Lift Up Your Hearts!

Where were you 20 years ago today?

My own journal entry is remarkably filled with the mundane details of life with two young children.  There is one exclamatory sentence, "Would that every day could be like this!" but it was referring to Heather's having awakened with her alarm clock, showered, dressed, made her bed, cleaned her room and finished all her chores before school.  Not as momentous as events on the other side of the world, but a personal triumph.

I chronicled the minutia of my own work: volunteering at the local middle school, sewing patches on our Indian Princess vests, making Bay Punch, and writing letters.  I mentioned Porter and Janet's Indian Princess meeting in the evening.  There was even the recurring whine about school, in this case my frustration with Heather's fifth-grade teacher, who, I thought, was putting undue restrictions on the books the children were allowed to read in class.

Mrs. C. responded to my letter, and the response was not at all what I had hoped.  She praised the required books as “Sunshine State Young Readers Award” winners (which means little more than that a lot of kids voted that they liked the books) and defended restricting the kids to those books during English reading time, “because I then can control what books the students are reading, feeling confident they are reading from an approved list.”  I don’t object to her wanting to have some control over the reading the kids do in school, but I do object to her using an “approved list” without exercising good judgement.  Even Newberry Award winners are not necessarily all good, and there are plenty of good books excluded from each list.  The Sunshine State awards are heavily biased toward modern books; I don’t believe a deceased author has a change of winning.  Perhaps Mrs. C. really does think that astral projection and high school romances are good topics for fifth graders to read about, but I’d rather hope it isn’t so.  She could at least admit that Little Women, Robin Hood, and similar books are also good reading, but she will not include those in her “approved” reading.  Even Heather is frustrated by this; she is beginning to be able to tell a junk-food book when she reads one.  We talked about it a bit; perhaps she will become frustrated enough to be willing to “play the game.”  She can pick out an “approved” book to read for the restricted 10 minutes, then set it aside until the next day and spend the other reading times with a more appropriate book.  It’s silly to have to do that, not to mention frustrating to leave a book in the middle, but it may be the only way.

Only at the end of my entry did I mention the momentous occasion of the day, and my reaction was characteristically subdued.  When something almost too horrible to think about has been a given for most of your life, it is hard to believe that change is really happening.  Unlike Porter, I had not been through Checkpoint Charlie with all its horrors, but I remembered well the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and feared that Eastern Europe's new freedoms would be short-lived.

Today the East German government announced that its citizens were free to travel to any country, whenever they want to.  This is the most remarkable news I ever expected to hear.  It is in the government’s best interest; the only way they can reasonably slow the exodus of East Germans through the recently more relaxed borders of other East European countries is to give some assurance that things may be getting better at home.  But the East German government has not been known for being reasonable, and they could have started building walls between their country and the others.  Let us hope that “hardliners” in the USSR and other Communist countries don’t get so fed up with reforms that they take over to “save” their countries.  Except for Albania, I expected East Germany to be the last country to reform.

The next day I wrote, "I wish I knew what K. and G. are thinking.  How exciting to be in Germany (and within sight of the border) in these times.  People are dancing on top of the Berlin Wall."   There were friends of ours who were on sabbatical in Germany.  For Christmas that year, they gave each girl a piece of the Berlin Wall.  They were, and maybe still are, too young to fully appreciate the significance of those gifts, more precious in their own way than moon rocks.

It is the gift, and curse, of each younger generation, not to appreciate the horrors that have gone before.  CNN's report on today's upcoming festivities was clearly written by someone for whom the events remembered are mere history.  The human face of what East Germany was like with the wall in place is completely missing in the report.

[German Chancellor Angela] Merkel, the first former East German to lead the reunified country, will join former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in a symbolic walk through the point where the first people crossed the Wall on the night of November 9, 1989.

It's a shame Ronald Reagan can't join them: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

What do hippies and Christians have in common?  A lot more than you might think.

The stereotypes:  Hippies are free-lovin', goddess-worshipping ultra-liberals who rebel against society's norms and customs; Christians are moralistic, hyper-conservative corporate capitalists; and never the twain shall break bread together.

Quite the contrary.  Christians and hippie types alike tend to look at society's conventions with a skeptical eye.

I first noticed this in the early days of homeschooling, when our "fellow travellers" were united by just one thing:  an unconventional view of the meaning and purpose of education.  This view made good friends and staunch allies of conservative Raymond Moore and liberal John Holt, vocal and active leaders in the movement who had little else in common.

Years later I saw the same pattern in the home birth movement.  Then in small and home-based businesses, and on small, sustainable, organic farms.

The Good Shepherds is an inspiring and encouraging article on the last.

Scott was skeptical when his wife said that she felt God wanted the family to raise sheep. "Excuse me," Scott replied. "I can't even stand to mow my own yard. What makes you think I'm going to start doing things like that?" ... Today, Lamb of God farm supplies about 40 families every week of the summer with fresh fruits and vegetables, and sells produce at farmers' markets around Chicago. Wool from their sheep is sold at a nearby knitting store, owned by their daughter. ... It would [now] take a miracle to get him to suit up again for a corporate boardroom, Scott says. "[Farming] is the most satisfying work I've ever done. It's because God's got his hand in it. There's something very elemental about tending this piece of his creation."

Called Christian agrarians, these families are tapping into broader cultural trends: interest in organic and locally produced food, back-to-the-land movements, and conservation and environmental concerns. They are resisting other trends: large-scale conventional agriculture, population flight from rural communities, and fragmented suburban life.

