Lift Up Your Hearts!

The final of the three articles I chose from the January-February issue of Christianity Today is "Who Owns the Pastor's Sermon?" which dives into the thorny issue of intellectual property rights.  If a church hires a pastor to preach sermons, do those sermons become church property, or does the preacher retain the copyrights?  Right now, the law favors the churches, which is why more pastors are seeking legal help to craft clear agreements.  Even though the focus of the article is entirely on pastors and sermons, church musicians, who frequently create intellectual property during the execution of their jobs, should take heed as well.

The law firm of Yates & Yates, which represents many Christian preacher-authors, has a standard agreement, which "recognizes that the pastor, as the creator, owns the intellectual property rights and has the right to determine copyright ownership. ... [T]he pastor grants the church a royalty-free license to use his written or recorded material."

It's the only arrangement that makes sense, said Yates. ... Preachers should own their sermons. If pastors don't own their sermons, that would essentially rob them of their livelihood. ... Pastors wouldn't be able to preach the same sermon in more than one place. And they wouldn't be able to take their sermon notes with them when they moved to a new church, which is "ridiculous," said Yates.

However, the legal situation is more complicated than this.

Frank Sommerville, a Dallas-based attorney who specializes in nonprofit law ... says that under the Copyright Act of 1976, a pastor's sermons qualify as "work for hire." That means the copyrights and intellectual property rights actually belong to their employer.

"It's not the answer that pastors expect," said Sommerville. "They've always taken the position that God gave them the sermon as part of their ministry. It never crossed their minds that there would be a law that would govern their sermons." (More)

Because there was actually only one great article in Three Great Articles - Part 1....

If our library is as good as it has been in acquiring books that I have suggested, eventually I'll post a review of The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence.  In the meantime, this is the Christianity Today article that caught my attention:  Why We're Losing the War on Poverty, an interview with lawyer-activist-author Gary A. Haugen of the International Justice Mission.  (If you want to correct your view of lawyers as the scum of the earth, take a good look at IJM.)

Picture a poor farmer trying to scrape his way out of poverty. Just when the crops have started to show promise, the locusts descend and devour all of that hard work. That's the locust effect—the way violence impacts the poor in the developing world. The traditional things we do to assist the poor to get out of poverty don't stop the violence. The Locust Effect tells the story of the hidden plague of violence.

The lack of reliable law enforcement, Haugen argues, exposes the poor to the worst predatory violence, undermining the good accomplished by the billions of dollars aid agencies spend annually to fight poverty.

Haugen wants Westerners—and the aid agencies they support—to be as determined in fighting criminal violence against the poor as they are in relieving hunger and treating HIV/AIDS.

The problem is not that the poor don't get laws. The problem is that they don't get law enforcement. There is a functional collapse of law enforcement systems in the developing world; the poor are left utterly vulnerable to violence.

There's a problem with pouring aid into circumstances where poor people are not protected from predatory violence. ... [W]e are going to be significantly disappointed in the outcome of our poverty alleviation efforts.

When people think of poverty, they tell you what they see: the shacks, the dirty water, the hungry families. Those are all the visuals that immediately come to mind.

What they don't see are the assaults, the slap across the face, the rape, the torture by police, and the extortion. It's intentionally hidden by the perpetrator. The victims are scared and ashamed, and it's difficult for them to speak. People don't talk about the things they don't have solutions for. People working in the development field and in poverty-fighting or public health don't often come from law enforcement.

There is a solution for violence: the basic service the rest of us rely on every day, law enforcement.

The ideal partner is the body of Christ around the world. Westerners are not going to parachute in and save the day. This is a fundamental struggle for justice that's going to have to be owned by the local community.

Another partner will be governmental authorities within that community, within that country. This recovers Christian interaction with government. Romans 13 says the authorities are actually ministers of God in order to do justice in the community. Christians in other eras shaped the way the government went about seeking justice and peace in the community.

In the city of Cebu, Philippines, IJM partnered with community leaders to rally the justice system to protect children from sex trafficking. That's Project Lantern. One critical partner was the church, Protestant and Catholic. The victimization of children in the commercial sex trade was reduced by nearly 80 percent because law enforcement protected the children instead of the sex traffickers. ... It's now being replicated in Manila and Pampanga. We're also seeing the government itself beginning to foot the bill and take the initiative. IJM is a partner, but it's no longer the prime moving force. The government itself is setting up specialized units. Fast-track courts are being established to address sex trafficking. Safe places for the survivors of sex trafficking are being established. It's being taken nationwide in the Philippines.

