuring lineups of Christian artists and drawing tens of thousands of young Christians. Importantly, they are not revivals—altar calls may be issued for those who feel moved to become Christians, but events like Cornerstone or the Sonshine Festival are more about giving existing Christians a place to socialize and worship together.

They have also, I discovered a few summers ago while covering Creation Fest in central Washington State, become a magnet for conservative political causes. The subtitle of Luhr’s book is “Conservatives and Christian Youth Culture,” and she writes about the conservative tilt and influence of suburbs in the postwar era in her exploration of Christian culture. But, in truth, there’s nothing inherently conservative about Christian pop culture. As a child I spent hours at Logos (“The Word”) bookstore just off the campus of the University of Michigan and the flagship location for a chain of more than two dozen Christian bookstores with a theological, not political, mission.

I arrived at Creation Fest hoping to revel in the same Christian culture I’d grown up with, maybe picking up some Moses Bobblehead dolls or Samson action figures at the same time. But when I scouted out the vendor tents, I was surprised to find that the Christian kitsch was swamped by booths for conservative causes. The first stand I came to featured a petition to sign supporting the people of South Dakota in their efforts to ban abortion. Next to it was a book with photos of abortions, a handmade sign warning that it should only be viewed by those “13 and up.” Available for sale were T-shirts bearing slogans like “Abortion Is Selfish” and “There’s nothing intellectual about believing you and I evolved from hydrogen gas.”

Yet as I walked the grounds of the festival, I saw very few teenagers wearing political shirts. (The most popular T-shirt read, “Hug Me If You Love Jesus.”) Nor were the people I spoke with preoccupied with banning gay marriage or protecting prayer in schools. Crystal, a student at Ecola Bible College, talked about wanting to go to Africa when she graduated. She had seen a movie about boys in Uganda who were abducted and forced into a rebel army, and she wanted to help them. If she saved some souls along the way, that was a bonus, but Crystal was more concerned about their physical safety. Even one T-shirt vendor told me he wanted to add some shirts with pro-environment messages to his inventory. “It’s really ignorant and arrogant not to take care of God’s creation, this gift we have,” he said, while behind him boxes of anti-evolution wear overflowed.

The bands at Creation Fest were perhaps most vocal about acting on their faith to help others. Members of The Myriad talked about traveling to Haiti when the tour ended and their plans to build an orphanage there. “It would be fantastic,” lead singer Jeremy Edwardson said, “to get socially involved and inspire audiences to care as well.” It was hard not to wonder whether conservative political causes have become associated with Christian pop culture by default, because conservatives have shown up and engaged with the culture and liberals have not.

Witnessing Suburbia is an invaluable read for those wondering how a religious tradition that once shied away from dancing and card-playing embraced electric guitars in the sanctuary and video games about the Rapture. And because Luhr is a historian, it is most useful in understanding how American evangelicalism became the version we know today. As evangelicalism continues to evolve, we will need to wait 20 years for a look back at the role Christian pop culture is playing today.

Witnessing Suburbia: Conservatives and Christian Youth Culture, by Eileen Luhr. University of California Press, 280 pages, $19.95.

Amy Sullivan, MTS ’99, is a senior editor at Time magazine. Her first book, The Party Faithful: How and Why Democrats Are Closing the God Gap, was published by Scribner in 2008.

Here is the site: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sickaroundtheworld/

Here is the transcript: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sickaroundtheworld/etc/script.html

Here is the introduction:

In Sick Around the World, FRONTLINE teams up with veteran Washington Post foreign correspondent T.R. Reid to find out how five other capitalist democracies — the United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, Taiwan and Switzerland — deliver health care, and what the United States might learn from their successes and their failures.

Reid’s first stop is the U.K., where the government-run National Health Service (NHS) is funded through taxes. “Every single person who’s born in the U.K. will use the NHS,” says Whittington Hospital CEO David Sloman, “and none of them will be presented a bill at any point during that time.” Often dismissed in America as “socialized medicine,” the NHS is now trying some free-market tactics like “pay-for-performance,” where doctors are paid more if they get good results controlling chronic diseases like diabetes. And now patients can choose where they go for medical procedures, forcing hospitals to compete head to head.

While such initiatives have helped reduce waiting times for elective surgeries, Times of London health editor Nigel Hawkes thinks the NHS hasn’t made enough progress. “We’re now in a world in which people are much more demanding, and I think that the NHS is not very effective at delivering in that modern, market-orientated world.”

Reid reports next from Japan, which boasts the second largest economy and the best health statistics in the world. The Japanese go to the doctor three times as often as Americans, have more than twice as many MRI scans, use more drugs, and spend more days in the hospital. Yet Japan spends about half as much on health care per capita as the United States.

One secret to Japan’s success? By law, everyone must buy health insurance — either through an employer or a community plan — and, unlike in the U.S., insurers cannot turn down a patient for a pre-existing illness, nor are they allowed to make a profit.

Reid’s journey then takes him to Germany, the country that invented the concept of a national health care system. For its 80 million people, Germany offers universal health care, including medical, dental, mental health, homeopathy and spa treatment. Professor Karl Lauterbach, a member of the German parliament, describes it as “a system where the rich pay for the poor and where the ill are covered by the healthy.” As they do in Japan, medical providers must charge standard prices. This keeps costs down, but it also means physicians in Germany earn between half and two-thirds as much as their U.S. counterparts.