Joel Salatin is a kind of elder statesman of this small movement. He's been working Polyface Farm in Virginia since he was a kid, and he has made a living at it since graduating from college. Though it would be fair to call him an evangelical and an environmentalist, Salatin fights labels. He calls himself a "Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist." He complains that evangelicals have been inconsistent. "We look at the liberal, who wants to abort babies and hug trees. We say, 'What is it with you?' " he says. "Well they look at you and me and say, 'What is this about you pro-lifers who want to genetically engineer food and eradicate everything?' "

Neither liberals nor traditional evangelicals are flocking to the countryside, but another group is, says Salatin. "Thirty years ago, 80 percent of all visitors to our farm were hippie, cosmic-worshipping, nirvana earth muffins," he says in his typical rambling manner. "Today, 80 percent are Christian homeschoolers."

"Once you opt out of the conventional paradigm [of public schooling] and find it satisfying, then you begin searching for other paradigms to opt out of," Salatin says. [F]amilies that homeschool often start looking for ways for fathers to leave their office jobs. "How do I leave my Dilbert cubicle at the end of an expressway," Salatin says, "and instead invest in my family, my kids, my community?"

Every year on his 550-acre farm, 450 acres of which is wooded, Joel Salatin produces 40,000 pounds of beef, 30,000 pounds of pork, 10,000 broiler chickens, 1,200 turkeys, 1,000 rabbits, and 35,000 dozen eggs. In The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan says the land, despite being used so intensely, "will be in no way diminished by the process—in fact it will be the better for it."

That's partly because Salatin's methods are vastly different from those of most contemporary farmers. In contrast to industrially produced chickens that can't leave their cages, that need to have their beaks cut off so they don't peck at each other, and that are ridden with disease, Salatin allows his chickens to poke freely around his pasture.

Salatin says he is just copying creation. "We use God's design and take it as a template," he says. "Our overriding question is not how do we grow the chicks bigger and faster and cheaper. The goal that we have is how do we … create a habitat that allows the chicken to fully express her 'chickenness.' "

Every day, Salatin moves his cows to a fresh spot of grass. The cows eat all day. At night, Salatin moves them to another spot. He then moves his chickens to where the cows were. The chickens eat the bugs and larvae growing in the cowpats. This "sanitation crew" cleans up after his cows. "Just like in nature, birds always follow herbivores, like the egret on the rhino's nose," he explains. Chickens' droppings, combined with cows', fertilize the grass, which in two weeks will have regrown enough to be ready for the cows again.

Symbiotic relationships are at work all over Salatin's farm. Without fertilizer, without hormones, and without cows and chickens forced into industrial factories, Salatin produces a healthy amount of food—and it is healthy food, too, for which customers come directly to him and pay top dollar. "What is it worth to have chicken that reduces your cholesterol instead of increasing it?" Salatin says. "We've had our chickens tested. They're 25 times cleaner than what's in the supermarket."

Homeschoolers, home birthers, homemakers, family businesses, and small farmers—for whom I pray daily—may never be more than fringe groups in our society.  Not everyone—and perhaps only a few—can follow all, or any of these paths.  But we would do well to encourage them, to cultivate and not penalize their growth, for they may be the remnant that preserves the good we are rapidly forgetting, like the dedicated conservators who raise heritage crops and farm animals.  As Neil Postman said, in another context, Those ... who resist the spirit of the age will contribute to what might be called the Monastery Effect, for they will help to keep alive a humane tradition.

More from the backblog . . .

The Strange Double Standards of Abortion  John Stackhouse muses on the murder of abortion doctor George Tiller, vigilantism, and hypocrisy.

This past week, a teenager in Vancouver was arrested by police because friends of his had noticed a “hit list” of over 100 people posted on his Facebook page. When the police seized the Grade 12 student, they found an arsenal of knives, guns and batons.  That young man attends my son’s high school.

Suppose he lived next door. Suppose I read the Facebook page one evening because my son brought it to my attention. Suppose the next morning I saw him loading weapons in the trunk of his car. What would I do to stop him from killing innocent people?

 

Reflections on My Termination Peter Augustine Lawler, former member of the President's Council on Bioethics, considers what is lost by President Obama's approach to the moral issues of the day.

For Obama, a valuable Council does nothing but offer advice to the administration. The Bush Council was actually given the additional mandate of public education, of developing a national dialogue on controversial bioethical issues. It's with that Socratic second mandate in mind that President Bush chose for his first chairman a man trained in medicine, natural science, and the wisdom about being human embodied in the Great Books from Plato through Shakespeare to Genesis--Leon Kass. For Obama, it would appear, there's no need for such moral and political discussion or such "humanistic" guidance because the experts know the nonideological and objective answer to the key questions that face us in our high-tech and increasingly biotech world. Personal opinion is trumped by what the "studies show," and public opinion should be guided toward a consensus based on those studies.

For many of the bioethical issues that face us, there's no obvious, objective solution—meaning one that emerges from experts without real moral and political deliberation. That doesn't mean that the contending parties involved should be narrowly ideological or blindly fundamentalist. It's their duty to be and in fact they often really are guided by what we can really know through science. But as Socrates himself constantly reminded us, for the most reasonable of men and women the key questions often remain more obvious than their answers. There's no substitute, in a democracy, for thinking together about who we are before deciding what to do, and it's not "anti-science" to sometimes conclude that science alone doesn't resolve every dilemma we face about human freedom and dignity.