I'm on the side of hope. I've seen it with my own eyes, and I've seen it profoundly in history.

We've subscribed to Christianity Today magazine for more years than I can remember.  The publication has been through many changes over the years, and I can't say as I've been happy with many of them, particularly its following of the deplorable trend of featuring images, pull-quotes, and short snippets instead of solid text.  If it wasn't designed by someone with ADHD, I'm guessing that's the audience they're reaching for.

On the other hand, CT is far from the worst offender in this, and besides, it makes for perfect bathroom reading.  There's no need to linger after the job is done just to finish a chapter.

Despite my complaints about the format, they do have some excellent articles not found elsewhere, and this year's January-February issue was a home run.  I'll mention three article of particular note.  Whether non-subscribers will be able to follow the links or not I don't now; they have a good deal of content available for free on their website, but what is and what isn't seems random to me.

The Surprising Discovery About Those Colonialist, Proselytizing Missionaries.  Sociologist Robert Woodberry's work was inspired by a mandatory lecture he attended while in graduate school:

The lecture was by Kenneth A. Bollen, a UNC–Chapel Hill professor and one of the leading experts on measuring and tracking the spread of global democracy. Bollen remarked that he kept finding a significant statistical link between democracy and Protestantism. Someone needed to study the reason for the link, he said.

Woodberry was hooked.  Warned by his professor that finding something positive about missionaries in the colonial era might scuttle his academic career, Woodberry was meticulous in his work and extraordinarily skeptical in his statistical analysis.  The correlation wouldn't go away: 

Areas where Protestant missionaries had a significant presence in the past are on average more economically developed today, with comparatively better health, lower infant mortality, lower corruption, greater literacy, higher educational attainment (especially for women), and more robust membership in nongovernmental associations.

"Missionary" is a broad term, and it's important to note that the correlation only applies to what the author calls "conversionary Protestants" who operated independently of the colonial powers.

Protestant clergy financed by the state, as well as Catholic missionaries prior to the 1960s, had no comparable effect in the areas where they worked.  Independence from state control made a big difference. "One of the main stereotypes about missions is that they were closely connected to colonialism," says Woodberry. "But Protestant missionaries not funded by the state were regularly very critical of colonialism."

"Why did some countries become democratic, while others went the route of theocracy or dictatorship?" asks Daniel Philpott, who teaches political science and peace studies at the University of Notre Dame. "For [Woodberry] to show through devastatingly thorough analysis that conversionary Protestants are crucial to what makes the country democratic today [is] remarkable in many ways. Not only is it another factor—it turns out to be the most important factor. It can't be anything but startling for scholars of democracy."

The missionaries didn't set out to fight social injustice, but they knew it when they saw it, and knew they had to do something about it.  Nor did it hurt their cause to have Christianity associated with someone helpful, rather than just the abusive rulers.  For example: (More)

Do most people read faster on an e-reader?

I've discovered that I can borrow books from our library for my Kindle, and this past Saturday I signed out The Hobbit.  That we have two physical copies on our shelves is beside the point:  Kindle books are the most comfortable way to read in bed—at least under our present lighting setup—and that's what I wanted it for.  As a tried-and-true introvert, my brain is always spinning rapidly, and if I don't get sufficient, effective processing time during the day—and sometimes even if I do—trying to fall asleep is like putting in the clutch while opening the throttle:  high rpms with no actual progress made.  Reading a few chapters of a good book engages the engine and throttles back to where sleep can take over.

For physical books, our library's default loan period is three weeks.  The default loan period for e-books is one week.

The downside of so much exposure to Facebook and other modern communication is that I am tempted at this point to write, "WTF?"  Instead, I will try to remember what we all said before that offensive term became so common as to jump immediately even to my own mind, and simply say, "Huh?"  I find reading a book a week to be an ambitious goal.

I don't think I read any faster (or slower) on the Kindle than with the printed page.  Do you?

If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets, even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry.  He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, 'here lived'.  — Martin Luther King, Jr.

Jon found this amazing furniture designed for small spaces.  This is what happens when artists and engineers collaborate!  I find it terrific!

There's only one tiny problem:  It appears that if you can afford this furniture, you can afford a larger apartment.

No prices are listed, but Jon's e-mail inquiry about the bunk beds is rather discouraging.  (I rounded the numbers, but you get the idea.)