In the 1990s, Taiwan researched many health care systems before settling on one where the government collects the money and pays providers. But the delivery of health care is left to the market. Every person in Taiwan has a “smart card” containing all of his or her relevant health information, and bills are paid automatically. But the Taiwanese are spending too little to sustain their health care system, according to Princeton’s Tsung-mei Cheng, who advised the Taiwanese government. “As we speak, the government is borrowing from banks to pay what there isn’t enough to pay the providers,” she told FRONTLINE.

Reid’s last stop is Switzerland, a country which, like Taiwan, set out to reform a system that did not cover all its citizens. In 1994, a national referendum approved a law called LAMal (“the sickness”), which set up a universal health care system that, among other things, restricted insurance companies from making a profit on basic medical care. The Swiss example shows health care reform is possible, even in a highly capitalist country with powerful insurance and pharmaceutical companies.

Today, Swiss politicians from the right and left enthusiastically support universal health care. “Everybody has a right to health care,” says Pascal Couchepin, the current president of Switzerland. “It is a profound need for people to be sure that if they are struck by destiny … they can have a good health system.”

http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1268/reinhold-neihbuhr-obama-favorite-theologian

Here is the intro:

Ever since then-Sen. Barack Obama spoke of his admiration for Reinhold Niebuhr in a 2007 interview with New York Times columnist David Brooks, there has been speculation about the extent to which the 20th-century theologian has influenced Obama’s views on faith, politics and social change. At the Pew Forum’s biannual Faith Angle Conference in May 2009, Wilfred McClay, a historian specializing in American intellectual history, offered an overview of Niebuhr’s unique form of progressive Christianity and its influence on 20th-century American politics and international affairs. E.J. Dionne, columnist for The Washington Post, remarked on the recent revival of interest in Niebuhrian thought and the role Niebuhr played as a public intellectual active during the worldwide political upheavals of the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s.

Speaker: Wilfred M. McClay, SunTrust Bank Chair of Excellence in Humanities, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
Respondent: E.J. Dionne Jr., Columnist, The Washington Post; Senior Advisor, Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life
Moderator: Michael Cromartie, Vice President, Ethics & Public Policy Center; Senior Advisor, Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life

In the following excerpt, ellipses have been omitted to facilitate reading. Find the full transcript, including audience discussion, at pewforum.org.

• Revitalizing the Economy
• Ending the War in Iraq
• Providing Health Care for All
• Protecting America
• Renewing American Global Leadership

‘We’ve hit a rich songwriting vein and we don’t want to stop.’ Bono has been talking to U2.Com about how the songs are shaping up for the new record and plans for 2009 to be their year.

‘This is our chance for us to defy gravity once again, ‘ explains Bono, calling in from a break in recording sessions in the south of France. ‘ We have what it takes, we have the songs, new rhythms and a guitar player who is not ready to re-enter earth’s atmosphere until he’s taken a slice of the moon!

‘It’s been fun, it’s been maddening… there have been injuries and recoveries, no babies born that I know of, but this one is nearly ready for the new year of 2009.’

The band have been writing and recording the follow-up to ‘How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb’ since last year, and the feeling is that they’ve hit a creative groove so there are no plans to stop. Everyone, he says, is excited about where the recording is taking them.

‘When we set out on this record it was Larry who came up with the plan not to have a plan. He put up this idea that wouldn’t it be great just to make music for its own sake, not for the purpose of a live show or on album but just to see what we’re capable of…’

It’s an idea that’s paid off. Following sessions in Morocco, in Dublin and through the summer in France, the band have written ‘fifty or sixty’ tracks. And counting.

‘We’ve hit a rich songwriting vein,’ he explains. ‘It gets a bit dark down here but looks like we’ve found diamonds not coal. I thought a while back we might have the album wrapped by now, but why come up above ground now if there’s more priceless stuff to be found?

For now, they’re keeping a promise they made to themselves when they started writing: ‘We said to each other that if we got to the great place then we wouldn’t stop…’

So the writing and recording continues and while they now know what shape most of the album will take, they’re not leaving the studio just yet.

‘We know we have to emerge soon but we also know that people don’t want another U2 album unless it is our best ever album. It has to be our most innovative, our most challenging … or what’s the point ?’

They have no doubts that it will be as important a release for U2 as any. ‘It’s a brand new chapter for us, and everyone we’ve played the tracks to has said that musically it feels like another departure.

‘The last two records were very personal, with a kind of three piece at their heart, the primary colours of rock – bass, guitars and drum. But what we’re about now is of the same order as the transition that took us from The Joshua Tree to Achtung Baby.’

He also mentions that the recording in Morocco was the first time the band have worked in a studio open to the sky: ‘On that track you can hear the sound of a swallows nest close to the building – it’s beautiful.’

Longtime collaborators Danny Lanois and Brian Eno have joined the band at different times, and, more recently, Steve Lillywhite – usually a tell-tale sign that a record is nearly done. ‘Steve has that ear for a top line melody and a good hook.’

But while Bono is itching to get the music out he says it’s going to be early 2009 when we first get to hear the songs.

‘I’m always the one who underestimates how easy it is to simply ‘put out the songs now’, if it was just up to me they’d be out already! But early next year people will be able to start hearing what we’ve been doing. We want 2009 to be our year, so we’re going to start making an impression very early on …’

This is a fantastic article by the editors of The New Yorker that pretty much sums up my thoughts on the election and my choice.   Certainly, governments and their elected officials are imperfect but that doesn’t mean there is no hope.  Ultimately, my hope is in the triune God, so I hold quite loosely to my expectations for a president.  But, I still have some pragmatic opinions about our country and the world as a the setting in which the kingdom of Jesus can be tasted and shared by his people.