The rule of experts might be fine if they were philosopher-kings who had united in themselves not only technological power but perfect wisdom. But of course, it's much more clear that the human power over nature and human nature is growing faster than is our wisdom to use it well for authentically human purposes. The experts, we have to remember, very often hide their own personal opinions and ideological agendas behind their impersonal claims to merely be following what the studies say. We can learn from them, but as long as they fall short of perfect objectivity based on perfect wisdom, we shouldn't trust them. These days, the people, above all, should distrust meddlesome, schoolmarmish judges and bureaucrats (and presidents who enable them) who want to deprive them of the capacity of thinking for themselves.

 

State Slaps Dr. Do-Good  Insurance laws have a purpose, as most well-intentioned laws do.  What laws rarely have is common sense, something judges sometimes, but increasingly rarely, provide.

The state is trying to shut down a New York City doctor's ambitious plan to treat uninsured patients for around $1,000 a year.  Dr. John Muney offers his patients everything from mammograms to mole removal at his AMG Medical Group clinics, which operate in all five boroughs.  "I'm trying to help uninsured people here," he said.  His patients agree to pay $79 a month for a year in return for unlimited office visits with a $10 co-pay.

But his plan landed him in the crosshairs of the state Insurance Department, which ordered him to drop his fixed-rate plan—which it claims is equivalent to an insurance policy.

He says he can afford to charge such a small amount because he doesn't have to process mountains of paperwork and spend hours on billing.  "If they leave me alone, I can serve thousands of patients," he said.

The state believes his plan runs afoul of the law because it promises to cover unplanned procedures—like treating a sudden ear infection—under a fixed rate. That's something only a licensed insurance company can do.

The doctor's plan is no substitute for health insurance, since it doesn't cover anything he can't do himself, eliminating the catastrophic, big-ticket items that are the raison d'être for insurance.  People who are generally healthy might find $1000 plus per year a bit steep for simple office visits, but what could be wrong with offering fixed-fee services, as long as he's not the only game in town?

 

Unplugging Grandma Isn't the Problem The problem is getting Grandma care in the first place.  The article also debunks the much-thrown-about life expectance statistics.

[President Obama] has no plans, as he put it, to "pull the plug on Grandma."  The problem with government health systems is not that they pull the plug on Grandma. It's that Grandma has a hell of a time getting plugged in in the first place. The only way to "control costs" is to restrict access to treatment, and the easiest people to deny treatment to are the oldsters. Don't worry, it's all very scientific. In Britain, they use a "Quality-Adjusted Life Year" formula to decide that you don't really need that new knee because you're gonna die in a year or two, maybe a decade-and-a-half tops. So it's in the national interest for you to go around hobbling in pain rather than divert "finite resources" away from productive members of society to a useless old geezer like you. And you'd be surprised how quickly geezerdom kicks in: A couple of years back, some Quebec facilities were attributing death from hospital-contracted infection of anyone over 55 to "old age."

I had an elderly British visitor this month who's had a recurring problem with her left hand. At one point it swelled up alarmingly, and so we took her to Emergency. They did a CT scan, X-rays, blood samples, the works. In two hours at a small, rural, undistinguished, no-frills hospital in northern New Hampshire, this lady got more tests than she's had in the past decade in Britain—even though she goes to see her doctor once a month. He listens sympathetically, tells her old age often involves adjusting to the loss of mobility, and then advises her to take the British version of Tylenol and rest up. Anything else would use up those valuable "resources." So, in two hours in New Hampshire, she got tested and diagnosed (with gout) and prescribed something to deal with it. It's the difference between health "care" (i.e., going to the doctor's every month to no purpose) and health treatment—and on the latter America is the best in the world.

 

Daughter Saves Mother, 80, Left by Doctors to Starve  Speaking of unplugging Grandma . . .

Hazel Fenton, from East Sussex [England], is alive nine months after medics ruled she had only days to live, withdrew her antibiotics and denied her artificial feeding. The former school matron had been placed on a controversial care plan intended to ease the last days of dying patients.  Doctors say Fenton is an example of patients who have been condemned to death on the Liverpool care pathway plan. They argue that while it is suitable for patients who do have only days to live, it is being used more widely in the NHS, denying treatment to elderly patients who are not dying.

Fenton was admitted to hospital suffering from pneumonia. Although [her daughter, Christine Ball] acknowledged that her mother was very ill she was astonished when a junior doctor told her she was going to be placed on the plan to “make her more comfortable” in her last days.  Ball insisted that her mother was not dying but her objections were ignored. A nurse even approached her to say: “What do you want done with your mother’s body?”  On January 19, Fenton’s 80th birthday, Ball says her mother was feeling better and chatting to her family, but it took another four days to persuade doctors to give her artificial feeding.

Despite my efforts, my backblog appears to be growing faster than I can deal with it.  Here's a quick look at several interesting health-related issues that have come my way recently.  (Where "recently" is defined as "sometime within the last year or two"; that's how old some of my backblog is.)

Acknowledging Preindustrial Patterns of Sleep May Revolutionize Approach to Sleep Dysfunction  Do you worry when you awaken in the middle of the night and can't get back to sleep?  Your body may be rebelling against unnatural sleep patterns imposed by artificial lighting and our frantic schedules.

In the course of gathering information for his book, At Day's Close: Night in Times Past, which is about night in preindustrial times, A. Roger Ekirch, professor of history at Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Roanoke, uncovered the fact that in preindustrial times before artificial illumination was widely used, persons typically slept in 2 shifts. They called the shifts "first sleep" and "second sleep." In those times, sleep was more closely associated with sunset and sunrise than it is now. Within an hour or so after sunset, persons retired to bed, slept for about 4 hours and then woke up. They remained awake for a few hours and then returned to sleep at about 2 am for another 4 hours or so.