• Beds:  $5,000 - $8,000
• Folding headboards (each):  $500
• Folding desk under lower bunk:  $1000
• Twin mattresss (each):  $500 - $1000

Minimum $6,000 for a set of bunk beds?  Add the headboards and a desk and it will set you back at least $8,000?  (Plus taxes and shipping no doubt.)  They're very clever, and I'm sure they're well-built—probably not in China, though I haven't found any evidence to back up that speculation—but yikes!

My nephew T got his driver's permit recently.  I didn't find that at all surprising—until I read that the percentage of young people becoming licensed drivers has dropped radically since at least 1983.  In that year, 46% of 16-year-old had their licenses; by 2010 that had plummeted to 28%.

Why?  Reasons suggested range from reasonable to ridiculous, from encourging to frightening.  Some of them (in no particular order):

1. Too busy
2. Too expensive
3. Driving interferes with texting
4. Online resources make travel less necessary
5. Preference for public transit/biking/walking
6. Changes in licensing requirements

#1 I haven't figured out yet.  Most DMV lines are long, but not that long.

#2 I understand as a reason to put off buying a car, but not a reason for not getting a license.  A 16-year-old should be happy enough using the family car, and an older, "boomerang kid" still living at home should welcome the opportunity to assist the parents who are still supporting him.  Owning a car isn't a prerequisite for acquiring a license!

#3 Okay, once I got over the ridiculousness of being so addicted to your phone that you refuse to drive because most states don't allow texting while driving, I acknowledge that being able to do something else while travelling is one of the great advantages of public transit.  My father was a book lover with not a lot of spare time; taking the train to work was like being handed an extra hour to read.

#4 Very true.  Since I hate to shop, I really appreciate being able to do much of it online.  And watching movies at home is much nicer than getting my feet sticky in a movie theater.  But even here in Switzerland, which has the best public transit I've seen anywhere, most people find they have need for a car—if not actually owning one, at least subscribing to a car-sharing service.

#5 The best reason of all.  I'm thrilled that it's becoming "cool" to use public transit.  I've said for a long time that public transit, along with walking and biking for transport (as opposed to exercise or sport), will never make it in the U.S. until it shakes its image of being just for the poor and for drunks who have had their driver's licenses taken way.  But see my comment on #4.

#6  There needs to be more said about this than I've heard so far.  Getting a license used to be straightforward and relatively easy, even when it became more restrictive than it was for our parents:  "This is my daughter.  She can drive; give her a license." "Okay, ma'am; here it is."  Many states have become increasingly restrictive when it comes to licensing young people, with more rules than I've been able to keep track of, rules that take away much of the immediate incentive for learning to drive.  If they can't drive themselves home after a football game (too late at night) and can't provide transportation for their friends (passenger limits), who can blame many young people for finding the whole process too much hassle to bother with, since they can get fully licensed with ease in just a few more years?

"There's a segment of this generation missing opportunities to learn under the safeguards that [graduated licensing] provides," said Peter Kissinger, the president of the AAA Foundation for Traffic safety.

All I can say to that is that they brought it on themselves by in effect telling young people they are irresponsible idiots.  Who can blame those who decide to chuck the whole system?

Don't miss the latest post from the Occasional CEO.  I don't have time now to summarize it, so you'll have to read the whole thing, which you should anyway.  Here's a teaser:

I truly appreciate software.  I also love my cotton Hanes, sugar on my Grapenuts and enough gas to get to the beach this summer.  But, if there’s nothing else three centuries of sugar, cotton and oil have taught, it’s that first we own the advantaged commodity, and then it owns us.

This was posted at Free-Range Kids this morning, and I can't resist sharing it.  I have no love for Allstate, but insurance companies know the risk/benefit business better than anyone else, and this is just great.

Most of you know that I'm not fond of Presbyterian sermons.  In my experience, even if they're good they're too long, because the preacher says everything three times.  But I'm posting this for three reasons:

• It's local:  First Presbyterian Church of Orlando.  It was never our church, but both kids had musical gigs there at one time or another.
• It's fascinating:  I'd never have guessed this was a Presbyterian preacher.  Baptist maybe.  Even Pentacostal.  But Frozen Chosen?  Nah.
• It's a good take on the whole egalitarian/complementarian debate, with points for both sides.

Do I agree with everything? Rhetorical question.  You know I never do.  But you know there must be something to it if I think a sermon that long is worth listening to.