Never in living memory has an election been more critical than the one fast approaching—that’s the quadrennial cliché, as expected as the balloons and the bombast. And yet when has it ever felt so urgently true? When have so many Americans had so clear a sense that a Presidency has—at the levels of competence, vision, and integrity—undermined the country and its ideals?

The incumbent Administration has distinguished itself for the ages. The Presidency of George W. Bush is the worst since Reconstruction, so there is no mystery about why the Republican Party—which has held dominion over the executive branch of the federal government for the past eight years and the legislative branch for most of that time—has little desire to defend its record, domestic or foreign. The only speaker at the Convention in St. Paul who uttered more than a sentence or two in support of the President was his wife, Laura. Meanwhile, the nominee, John McCain, played the part of a vaudeville illusionist, asking to be regarded as an apostle of change after years of embracing the essentials of the Bush agenda with ever-increasing ardor.

The Republican disaster begins at home. Even before taking into account whatever fantastically expensive plan eventually emerges to help rescue the financial system from Wall Street’s long-running pyramid schemes, the economic and fiscal picture is bleak. During the Bush Administration, the national debt, now approaching ten trillion dollars, has nearly doubled. Next year’s federal budget is projected to run a half-trillion-dollar deficit, a precipitous fall from the seven-hundred-billion-dollar surplus that was projected when Bill Clinton left office. Private-sector job creation has been a sixth of what it was under President Clinton. Five million people have fallen into poverty. The number of Americans without health insurance has grown by seven million, while average premiums have nearly doubled. Meanwhile, the principal domestic achievement of the Bush Administration has been to shift the relative burden of taxation from the rich to the rest. For the top one per cent of us, the Bush tax cuts are worth, on average, about a thousand dollars a week; for the bottom fifth, about a dollar and a half. The unfairness will only increase if the painful, yet necessary, effort to rescue the credit markets ends up preventing the rescue of our health-care system, our environment, and our physical, educational, and industrial infrastructure.

At the same time, a hundred and fifty thousand American troops are in Iraq and thirty-three thousand are in Afghanistan. There is still disagreement about the wisdom of overthrowing Saddam Hussein and his horrific regime, but there is no longer the slightest doubt that the Bush Administration manipulated, bullied, and lied the American public into this war and then mismanaged its prosecution in nearly every aspect. The direct costs, besides an expenditure of more than six hundred billion dollars, have included the loss of more than four thousand Americans, the wounding of thirty thousand, the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis, and the displacement of four and a half million men, women, and children. Only now, after American forces have been fighting for a year longer than they did in the Second World War, is there a glimmer of hope that the conflict in Iraq has entered a stage of fragile stability.

The indirect costs, both of the war in particular and of the Administration’s unilateralist approach to foreign policy in general, have also been immense. The torture of prisoners, authorized at the highest level, has been an ethical and a public-diplomacy catastrophe. At a moment when the global environment, the global economy, and global stability all demand a transition to new sources of energy, the United States has been a global retrograde, wasteful in its consumption and heedless in its policy. Strategically and morally, the Bush Administration has squandered the American capacity to counter the example and the swagger of its rivals. China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and other illiberal states have concluded, each in its own way, that democratic principles and human rights need not be components of a stable, prosperous future. At recent meetings of the United Nations, emboldened despots like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran came to town sneering at our predicament and hailing the “end of the American era.”

The election of 2008 is the first in more than half a century in which no incumbent President or Vice-President is on the ballot. There is, however, an incumbent party, and that party has been lucky enough to find itself, apparently against the wishes of its “base,” with a nominee who evidently disliked George W. Bush before it became fashionable to do so. In South Carolina in 2000, Bush crushed John McCain with a sub-rosa primary campaign of such viciousness that McCain lashed out memorably against Bush’s Christian-right allies. So profound was McCain’s anger that in 2004 he flirted with the possibility of joining the Democratic ticket under John Kerry. Bush, who took office as a “compassionate conservative,” governed immediately as a rightist ideologue. During that first term, McCain bolstered his reputation, sometimes deserved, as a “maverick” willing to work with Democrats on such issues as normalizing relations with Vietnam, campaign-finance reform, and immigration reform. He co-sponsored, with John Edwards and Edward Kennedy, a patients’ bill of rights. In 2001 and 2003, he voted against the Bush tax cuts. With John Kerry, he co-sponsored a bill raising auto-fuel efficiency standards and, with Joseph Lieberman, a cap-and-trade regime on carbon emissions. He was one of a minority of Republicans opposed to unlimited drilling for oil and gas off America’s shores.

Since the 2004 election, however, McCain has moved remorselessly rightward in his quest for the Republican nomination. He paid obeisance to Jerry Falwell and preachers of his ilk. He abandoned immigration reform, eventually coming out against his own bill. Most shocking, McCain, who had repeatedly denounced torture under all circumstances, voted in February against a ban on the very techniques of “enhanced interrogation” that he himself once endured in Vietnam—as long as the torturers were civilians employed by the C.I.A.

On almost every issue, McCain and the Democratic Party’s nominee, Barack Obama, speak the generalized language of “reform,” but only Obama has provided a convincing, rational, and fully developed vision. McCain has abandoned his opposition to the Bush-era tax cuts and has taken up the demagogic call—in the midst of recession and Wall Street calamity, with looming crises in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—for more tax cuts. Bush’s expire in 2011. If McCain, as he has proposed, cuts taxes for corporations and estates, the benefits once more would go disproportionately to the wealthy.