Written records from before the first century onward indicate that the period between first and second sleep afforded persons a chance for quiet contemplation, but persons also rose from bed during this interval and did household chores or visited with family and friends. Although diaries, court documents, and literature of the time indicate that this sleep pattern was widely acknowledged, this bit of history had been lost until the debut of Ekirch's work. The pattern of sleep he describes as the norm in days past is no longer the norm in developed countries where artificial light extends the day.  Anthropologists, however, have observed a similar pattern of segmented sleep among some contemporary African tribes, such as the Tiv of central Nigeria, who even refer to their customary sleep patterns as first sleep and second sleep, just as the early Europeans did.

In-Body Stem Cell Therapy Has Enormous Potential for Bone Injuries If you're as sensitive as I am to the violence committed in the name of stem cell research, rest easy:  this amazing breakthrough from the University of Rochester Medical Center uses the body's own stem cells, in vivo.

At the heart of the research is the drug teriparatide . . . which was approved by the FDA in 2002 for the treatment of osteoporosis. Astute observations led a team of clinicians and researchers to uncover how this drug can also boost our bodies’ bone stem cell production to the point that adults’ bones appear to have the ability to heal at a rate typically seen when they were young kids.

“I had patients with severe osteoporosis, in tremendous pain from multiple fractures throughout their spine and pelvis, who I would put on teriparatide. . . . When they would come back for their follow-up visits three months later, it was amazing to see not just the significant healing in their fractures, but to realize they were pain-free—a new and welcome experience for many of these patients.” 

Circumcision Is Found to Curb Two S.T.D.’s This New York Times article left me both confused and concerned.  First, even if subsequent research verifies the protective effects of circumcision, the question still remains, why?  What would drive men to choose major, irreversible surgery on a most sensitive and important body part over simple hygiene and sexual fidelity?  If we needed further evidence that our sexual drive is broken and gangrenous, this would be it.  I am not one of those who would ban circumcision, not even for infants who have no say in the matter.  For those without religious or other strong convictions, however, administration of the procedure under the mere assumption that one's newborn son will inevitably engage in illegitimate sex seems bizarre.  (I wouldn't subject a daughter to the HPV vaccine, either.)  Newborn circumcision is a lucrative practice, however, so I wouldn't be surprised to find doctors using this study as an excuse to encourage it.

Women must toughen up for birth—expert  A British midwife is mocked for saying that normal childbirth without anesthesia is better for mom and baby.  The article does allude to hospital practices, such as leaving the laboring mother alone, that increase pain and subsequent desire for anesthesia.  "He urged women to use yoga, hypnosis and massage to overcome pain."

Or they could swear.

Curses can foil pain, scientist discovers  According to an English study, swearing lessens pain, though only if it's an unusual response to the stimulus and not a habitual part of one's vocabulary.  This may bode ill for our profanity-saturated culture.

Though both sexes experienced a reduction in perceived pain while swearing, females did so to a greater extent. Similarly, swearing increased the heart rate of both sexes, but more so for females. . . . [T]hat result may have stemmed from differences in the way swearing figures in men's and women's vocabularies.

"I suggested for prisoners who commonly swear, the words kind of lose their shock value, whereas a nun who never uses those words may be more emotionally aroused by cursing."

Studies showing that teachers will form expectations of a student's character and ability based on nothing more than his or her name are unfortunately nothing new.  Students with "traditional," common names are more likely to receive higher ratings on both academic performance and behavior than those with names perceived as odd.  What makes this article worth commenting on is not the results of the study, but the names themselves.

The study reveals that . . . traditional names such as Charlotte, Sophie, Marie, Hannah, Alexander, Maximilian, Simon, Lukas and Jakob are consistently linked to strong performance and good behaviour. Non-traditional names such as Chantal, Mandy, Angelina, Kevin, Justin and Maurice, on the other hand, are associated with weak performance and bad behaviour.

That's when I ceased skimming the article and paid attention.  Traditional names?  Maximilian?  Sophie?  Ah, the ".de" in the url explains everything.  It's nice to see another perspective on the same problem.

But why do the Germans have such a prejudice against Kevins?  All the Kevins I know are really nice people and far brighter than average.

The name Kevin was perceived as being linked to especially poor behaviour and performance, with one study participant even writing that, “Kevin is not a name—it’s a diagnosis!”

Bizarre.

Fortunately, the person I know who would be most likely to use this information against his brother is unlikely to read my blog.

The Advent Conspiracy has nothing to do with my favorite computer adventure game.

Advent, celebrated during the four weeks before Christmas, is a season of the liturgical church year, a time of repentance and reflection in preparation for the coming of Christ, both as God who became man in a particular time and place (Christmas), and as God who will return to judge the world at its ending (the Second Coming).

That's the theory anyway.  In practice, it's a hard season to observe in a culture where Christmas events start before Hallowe'en* and the celebrations—instead of extending from Christmas Eve until Epiphany on January 6^th—end abruptly about noon on December 25^th.  Between Hallowe'en hype and Christmas hype, Advent—like Thanksgiving—gets lost.

Someone told me last year about the Advent Conspiracy, and I hope whoever it was will forgive me for not remembering.  I've searched all my e-mails and family blogs and come up empty.  This year, however, it was my sister-in-law who brought it up; her family is spearheading their church's incarnation of the idea.

I have a natural suspicion of "movements" and bandwagons, but so far I've seen nothing wrong, and much good, about this one.  It's a simple formula for making Christmas more delightful:

Worship Fully  It starts with Jesus. It ends with Jesus. This is the holistic approach God had in mind for Christmas. It’s a season where we are called to put down our burdens and lift a song up to our God. It’s a season where love wins, peace reigns, and a king is celebrated with each breath.  It's the party of the year.