My husband likes to tell this story about one day when I was coming to pick him up from work:

He was in a hurry to get going, so instead of waiting at the office, where I was expecting him, he walked up the street to the main road, thus saving—or so he hoped—the time it would take me to drive down the street and turn around.

The plan backfired, however, because I, concentrating on the job at hand, didn't see him waving frantically on the sidewalk.  I drove to the usual place, and he had to walk back.

Thanks to our alma mater, I finally have a comeback for those embarrassing moments when the entire lunch table is thinking, "How dumb can this woman be?"

I didn't see him where I didn't expect him, not because I am stupid, but because I am highly intelligent!

Check it out:  a study at the University of Rochester has discovered a strong correlation between high intelligence and a significantly reduced ability to notice background motions.

The authors explain that in most scenarios, background movement is less important than small moving objects in the foreground, for example driving a car, walking down a hall or moving your eyes across the room.

As a person's IQ increases, so too does his or her ability to filter out distracting background motion and concentrate on the foreground.

In an initial study on 12 people, there was a 64% correlation between motion suppression and IQ scores. In this larger study on 53 people, a 71% correlation was found.

Ha!

In a comment to my previous post on Getting Organized in the Google Era, I was asked for an example to explain my statement that I had a hard time relating to much of the book because the author's world—not so much his physical world as his world view, the basic assumptions as to the way life is and ought to be—was so different from mine.  I'd planned to answer with another comment, but ended up writing so much it deserves its own post.

How are our worlds different?  Here are a few examples that come to mind:

Music:  I'm not talking about different tastes in music, though that is surely a huge difference, looking at the playlist he includes.  That he includes a playlist in a book on organization strategies is more to the point.  He doesn't merely enjoy music, or make music—if he plays an instrument or sings it's not important enough for him to mention—but that he lives and breathes music.  Other people's music.  From what he says, I gather that he is "plugged in" to music all the time, and considers that the normal state of being.  I love music, albeit a different kind, but I love silence, too, and having music constantly pouring into my brain would drive me crazy.  I go crazy enough with all the music that goes on inside my brain without any external help.

The e-World:  Music is just a small example of how he seems constantly plugged into an electronic world.  IPod, iPhone, iPad, computers, GPS—these and other devices seem in his world to be not so much tools to work with as interfaces with what is “reality” to him.  As much as I think of myself as a computer person—much of my work is dependent on the computer, I enjoy technology, and spend much too much time interacting with electronic devices—his world is much, much more "wired" than mine.  I suspect my comment about spending too much time with electronic devices is something he wouldn’t comprehend.  Maybe I’m wrong, but that’s the impression I get from his book.

Ethics:  I don't mean he's unethical.  He seems to have a good sense of some sort of ethical framework, and his concern for his girlfriend in her fight with cancer shows that the relationship was no superficial one.  It was, indeed, "till death do us part" even though he never made the promise.  But no matter how close they were—and the same is true for his current girlfriend—relationships in the world he lives in seem to be not “two becoming one,” but two separate lives touching, albeit intimately, at the “now” point in time, content to go their separate ways when circumstances change sufficiently.   Children do not seem to be an important, expected part—or necessarily any part—of the equation.

There’s no clearer example of this radical difference than that he is so open about his living-together-unmarried situation.  People have been indulging in such activities forever, but mostly either bragging about them or trying to hide them.  In Merrill’s world, however, this is normal, common, expected behavior.  The kind you mention casually in a book, not expecting anyone to think twice about it, let alone be shocked.

Finally, there’s the clear expectation that in normal families, both parents have important, serious—i.e. paid—careers, and children spend their days in some combination of daycare and school.  People eat out a lot, and have plenty of disposable income to spend on restaurant meals, daycare, and electronic gadgets.

The upshot is that Getting Organized in the Google Era has given me a few new ideas, but the extreme disconnect between his life's framework and mine makes me disinclined to trust that his solutions are as generalizable as he hopes.

I took the Front Porch Republic out of my news feed, not because what they had to say was bad, but because it was too good.  I was spending 'way too much time reading, and composing comments in my head—whether or not those comments ever made it into print.  But then they started sending me their weekly updates....