In Washington, the craze for pure market triumphalism is over. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson arrived in town (via Goldman Sachs) a Republican, but it seems that he will leave a Democrat. In other words, he has come to see that the abuses that led to the current financial crisis––not least, excessive speculation on borrowed capital––can be fixed only with government regulation and oversight. McCain, who has never evinced much interest in, or knowledge of, economic questions, has had little of substance to say about the crisis. His most notable gesture of concern—a melodramatic call last month to suspend his campaign and postpone the first Presidential debate until the government bailout plan was ready—soon revealed itself as an empty diversionary tactic.

By contrast, Obama has made a serious study of the mechanics and the history of this economic disaster and of the possibilities of stimulating a recovery. Last March, in New York, in a speech notable for its depth, balance, and foresight, he said, “A complete disdain for pay-as-you-go budgeting, coupled with a generally scornful attitude towards oversight and enforcement, allowed far too many to put short-term gain ahead of long-term consequences.” Obama is committed to reforms that value not only the restoration of stability but also the protection of the vast majority of the population, which did not partake of the fruits of the binge years. He has called for greater and more programmatic regulation of the financial system; the creation of a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank, which would help reverse the decay of our roads, bridges, and mass-transit systems, and create millions of jobs; and a major investment in the green-energy sector.

On energy and global warming, Obama offers a set of forceful proposals. He supports a cap-and-trade program to reduce America’s carbon emissions by eighty per cent by 2050—an enormously ambitious goal, but one that many climate scientists say must be met if atmospheric carbon dioxide is to be kept below disastrous levels. Large emitters, like utilities, would acquire carbon allowances, and those which emit less carbon dioxide than their allotment could sell the resulting credits to those which emit more; over time, the available allowances would decline. Significantly, Obama wants to auction off the allowances; this would provide fifteen billion dollars a year for developing alternative-energy sources and creating job-training programs in green technologies. He also wants to raise federal fuel-economy standards and to require that ten per cent of America’s electricity be generated from renewable sources by 2012. Taken together, his proposals represent the most coherent and far-sighted strategy ever offered by a Presidential candidate for reducing the nation’s reliance on fossil fuels.

There was once reason to hope that McCain and Obama would have a sensible debate about energy and climate policy. McCain was one of the first Republicans in the Senate to support federal limits on carbon dioxide, and he has touted his own support for a less ambitious cap-and-trade program as evidence of his independence from the White House. But, as polls showed Americans growing jittery about gasoline prices, McCain apparently found it expedient in this area, too, to shift course. He took a dubious idea—lifting the federal moratorium on offshore oil drilling—and placed it at the very center of his campaign. Opening up America’s coastal waters to drilling would have no impact on gasoline prices in the short term, and, even over the long term, the effect, according to a recent analysis by the Department of Energy, would be “insignificant.” Such inconvenient facts, however, are waved away by a campaign that finally found its voice with the slogan “Drill, baby, drill!”

The contrast between the candidates is even sharper with respect to the third branch of government. A tense equipoise currently prevails among the Justices of the Supreme Court, where four hard-core conservatives face off against four moderate liberals. Anthony M. Kennedy is the swing vote, determining the outcome of case after case.

McCain cites Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, two reliable conservatives, as models for his own prospective appointments. If he means what he says, and if he replaces even one moderate on the current Supreme Court, then Roe v. Wade will be reversed, and states will again be allowed to impose absolute bans on abortion. McCain’s views have hardened on this issue. In 1999, he said he opposed overturning Roe; by 2006, he was saying that its demise “wouldn’t bother me any”; by 2008, he no longer supported adding rape and incest as exceptions to his party’s platform opposing abortion.

But scrapping Roe—which, after all, would leave states as free to permit abortion as to criminalize it—would be just the beginning. Given the ideological agenda that the existing conservative bloc has pursued, it’s safe to predict that affirmative action of all kinds would likely be outlawed by a McCain Court. Efforts to expand executive power, which, in recent years, certain Justices have nobly tried to resist, would likely increase. Barriers between church and state would fall; executions would soar; legal checks on corporate power would wither—all with just one new conservative nominee on the Court. And the next President is likely to make three appointments.

Obama, who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago, voted against confirming not only Roberts and Alito but also several unqualified lower-court nominees. As an Illinois state senator, he won the support of prosecutors and police organizations for new protections against convicting the innocent in capital cases. While McCain voted to continue to deny habeas-corpus rights to detainees, perpetuating the Bush Administration’s regime of state-sponsored extra-legal detention, Obama took the opposite side, pushing to restore the right of all U.S.-held prisoners to a hearing. The judicial future would be safe in his care.

In the shorthand of political commentary, the Iraq war seems to leave McCain and Obama roughly even. Opposing it before the invasion, Obama had the prescience to warn of a costly and indefinite occupation and rising anti-American radicalism around the world; supporting it, McCain foresaw none of this. More recently, in early 2007 McCain risked his Presidential prospects on the proposition that five additional combat brigades could salvage a war that by then appeared hopeless. Obama, along with most of the country, had decided that it was time to cut American losses. Neither candidate’s calculations on Iraq have been as cheaply political as McCain’s repeated assertion that Obama values his career over his country; both men based their positions, right or wrong, on judgment and principle.