Spend Less  We like gifts. Our kids really like gifts. But consider this: America spends an average of $450 billion a year every Christmas. How often have you spent money on Christmas presents for no other reason than obligation? How many times have you received a gift out of that same obligation?....We’re asking people to consider buying ONE LESS GIFT this Christmas. Just one.  Sounds insignificant, yet many who have taken this small sacrifice have experienced something nothing less than a miracle: They have been more available to celebrate Christ during the [A]dvent season.

Give More  God’s gift to us was a relationship built on love. So it’s no wonder why we’re drawn to the idea that Christmas should be a time to love our friends and family in the most memorable ways possible. Time is the real gift Christmas offers us, and no matter how hard we look, it can’t be found at the mall. Time to make a gift that turns into the next family heirloom. Time to write mom a letter. Time to take the kids sledding. Time to bake really good cookies and sing really bad Christmas carols [or really good Christmas carols]. Time to make love visible through relational giving.

Love All  When Jesus loved, He loved in ways never imagined. Though rich, he became poor to love the poor, the forgotten, the overlooked and the sick. He played to the margins. By spending less at Christmas we have the opportunity to join Him in giving resources to those who need help the most. When Advent Conspiracy first began four churches challenged this simple concept to its congregations. The result raised more than a half million dollars to aid those in need. One less gift. One unbelievable present in the name of Christ. 

Advent Conspiracy accepts no money and encourages participants to share a variety of ideas on how to give presence this Christmas.  But they also have a particular concern for the millions of people who suffer and die for lack of clean water, and for three years have supported the work of Living Water International.

The solution to this problem is directly beneath our feet. Drilling a fresh water well is a relatively inexpensive, yet permanent solution to this epidemic. $10 will give a child clean water for life. That's not an estimate. It's a fact. And here's another fact: Solving this water problem once and for all will cost about $10 billion. Not bad considering Americans spent $450 billion on Christmas last year. Our hope is that, by celebrating Christ in a new way at Christmas, the church can serve as the leading movement behind ending the water crisis once and for all.

LWI earns a four-star (highest) rating from Charity Navigator.  So does World Vision, one of my favorite charitable organizations, which has a Gift Catalog filled with ways to help, from water wells to farm animals to (one of my favorites) microfinance loans.

Your church doesn't participate in Advent Conspiracy?  You don't have a church?  Not to worry!  Participation in this conspiracy is open to all.

President Obama has declared the swine flu outbreak to be a national emergency.  I'm not sure that's all that bad of a measure, given that it lifts some governmental rules for hospitals that probably weren't a good idea in the first place.  But as Susan McWilliams points out in this Front Porch Republic post, our media-hyped fears seem 'way out of line.  It's hard not to quote her entire post.

What Thucydides helps us to see [in his description of a plague in Athens during the Pelopponesian War], as George Kateb has written, is “the ways in which fear of death through contagion disorganizes all human relations”:

It is the peculiar power of contagious disease to isolate people from each other; normal communal ties give way before the desire of every man to avoid contact which could bring on the disease and with it, death. The wish to remain free of sickness overrides all duty and all affection.

The plague resulted in what Kateb calls “a kind of negative state of nature: instead of the war of all against all, there was the avoidance of all by all.” What is ultimately most horrifying about the plague is how it exposes the fragility of civilization.  You might not be able to build Rome in a day, but you can destroy Athens in a few weeks.

[F]ears of the swine flu have curbed many of life’s rituals in the United States. Employers are forcing employees to stop sharing candy. Colleges are forcing students—heaven forfend!—to stop playing beer pong. People are cancelling holiday parties, or serving hand sanitizer instead of punch.

Religious institutions have seemed especially willing to change generations-old rituals on the chance that they might spread contagion. Churches are instructing congregants not to shake hands at the sign of peace, emptying the holy water fonts, and putting away hymnals. Many churches have stopped offering a shared sacrament, thereby taking a lot of the communing out of communion.

The North American Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, which is the nation’s largest Protestant group, has raised the possibility of cancelling all mass gatherings: weekly services, weekday events at church, weddings, and funerals.

Keep in mind a few things here: 1) although swine flu is not pretty, most people recover from it within a week, without needing any medical care; 2) Americans who do get sick with the swine flu may be treated with antiviral medication; 3) there is a vaccine available to protect against this flu; and 3) according to epidemiologists, there isn’t even that much of a swine flu resurgence in American cities this year to begin with.

When even our religious institutions—the places that in theory are devoted to the primacy of spiritual health (and the attendant conviction that the health of the spirit might be more important than the health of the body)—are willing to dismantle themselves at the idea of what is for the most part a transient and nonfatal illness, I think we should be getting more than a little nervous about the spiritual health of the country.

The greatest horror of the Athenian plague, as Thucydides says, is not the number of the dead but the degradation of the terms of life for the living.

That understanding—which sees death as something that you must risk in the name of a good life—has in the past been central to American thought and practice, evidenced by homestead wives and warriors alike.

In all this fear about exposure to the H1N1 virus, our willingness to abandon core rituals and community life might be the most frightening thing out there.

I know I've been out of the comics loop for a while—having recently had three grandchild-comics available for my entertainment—but what's with the volunteerism theme?  I'm all for volunteer work, and think that one of the sad results of the "women's movement" was the conversion of so many volunteer hours into paid employment.  But when comic strip after comic strip at the same time starts pushing volunteer work, it sounds creepy, like groupthink.  Like the Florida public school system, which several years ago began requiring volunteer work from their students, many of whom probably cannot spell, much less define, "oxymoron."