Here's a good article on immigration.  Normally I don't read about the topic, because it's so inflammatory; too many people, as they say, are enjoying the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.  This one is different, as are most FPR articles, whether I agree with them or not.  For one thing, he lambasts both the Republicans and the Democrats.  ("[A]s with nearly everything in establishment Republicanism, even when they are sincere they are still lying"; for the Democratic skewer, see below.)  For another, he acknowledges three points that I've long thought critical to the debate:

1. Immigration in sufficient numbers inevitably and irrevocably transforms a culture; if we try to ignore or deny this and don't take steps to defend and preserve that which is good about our specific culture, it will be overrun just as surely as imperialism destroyed the native cultures of its colonies.
2. We are repeatedly told that we need more immigrants because there are not enough Americans who are willing/qualified to do the jobs.  Whether it's a factory owner crying that he'd go out of business without illegal immigrants (shades of pre-Civil War Southern plantation owners' insistence on the necessity of slavery), or companies pushing for more H1-B visas because they can't find enough Americans to do their high-tech jobs (meaning, qualified Americans are asking for higher salaries than Indians and Moldovans)—the bottom line is not that Americans can't or won't do the jobs, but that we value low prices more than fair wages.
3. We feel a need for large numbers of immigrants because our own birth rate is too low.  This reproductive minimalism is both an expression of our lack of appreciation for our own culture, and a great factor in its demise.^*

I wonder if it is even possible to debate immigration honestly.  The Democratic party has bet big that the continued use of contraception among white Americans and the admission of peoples from the Latin south will, in the long term, tilt demography permanently in favor of its version of the welfare state, and, consequently, its sustained power.  Moreover, the turning away of Americans from marriage and the having of children suggests a lack of investment in, an apathy regarding, the future character of their country.  It is no more surprising that Americans should be resigned regarding the future of their culture than it is that Americans should desire immigrants to labor for the welfare state in lieu of the children who could have been. These trends are a tacit vote of assent to the Democratic strategy vastly more significant that any election-day tally. Further, neither Republicans nor Democrats seem to be capable of giving voice to a genuine love of country: one that does not base itself on being a jingoistic bully abroad, but rather on a reverent care to preserve and cultivate what we have, here, now, at home.

O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
An' foolish notion....

(from To A Louse, On Seeing One on a Lady's Bonnet at Church)

Robert Burns assumed that we hold higher views of ourselves than others do, but for many of us, especially women, the opposite problem can be devastating.  Here's the latest from Dove's effort on behalf of all the young girls—and older women—conditioned by airbrushed and photoshopped media to see themselves as ugly.

You can see the sketches, and learn more, at Dove's site.

You can criticize Dove for choosing women who are all good looking in the first place.  You can figure that the sketch artist let his knowledge of the program influence his sketches.  You can complain that Dove's message still assumes that "real beauty" is physical.  But even a small candle illuminates when the world is dark.

There's no use pretending:  60 is not young.  To say, "sixty is the new forty" helps a bit, but not much, because 40 isn't young, either—except to those of us breathing the rarefied sexagesimal air.

For anyone, at any age, life may be more than half over, but young people don't think about it much; perhaps that's part of what keeps them young.  But at 60, it's not just a possibility, but a certainty:  there are fewer days before us than behind us.  Still, that's not necessarily bad.  The days behind us are filled with experience, and through each one of them we have gathered knowledge, experience and wisdom.

Young children look forward to their birthdays, and it's not primarily because of the presents.  "I can't wait to be five," exclaimed my granddaughter recently.  The young know that the passage of time represents growth:  new knowledge, new abilities, new privileges.  As we age, we begin to forget this, because healthy growth is no longer so obvious and so apparently effortless.  I say "apparently" because close observation of little children reveals that even if we don't remember most of our own childhood efforts, growing up is very hard work indeed.

I suspect the crucial difference is not effort, but attitude.  Somehow—perhaps through years of compulsory schooling, the daily stresses of earning a living, or the distractions inherent in tending to our children's health and growth—we stop looking forward to each new day as the opportunity to learn, to grow, to acquire new skills and hone existing ones, to become more loving, patient, kind, gentle, and joyful people.

Aging brings limits, that can't be denied.  But it brings freedoms, too, that youth does not have, such as more resources, increased options, and a greater awareness of how we learn best.  We have a lifetime's worth of experience to build on, and a lifetime's worth of acquired wisdom to guide us.  "We're not getting older, we're getting better" is trite, and wrong.  We are getting older.  Nonetheless, because we are getting older, we can be getting better.

So, after all this, you think I'm turning 60?  Nope.  Passed that landmark already.  But someone I love very much is, indeed, turning 60 today.  For you, dear one, I wish a

Happy Birthday!

and many, many years of living, loving, learning ... and growing better.