President Bush’s successor will inherit two wars and the realities of limited resources, flagging popular will, and the dwindling possibilities of what can be achieved by American power. McCain’s views on these subjects range from the simplistic to the unknown. In Iraq, he seeks “victory”—a word that General David Petraeus refuses to use, and one that fundamentally misrepresents the messy, open-ended nature of the conflict. As for Afghanistan, on the rare occasions when McCain mentions it he implies that the surge can be transferred directly from Iraq, which suggests that his grasp of counterinsurgency is not as firm as he insisted it was during the first Presidential debate. McCain always displays more faith in force than interest in its strategic consequences. Unlike Obama, McCain has no political strategy for either war, only the dubious hope that greater security will allow things to work out. Obama has long warned of deterioration along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, and has a considered grasp of its vital importance. His strategy for both Afghanistan and Iraq shows an understanding of the role that internal politics, economics, corruption, and regional diplomacy play in wars where there is no battlefield victory.

Unimaginably painful personal experience taught McCain that war is above all a test of honor: maintain the will to fight on, be prepared to risk everything, and you will prevail. Asked during the first debate to outline “the lessons of Iraq,” McCain said, “I think the lessons of Iraq are very clear: that you cannot have a failed strategy that will then cause you to nearly lose a conflict.” A soldier’s answer––but a statesman must have a broader view of war and peace. The years ahead will demand not only determination but also diplomacy, flexibility, patience, judiciousness, and intellectual engagement. These are no more McCain’s strong suit than the current President’s. Obama, for his part, seems to know that more will be required than willpower and force to extract some advantage from the wreckage of the Bush years.

Obama is also better suited for the task of renewing the bedrock foundations of American influence. An American restoration in foreign affairs will require a commitment not only to international coöperation but also to international institutions that can address global warming, the dislocations of what will likely be a deepening global economic crisis, disease epidemics, nuclear proliferation, terrorism, and other, more traditional security challenges. Many of the Cold War-era vehicles for engagement and negotiation—the United Nations, the World Bank, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty regime, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—are moribund, tattered, or outdated. Obama has the generational outlook that will be required to revive or reinvent these compacts. He would be the first postwar American President unencumbered by the legacies of either Munich or Vietnam.

The next President must also restore American moral credibility. Closing Guantánamo, banning all torture, and ending the Iraq war as responsibly as possible will provide a start, but only that. The modern Presidency is as much a vehicle for communication as for decision-making, and the relevant audiences are global. Obama has inspired many Americans in part because he holds up a mirror to their own idealism. His election would do no less—and likely more—overseas.

What most distinguishes the candidates, however, is character—and here, contrary to conventional wisdom, Obama is clearly the stronger of the two. Not long ago, Rick Davis, McCain’s campaign manager, said, “This election is not about issues. This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.” The view that this election is about personalities leaves out policy, complexity, and accountability. Even so, there’s some truth in what Davis said––but it hardly points to the conclusion that he intended.

Echoing Obama, McCain has made “change” one of his campaign mantras. But the change he has actually provided has been in himself, and it is not just a matter of altering his positions. A willingness to pander and even lie has come to define his Presidential campaign and its televised advertisements. A contemptuous duplicity, a meanness, has entered his talk on the stump—so much so that it seems obvious that, in the drive for victory, he is willing to replicate some of the same underhanded methods that defeated him eight years ago in South Carolina.

Perhaps nothing revealed McCain’s cynicism more than his choice of Sarah Palin, the former mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, who had been governor of that state for twenty-one months, as the Republican nominee for Vice-President. In the interviews she has given since her nomination, she has had difficulty uttering coherent unscripted responses about the most basic issues of the day. We are watching a candidate for Vice-President cram for her ongoing exam in elementary domestic and foreign policy. This is funny as a Tina Fey routine on “Saturday Night Live,” but as a vision of the political future it’s deeply unsettling. Palin has no business being the backup to a President of any age, much less to one who is seventy-two and in imperfect health. In choosing her, McCain committed an act of breathtaking heedlessness and irresponsibility. Obama’s choice, Joe Biden, is not without imperfections. His tongue sometimes runs in advance of his mind, providing his own fodder for late-night comedians, but there is no comparison with Palin. His deep experience in foreign affairs, the judiciary, and social policy makes him an assuring and complementary partner for Obama.

The longer the campaign goes on, the more the issues of personality and character have reflected badly on McCain. Unless appearances are very deceiving, he is impulsive, impatient, self-dramatizing, erratic, and a compulsive risk-taker. These qualities may have contributed to his usefulness as a “maverick” senator. But in a President they would be a menace.

By contrast, Obama’s transformative message is accompanied by a sense of pragmatic calm. A tropism for unity is an essential part of his character and of his campaign. It is part of what allowed him to overcome a Democratic opponent who entered the race with tremendous advantages. It is what helped him forge a political career relying both on the liberals of Hyde Park and on the political regulars of downtown Chicago. His policy preferences are distinctly liberal, but he is determined to speak to a broad range of Americans who do not necessarily share his every value or opinion. For some who oppose him, his equanimity even under the ugliest attack seems like hauteur; for some who support him, his reluctance to counterattack in the same vein seems like self-defeating detachment. Yet it is Obama’s temperament—and not McCain’s—that seems appropriate for the office both men seek and for the volatile and dangerous era in which we live. Those who dismiss his centeredness as self-centeredness or his composure as indifference are as wrong as those who mistook Eisenhower’s stolidity for denseness or Lincoln’s humor for lack of seriousness.