Like many people, I have mixed feelings about Facebook, finding it simultaneously useful and annoying.  But here's a funny thing about Facebook, as reported by Eric Schultz, who is the Chairman of the Board of the New England Historic Genealogical Society and writer of The Occasional CEO. (The NEHGS library, both online and in person, is one of my favorite and most helpful resources for genealogical research.)

This last summer, in the midst of its 164^th year, NEHGS had the single greatest month of membership growth ever.  Ever.

The reason?   Facebook.

Yep, that surprised the board, too.

How Tim Keller Found Manhattan.  Although a church in the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) denomination gave us our best church experience, it also gave us our worst.  What I have since learned about other PCA churches leads me to believe that, although they are a sound, orthodox (small "o") denomination, with many wonderful people, there appears to be something congenital that predisposes PCA churches to the sins of arrogance, pride, and distancing themselves from the real world.  I'm not particularly picking on the PCA here—my own current denomination-of-choice, the Episcopal Church, has its own sins aplenty, and persists in displaying them prominently in public.  But our PCA experience was bad enough that I had been fairly determined never to set foot in a PCA church again.

Until now.  I haven't done so, but should I get the opportunity, I think I will be pleased to visit Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan.  The first chink in my armor was the Christianity Today article (linked above) on the church, the pastor, and their vision.

The Kellers stick to a few rules. They never talk about politics. Tim always preaches with a non-Christian audience in mind, not merely avoiding offense, but exploring the text to find its good news for unbelievers as well as believers. The church emphasizes excellence in music and art, to the point of paying their musicians well (though not union scale). And it calls people to love and bless the city.

The point about the musicians seems minor, but is illustrative of the way the church reaches out to the people who call New York City home.  A glowing article may be taken with a grain of salt, but we were privileged to spend an evening with a lovely young couple who are part of the city's artistic community, and they confirmed the church's positive presence in the city, from its rigorous intellectual honesty, to its respect for New York's harried businessmen and struggling artists, to its emphasis on mercy and justice for the poor.

 

---

 

Why We Need Earthquakes.  Another Christianity Today article with a new take on the old "If God is all-good and all-powerful, why is there evil?" question.  Moral evil—the bad things people do to each other—may be explained by human free will, but what about earthquakes, tsunamis, and hurricanes?  It violates no person's free will to prevent an earthquake.  As it turns out, however, it may violate the fundamental structure of our earth that is necessary for life as we know it.

While natural disasters occasionally wreak havoc, our planet needs plate tectonics to produce the biodiversity that enables complex life to flourish on earth. Without plate tectonics, earth's land would be submerged to a depth of several thousand feet. Fish might survive in such an environment, but not humans.

 

---

 

What the New Atheists Don't See.  Theodore Dalrymple, while not shy about proclaiming his own unbelief, takes on Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and others in the currently popular anti-religion movement.

Lying not far beneath the surface of all the neo-atheist books is the kind of historiography that many of us adopted in our hormone-disturbed adolescence, furious at the discovery that our parents sometimes told lies and violated their own precepts and rules. It can be summed up in Christopher Hitchens’s drumbeat in God Is Not Great: “Religion spoils everything.”

What? The Saint Matthew Passion? The Cathedral of Chartres? The emblematic religious person in these books seems to be a Glasgow Airport bomber—a type unrepresentative of Muslims, let alone communicants of the poor old Church of England. It is surely not news...that religious conflict has often been murderous and that religious people have committed hideous atrocities. But so have secularists and atheists, and though they have had less time to prove their mettle in this area, they have proved it amply. If religious belief is not synonymous with good behavior, neither is absence of belief, to put it mildly.

 

---

 

A Scientist Who Believes in God!  John Stackhouse on Francis Collins, former head of the Human Genome Project whom President Obama named to be head of the National Institutes of Health.

What makes this news is the breathtaking idea that someone could be both a scientist and a believer in God.

Like Isaac Newton. Or Johannes Kepler. Or Galileo Galilei. Or most of the other leaders of the Scientific Revolution. And a large number of scientists today.

This isn't news. What is news instead is the continuing ignorance of people who think that science and belief in God are incompatible.

 

---

 

Why Christianity Is Believable: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, and Part Four.  Challenged by Richard Dawkins' assertion that theologians don't do anything useful, Stackhouse presents his case:

What are the grounds—and by “grounds” here I’m going to mean “publicly accessible and decidable grounds”—for Christian belief (and therefore for the work of theologians)?

On the Nobel Prize system, that is.

I mean, it's bad enough they don't have anything for mathematicians.

When I was in college, my roommate's father was a chemist.  Whether he ever had a chance at a Nobel prize I never knew, but we always watched the Nobel news carefully because he certainly knew many fellow chemists who did.  In the process, I learned that there was often a signficant time lag involved, the work for which the prize was given having been done many years earlier.  When I thought about it, that made sense:  one never knows the true impact of a discovery or an action until one can look back on it from a more distant perspective.

But now we have the Nobel Peace Prize given, not for actions proved peace-promoting from the perspective of history, but to encourage actions that might, maybe, possibly, we hope will do so?

President Barack Obama won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday in a stunning decision designed to encourage his nascent initiatives to reduce nuclear arms, ease tensions with the Muslim world and replace unilateral American action with international diplomacy and cooperation.

For once, words fail me.  To his credit, I hear President Obama was surprised.  It would be greater credit if he refused the honor on the grounds that he doesn't deserve it, even if he hopes to someday.  But that may be too much to expect of any human being, let alone a politician.

If you'd told me I'd be the regular reader of a business blog, I'd have thought you crazy, but Eric Schultz is Chairman of the Board at the New England Historic Genealogical Society and once wrote a genealogy-related post that hooked me.  Hiis blog, The Occasional CEO, is about business, yes, but more about people and history and innovation and instersting ideas.  Best of all, he writes really well.  This is old news to regular readers, as I've quoted from The Occasional CEO several times.  Here, in brief, are five of his posts—spanning more than a year—from my backblog.

The Incalculable ROI

The Erie Canal was 363 miles, 83 locks, 675 feet up and down, and cost $7,143,789 to build. A calculation of the ROI [Return On Investment] on the project would show that the construction cost was paid in nine years. In 1882, when tolls were finally abolished, the canal had produced revenue of $121 million, more than four times its operating costs....But, what did the Erie Canal really do? How do we, in retrospect, measure the incalculable ROI?

 

---

 

It Turns Out You CAN Buy Happiness

[O]ne of the best predictors of happiness is a strong social network; spending money on others is the one thing sure to make us significantly happier. “Money makes you most happy if you don’t spend it on yourself”—not giving it all away, but “just reallocating as little as $5 on a given day can make a difference in happiness.”

 

---

 

The Great American Export:  English

[If you] ask the question, “What did the Americans ever do for us?”...there will likely be a strong argument that the single greatest export in American history turned out to be the English language, with an obvious and major assist from the British Empire....If you wish to land your jumbo jet at an airport, or practice any kind of international commerce, you’d best do it in English. Over 80 per cent of the world’s electronically stored information is in English and two-thirds of the world’s scientists read in English. English is an official language, or has a special status in over 75 of the world’s territories....It will be a truly bizarre day when the entire world conducts its business in English, except for the United States, where one can get by swimmingly without ever having had to learn the mother tongue.

 

---

 

Broken Pines and Stuck Bolts

Focusing hard on a stuck bolt allows us to peer 4 billion years into the future.  Driving our car into a 34-foot pine tree destroys Western Civilization.  Multitasking makes us stupid, especially behind the wheel of a car.  It’s not exactly a recipe for life, but—it does give you pause, eh?

 

 

---

 

It's Beginning to Look (A Lot Less) Like Christmas

According to our local stores, who have already put out Christmas merchandise, we're nearing that time of year when I gripe about Kwanzaa as a made-up "holiday."  This is a good reminder that while Christmas is a bona fide "holy day," commemorating an event of incalculable historical and spiritual significance, much of the American secular holiday of the same name is as contrived as Kwanzaa.

Santa...was essentially invented in the 1820s and co-opted almost immediately by the rising material tide in the early Republic. He did...help to soften the season, which was violent and drunken in post-Revolution America.  But Santa was and is part and parcel of our economic history, and has been intimately bound to our financial fortunes for two centuries.

John Pintard was a prominent NYC merchant and civic leader...and a major player in establishing Washington’s Birthday, the Fourth of July and even Columbus Day as national holidays....[F]rom 1810 to 1830 or so Pintard took the responsibility of inventing Christmas rituals to try to create the perfect-remembered holiday. He led the effort to bring St. Nicholas to America....

Learning the lesson of Napoleon and Hitler.  Never underestimate Russia.  C. S. Lewis observed that mankind tends to alternate between taking the Devil too seriously and not taking him seroiusly enough.  Without making any implications on the order of "the Great Satan" or "the Evil Empire," it's a good analogy for the way we look at other countries, whether friend or enemy.  During the Cold War, for example, our fears of Russia—especially in the 1950s—were probably exaggerated, and it's likely that now we're not sufficiently worried about how far the influence such a large country with so many resources might reach.  Here's a New York Times article on the activities of Moscow's mayor, not to provoke fear, but to make us think.  The article is a bit dated, but the ideas are not.

 

---

 

And it doesn't even mention health care.  This analysis of then president-elect Obama's upcoming challenges was written nearly a year ago.  It is left as an exercise to the reader to decide how well he is meeting them.

U.S. President George W. Bush demonstrated that the inability to understand the uses and limits of power can crush a presidency very quickly. The enormous enthusiasm of Obama's followers could conceal how he—like Bush—is governing a deeply, and nearly evenly, divided country. Obama's first test will be simple: Can he maintain the devotion of his followers while increasing his political base? Or will he believe, as Bush and Cheney did, that he can govern without concern for the other half of the country because he controls the presidency and Congress, as Bush and Cheney did in 2001? Presidents are elected by electoral votes, but they govern through public support.

 

---

 

And now for something completely different.  A long and ususual but fascinating look at changes in Austria (and the world) since the days of Kaiser Franz Josef.

First we made pets of our children; now we make children of our pets.  The title of Caleb Stegall's Against Pets might make some turn away in reflexive disgust, but it is a reasoned and worthwhile commentary on the bizarre twist our relationship with animals has taken.  How far we have come from the shepherd's down-to-earth love for his sheepdog, and from C. S. Lewis's description of the ideal earthly relationship between man and beast:  Man is no longer isolated.  We are now as we ought to be—between the angels who are our elder brothers and the beasts who are our jesters, servants and playfellows. (That Hideous Strength, chapter 17.)

 

---

 

Where have you been all my life, GK?  G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) is another one of those classic, cultural icons totally missing from my educational experience.  I guess the best thing I can say for having never met him in school is that he wasn't ruined for me, so discovering him now is a delight.  What Is America? is an essay worth reading in full, not the least because Chesterton's style does not lend itself at all to capture by excerpt.