Nowadays, almost every politician who thinks about running for President arranges to become an author. Obama’s books are different: he wrote them. “The Audacity of Hope” (2006) is a set of policy disquisitions loosely structured around an account of his freshman year in the United States Senate. Though a campaign manifesto of sorts, it is superior to that genre’s usual blowsy pastiche of ghostwritten speeches. But it is Obama’s first book, “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance” (1995), that offers an unprecedented glimpse into the mind and heart of a potential President. Obama began writing it in his early thirties, before he was a candidate for anything. Not since Theodore Roosevelt has an American politician this close to the pinnacle of power produced such a sustained, highly personal work of literary merit before being definitively swept up by the tides of political ambition.

A Presidential election is not the awarding of a Pulitzer Prize: we elect a politician and, we hope, a statesman, not an author. But Obama’s first book is valuable in the way that it reveals his fundamental attitudes of mind and spirit. “Dreams from My Father” is an illuminating memoir not only in the substance of Obama’s own peculiarly American story but also in the qualities he brings to the telling: a formidable intelligence, emotional empathy, self-reflection, balance, and a remarkable ability to see life and the world through the eyes of people very different from himself. In common with nearly all other senators and governors of his generation, Obama does not count military service as part of his biography. But his life has been full of tests—personal, spiritual, racial, political—that bear on his preparation for great responsibility.

It is perfectly legitimate to call attention, as McCain has done, to Obama’s lack of conventional national and international policymaking experience. We, too, wish he had more of it. But office-holding is not the only kind of experience relevant to the task of leading a wildly variegated nation. Obama’s immersion in diverse human environments (Hawaii’s racial rainbow, Chicago’s racial cauldron, countercultural New York, middle-class Kansas, predominantly Muslim Indonesia), his years of organizing among the poor, his taste of corporate law and his grounding in public-interest and constitutional law—these, too, are experiences. And his books show that he has wrung from them every drop of insight and breadth of perspective they contained.

The exhaustingly, sometimes infuriatingly long campaign of 2008 (and 2007) has had at least one virtue: it has demonstrated that Obama’s intelligence and steady temperament are not just figments of the writer’s craft. He has made mistakes, to be sure. (His failure to accept McCain’s imaginative proposal for a series of unmediated joint appearances was among them.) But, on the whole, his campaign has been marked by patience, planning, discipline, organization, technological proficiency, and strategic astuteness. Obama has often looked two or three moves ahead, relatively impervious to the permanent hysteria of the hourly news cycle and the cable-news shouters. And when crisis has struck, as it did when the divisive antics of his ex-pastor threatened to bring down his campaign, he has proved equal to the moment, rescuing himself with a speech that not only drew the poison but also demonstrated a profound respect for the electorate. Although his opponents have tried to attack him as a man of “mere” words, Obama has returned eloquence to its essential place in American politics. The choice between experience and eloquence is a false one––something that Lincoln, out of office after a single term in Congress, proved in his own campaign of political and national renewal. Obama’s “mere” speeches on everything from the economy and foreign affairs to race have been at the center of his campaign and its success; if he wins, his eloquence will be central to his ability to govern.

We cannot expect one man to heal every wound, to solve every major crisis of policy. So much of the Presidency, as they say, is a matter of waking up in the morning and trying to drink from a fire hydrant. In the quiet of the Oval Office, the noise of immediate demands can be deafening. And yet Obama has precisely the temperament to shut out the noise when necessary and concentrate on the essential. The election of Obama—a man of mixed ethnicity, at once comfortable in the world and utterly representative of twenty-first-century America—would, at a stroke, reverse our country’s image abroad and refresh its spirit at home. His ascendance to the Presidency would be a symbolic culmination of the civil- and voting-rights acts of the nineteen-sixties and the century-long struggles for equality that preceded them. It could not help but say something encouraging, even exhilarating, about the country, about its dedication to tolerance and inclusiveness, about its fidelity, after all, to the values it proclaims in its textbooks. At a moment of economic calamity, international perplexity, political failure, and battered morale, America needs both uplift and realism, both change and steadiness. It needs a leader temperamentally, intellectually, and emotionally attuned to the complexities of our troubled globe. That leader’s name is Barack Obama.

—The Editors

• I am no computer expert, simply an avid user. I have no programming education or experience and have learned most things through trial and error and through the advanced expertise of former roommates and brothers-in law. I like to use sophisticated Bible software (Bibleworks, Libronix, etc.), I have lots of pictures and music (about 50-60 GB’s worth), I like to do web editing (with Frontpage), I sync my devices with the computer (iPod, Blackberry, Pocket PC), and I use most MS Office Applications (Word, Excel, & Outlook). Thus, I like to have a lot of things running at once.
• I have used most phases of Windows, including Windows 3.5, 95, 98, 98 Second Edition, ME, XP Home, and XP Professional (through each service pack). All have had their difficulties, but I found XP Pro to have the least issues.
• I have used a few versions of Linux, including Fedora Core 5-7 and Suse Linux 9. I enjoyed the layout of these systems, but had a great deal of difficulty with drivers and optimizing my screen view (oddly enough). I wholeheartedly support the efforts of open source operating systems and other software, and do enjoy the concept of the Live CD or DVD to run off.
• This is the probably the most important point of all: I added to my RAM by 2 GBs before I upgraded XP to Vista. Even before I upgraded and still had XP, it was a massive difference in the speed and performance of my computer. To upgrade to Vista, it requires at least 1 GB of RAM and I only had 512 MB.

Now, with all that being said, I realize that the Mac (and/or the world) vs. Windows is much like the PR battle of the Democrats (and/or the independents) vs. Republicans. Windows is the corporate product whereas a Mac or Linux OS is a product for the people. Like productive political discussion, however, it is necessary to stick to the issues and not the hype or rumors. After all, it all comes down to how a particular system pragmatically delivers our greatest spread of ideals. I have heard so many people talk about Vista as a disaster, a mistake, poorly planned, and crippled with flaws. However, I am hard pressed to find any specific examples of problems with the actual operating system. Of course, the most common problem with any OS upgrade is hardware/driver compatibility. For PCs, there is really no way around this because the hardware components are all made by different companies, and they are responsible for creating new drivers that are compatible for the latest operating systems. As a matter of fact, even after an entire year of using Vista, the company who made my sound card has not updated their drivers for it such that I cannot get my microphone or line-in jacks to work. I really don’t use them so it’s not that big of a deal to me, but I wouldn’t consider that a “failure” for Vista. And by now, as the first Service Pack is available, most driver issues have been resolved and issues of that nature have been resolved.

I have found Vista to be a very welcome and timely update to XP. I’m glad Microsoft slowed down their production of operating systems, because up to 2001, there was a new one pretty much every year. So they took their time with Vista and gave themselves 5-6 years. Thus, they were anticipating changes of the way in which we use computers. For instance, they have a voice recognition component built into the OS. It may not be the same quality of the amazing Dragon Naturally Speaking product by Nuance, but it provides the service for those who would like to try it. They have also significantly enhanced Windows Media Center, as it will serve in the future as the way people watch TV, movies, photos, and listen to music. It will replace TiVo or a DVR for those who have the vision to centralize their media on their computers. I have seen this in action at my sister’s house where my brother-in-law runs everything through his Windows Media Center server and he accesses the media at each TV through Xbox. It looks and function much better than TiVo or my Comcast DVR, and completely replaces the need for Apple TV. But, you don’t hear people talking about that, because most people have not been exposed to the far-reaching, forward-thinking capabilities of Vista. Of course, I could mention that the Vista interface looks really nice and as appealing as Linux or Apple, or that they’ve simplified the folder structure of Vista to make it a bit more intuitive, but that should be expected. Issues of visual aesthetics are all customizable even for XP. If you have XP, you can make your interface look like a Mac or Linux, or even Vista if you wanted to. You can even add the widget features of Mac or Vista to XP. So, it is no surprise that these things have been updated with Vista.

Two components to the OS that I find have greatly enhanced Vista, which most people don’t like, are Windows Update and User Account Control.  My computer is on 24/7, so Update runs every day at 3:00 AM and it includes all critical updates and even defrags once a week.  Of course, you can turn off this feature.  User Account Control is the big change people feel inconvenienced by.  This alerts you when anything wants to run or install, and gives you the choice to allow it or not.  I find this helps me know exactly what is going on my computer and eliminates spy ware at the front end.  Of course, you can turn off this feature if you do not care to use it.   But, I think it is helpful in most cases.

Other features that I don’t use often but think they are necessary are Windows Backup and Restore Center, Shadow Copy (this creates shadow copies of your computer), Remote Access, Sync Center, and Windows Easy Transfer.  You can always go to the Vista site and demo all the features.

Overall, I am very happy with the upgrade and know it will serve me well for the future.  MS is already close to completion on “Windows 7″ and will be starting “Windows 8″ soon (Vista is “Windows 6″).  I do think that the most important factor in my upgrade was increasing my RAM.  I cannot emphasize this enough.  My wife has only 1.25 GB, and her computer is noticeably slower running Vista.  So, keep that in mind if choosing to take the plunge.

(FYI: I started this post like 8 months ago and just finished today, just so you know)

But, as you can see, learning about 2 topics that have been pretty foreign to me until last fall has contributed to keeping my blog relatively silent. But rest assure, although I could go on and on about politics, I find golf much more interesting because there is more concrete information to learn.  Politics is simply a glorified ad campaign centered around a person or group.

Just got finished watching a fascinating NOVA program entitled, “Ghost in Your Genes” which was about epigenetics. Epigenetics is the study of genetic modifiers called “epigenomes” that are instrumental in turning on and off the varied features of any given genome. The Human Genome Project of the early 90′s was monumental as it mainly purposed to identify all of the genomes or “genes” in the DNA make-up of humans. In 2000 they reported that they had found 22,000-23,000 genomes, which was surprisingly less than they had anticipated. That’s roughly the same that can be found in worms, rats, and frogs. Since it has been thought that humans are more genetically complex, it left many questions about what causes some genes to appear and others not to appear. The salient example of this question is how identical twins which have the exact same DNA structure can develop differently. The answer that has been found in the past few years is the discovery of “epigenomes” which can attach themselves to certain genes or gene sequences and turn them on or off depending on the circumstances. Moreover, they are finding that epigenomes can be influenced early in development, showing that although we inherit genes and epigenomes naturally through our parents, it is how we are nurtured that can determine which traits develop in us. That is certainly a simplification of very complex research, but nonetheless very compelling. They have now launched the Human Epigenome Project to try to identify what could be millions of epigenomes influencing genetic development. This is very exciting, and they have already benefited from this kind of research in cancer treatment.