The first principle is that nobody should be ashamed of thinking a thing funny because it is foreign; the second is that he should be ashamed of thinking it wrong because it is funny.

Oh, and the part about the U. S. asking visitors if they're anarchists, polygamists, or support the overthrow of the U. S. Government by force?  It's true.  The other day I was looking at a 1921 ship's manifest for arriving foreign passengers, and the questions are right there, just as Chesterton reports.  To his insightful analysis of the reasoning behind such questions, I would add this pragmatic consideration:  No, they weren't foolish enough to expect a terrorist to answer truthfully, but—like the "tax evasion" conviction ploy used against American gangsters—if they couldn't convict him for throwing the bomb, they might be able to deport him for lying to the immigration authorities.

 

---

 

Books:  The Original Plug-In Drug.  Everyone from parents, teachers, and librarians to corporations and the Federal Government laments that children do not read for pleasure anymore.  What little unstructured time they have is sucked up by television, video games, and computers.  How do we get children to read more? is the question of the age.  I'm here to question that question.  I'm an avid, voracious reader, and in general I side with the librarians on this one:  I'm more concerned by adults who do not read for pleasure, but realize such habits begin in childhood.  I'm certain there's causation as well as correlation between my love of reading and the fact that television did not enter my life until after my seventh birthday.

Nevertheless...I feel the need to sound a cautionary note, one probably familiar to all bibliophiles, but which I'm not hearing:  It is possible for a child to read too much.  Reading, just like video games, TV, and computers, can keep people from experiencing real life.  There were couch potatoes before there were remote controls.  When I was 16, my family took a once-in-a-lifetime car trek across the United States.  Unfortunately for me, our first stop was to visit my aunt and uncle.  My uncle was as much of a science fiction fan as I was, and he had a wonderful collection of books, a large stack of which he lent me for the trip.  I was in heaven—but spent the journey seeing more of the words on the page than the fruited plains and purple mountain majesties.

John C. Wright gets it.  SFSignal asked a group of science fiction writers what books held special memories for them.  Wright's response is at the bottom of the page, and is well worth reading in its entirety because of the commentary that accompanies his list.  But the immediate inspiration for this post was the following:

The difference between a bookish person and a non-bookish person...is that our formative thoughts, memories, and ideas, the things that shaped our character, come largely from books rather than from real-life experiences.

'Tis all too true, and should not be.  Books provide contact with reality unrestricted by time and distance, and good books can and should be part of the shaping of our character.  But never at the expense of real work, real play, and the purple mountain majesties.

"Any decent society needs to defend itself from armed aggression without becoming a society not worth defending. This is never simple to accomplish."  Jim Manzi, writing in National Review Online, makes an eloquent case against the use by the United States, or any civilized nation, of waterboarding as an interrogation technique.  Most arguments on the issue, for or against, are hardly worthy of the name because they assume what they think they're proving.  Manzi acknowledges the complexity of the issue, examines the historical record, and concludes that our current situation is not one in which the tactical advantages gained by waterboarding would offset the strategic losses.

---

The music is a little too red, don’t you think?  Although true synesthesia—the bizarre crossing of the senses that enables some people to hear colors and taste sounds—is rare, researchers have discovered that most of us have this ability to some degree.

---

Br'er Rabbit rules!  Katherine Dalton makes a poignant case for why Uncle Remus should never have fallen victim to Political Correctness.

Of all the folk and fairy tales I know, the Uncle Remus stories are rivaled only by the Brothers Grimm as a powerful and memorable expression of a people’s mind and spirit…. They are not always predictable, and often fantastic and amoral, yet they all resolve in ways that seem right because they feel culturally and humanly true.  There is something both stirring and instructive about them.

These stories are so powerful, I believe, because they express the collective experience of many authors and editors under the stress of slavery, and so capture the essence of human nature and the human condition with the heightened understanding that comes to people in difficulty.  And like the Grimm stories, these tales are not only for children and originally weren’t even principally intended for children.  They are the stories adults loved to tell each other, back when many of us were illiterate, and had much more of a culture.

Most of what we know as the Uncle Remus tales began as trickster stories in west Africa.  They were then transformed through retellings in the American South during its slave period, influenced by American Indian and European stories, and collected by a white man during Reconstruction.  The versions Joel Chandler Harris started publishing in 1879 were stories he had heard as a young man in central Georgia.

[The character of Uncle Remus is] an old family servant and former slave who tells the Brer Rabbit tales to the little son of the family.  The child’s mother is a Southerner, the father a former Union soldier, and Uncle Remus, though a strong and even imperious character, is loyal to his white family and has a strong tie to this child.  It is a frame Harris expressly constructed to help his white audience heal the wounds of war and Reconstruction.  As such it now angers some readers, and most modern versions leave it out and let Brer Rabbit take center stage alone.  Also, because the dialect is thick, it has been softened in the more recent retellings… and Uncle Remus’s occasional use of the word “nigger” has been left out as offensive.  For children these changes make sense.

But adults should read Harris’s original, to hear the stories as he heard them.  He took his work as transmitter as seriously as any ethnographer.  It is especially sad that the dialect he worked so hard to reproduce accurately is now blasted as demeaning, when to Harris’s mind it was integral to the stories themselves.  He felt the tales would be diminished by being translated out of their vernacular—and so with no training but a good ear, he recreated several black dialects of the mid-century in a way scholars today judge to be accurate.  This dialect is presented without irony or mockery.  The stories are told as a black man might have spoken them, not in blackface.