Here is the TV Program Description
Here is the Program Manuscript
Here is the Program Preview
Here are some links and resources
Here is the Wikipedia entry for Epigenetics

I was excited that my favorite NPR (WBUR) program “On Point” was discussing this news yesterday, but I was quickly turned off by the fact that the host, Tom Ashbrook, got quite carried away by his misunderstandings of the project. He was calling it the G-phone or Google phone, which is a radical misnomer because there are over 30 companies involved in the alliance, and was very concerned that Google’s agenda with the OS would be to make money by planting ads in phones. Also, he raised the question about security and privacy because he thought that since it is open source it could be tampered with. He had at least 3 field experts on his panel for discussion, and I thought they did a good job talking about the possibilities of the project. However, they also had some of the same misinformation which was also furthered by some of the callers, and I think many people walked away from the discussion thinking falsely that Google has become a phone developer with a few partners putting out an insecure phone that invades peoples privacy. The discussion really missed most of the goals of the alliance in developing “Android” and I hope that in the coming weeks and months that Tom updates this story with a clearer apprehension of the significance of the alliance and it’s project(s).

If you feel you are out of the loop with regards to the recent discussions about the doctrine of justification in Pauline theology, particularly the writings of E.P. Sanders, James Dunn, and N.T. Wright I would suggest checking out thepaulpage.com and Monergism.com‘s “New Perspective” section. For many N.T. Wright sources there is also the ntwrightpage.com.

Click here to browse the book or here for the PDF.

Work has been crazy the past few weeks as we just ended our fiscal quarter/year. I’m glad that is finally over and we are back to relative normalcy.

We’ve been taking a break for church the past month and a half as things have been super busy for all of us. Hopefully, we should begin meeting again. 10/4 marked a year that we’ve been gathering.

Kalila has been in classes for the past few weeks. She is taking 3 classes: 1 Monday evenings, 1 Tuesday/Thursday in the afternoon, and 1 Saturday mornings. Her Monday night class is her favorite. It’s an American Lit class I think, but her prof is very intelligent and can teach well. He actually taught them about Jonathan Edwards.

Right now I am at my sister’s house in the Seattle area. My dad and I are visiting my little niece Julia who is 16 months old. She is the cutest thing in the world I think. I’ll put some more pics up soon. Also got to visit Mars Hill Church yesterday. I’ll be back tomorrow to work a half day and get to see my wife for the first time in 4 days!

If the main focus of a sermon is to preach Christ, what do we do with the book of Proverbs and a host of other Biblical texts that seem to focus on wisdom for life, or our own personal growth in holiness, etc? That’s the focus of this edition of the White Horse Inn as Michael Horton talks with Dennis Johnson about his new book, Him We Proclaim: Preaching Christ in All the Scriptures.

This is interview is a great primer on what it means to preach/teach a passage in it’s historical-redemptive context. Josh has been focusing on this book and this topic over at his blog as he has been studying with some friends at his church. This book is a bit on the lengthy side for most people, but in it Johnson clearly lays out the issues, options, and methods of historical-redemptive biblical theology. Even if you are on interested in his book, his interview at the White Horse Inn is worth your time.

The only deficiency I observed in the interview was the lack of discussion on the nature of typology and how it should be distinguished from allegory. The book makes up for that lack, however, so I do not hold it against Johnson; the interview was only 25 minutes after all.

Here is the link to the audio.

With regards to focus, I have been able to continually shift attention from the trees to the forest, to “see the microcosm in macro vision” (line from Depeche Mode song “Macro”). Taking a few steps back from analyzing topics and subtopics of thought into the greater panorama has facilitated my ability to ask more questions. This isn’t just with biblical studies either, this has been with many things in life. There is a great need for both macro exegesis and micro exegesis and an oscillating focus between the two for all areas of life. In particular for me, stepping back from the Bible and assessing the great methods (e.g. discourse analysis) and structures (i.e. historical-redemptive biblical theology) I have come to love has helped me to read the whole Bible in my head. I know that sounds funky, but hear me out. The Bible is a large collection of writings spanning 2000 years of people, nations, backgrounds, and events while employing at least a dozen different genres from about 40 different personalities. Familiarity with this kind of material takes lots of time, which is a major reason to read it consistently. For me, 4 years of a Biblical Studies degree and 3-5 years of a Master of Divinity degree have fostered a generous amount of familiarity. Now, it is impossible to read the whole Bible in an hour or even a day because there are simply too many words and too much information. But when one gains a certain degree of familiarity with the Bible (or anything for that matter), it is really an indication that a mental table of contents or index (or even concordance if you wish) has formed in their mind. Thus, when another person mentions a book of the Bible, or a character, or event, or topic, one can recall or mentally recapitulate whatever is mentioned. The contents of this index are varied for us all and are shaped by the methods and structures we were taught or employ. The more we read the Bible, the sharper and more comprehensive this index becomes (hopefully). This index is what we walk away from the Bible with and can allow us to “read” the Bible in our minds. We can “read” the Bible this way very quickly because of the miracle of instantly thumbing through our index. Thus, I think since I have had time away from “index-building” (or micro exegesis), I’ve had more time to review the index (running it through the logic filter) and ask more questions of it (macro exegesis). I have found this very refreshing and of greater value when I jump back into both my Bible and my books.

With regards to freedom, I have no obligations or demands on me to study which has allowed me to think freely; read less and think more. I still find myself drawn to certain people’s works like Meredith Kline, Gerhard Forde, N.T. Wright, and John Piper, but for the most part I’m trying to work out things on my own and in a small community of close friends. Granted, these friends are on the same page and entertain even the most ridiculous ideas I might have, but I have the freedom to be wrong. I taste much freedom also knowing that I need others. Boy does that take pressure off in the “theological project”.

I think much of what I am talking about has coalesced beautifully with our little home group/church on Tuesdays. It’s been an immense blessing to have a teaching outlet and an on-going discussion with wonderful saints that are relatively flexible and available.