Lift Up Your Hearts!

One of Janet's friends from Japan needs as many responses as possible for a survey that will become part of her senior thesis. Please take a moment to help her out. The survey is below; you can respond in a comment, or e-mail me if you'd prefer a less public venue, and I'll send her your answers.

My own response is here, if you're interested. And here's a succinct Baldo commentary on the American Dream.

Questionnaire

 

Name:
Age:
Nationality:

 

1. Do you believe in the American dream? Why or why not?

 

 

2. What is that dream?

 

 

3. Do you personally have your own American dream?

 

 

4. Who do you think has realized the American dream in this century?

 

 

5. What contemporary films do you think express American dreams?

There's not much I can—or want to—add to the story of the latest school shooting, the tragedy in Amish country. There are a few unusual things about this event that are worth paying attention to, however. Some quotes from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review story that randomly showed up in my mailbox this morning (thanks to the Google news alert I have set for "midwife Pittsburgh") highlight some of the differences between this and your run-of-the-mill (ghastly thought) school shooting.

The Lancaster County Amish community released a statement through the state police thanking police and firefighters for controlling all the traffic -- often lethal to Amish riding in slow, black buggies -- that has clogged the rural roads around the schoolhouse this week.

They also asked to be left alone to grieve.

"Please respect our privacy. The media frenzy and the hordes of outside people have not been appreciated. We don't know or understand why this happened, but we do believe God allowed this to happen. For the rest of us, our lives will go on," the statement said.

School administrators there didn't tell the children about the shooting, preferring to let parents decide how best to break the news. (my emphasis)

The small, tight-knit Amish community will bury four of the girls today and a fifth on Friday, said Rita Rhodes, a Mennonite midwife who helped deliver two of the girls.

For the funerals, as is Amish custom, the partitions on the main floor of the families' homes will be removed and two rows of benches -- one for men and one for women -- will be placed inside. The service lasts about two hours, Rhodes said.

Rhodes said the girls' families are despondent but are being helped by family and friends.

"And it's not just that their family and friends are around. It's the faith inside themselves," she said. "Both sets of families expressed to me that they are so glad their daughter is not suffering. ... They're also very thankful that they didn't have to go through any abuse, like the man had intended to do to them. They're really, really thankful.

 

"They have forgiven the shooter, and that's amazing," she said.

From this article on a Scottish study of the health benefits of drinking cider, I learned the following critical difference between what we in the U. S. and Canada call cider and what you get if you order the drink of that name elsewhere:

What is Cider?

It is an alcoholic drink made from apples which are first crushed and then fermented. In the USA and some some parts of Canada it is known as 'hard cider' - in those parts, the term 'cider' can often mean non-alcoholic apple juice. In the rest of the English-speaking world 'cider' refers only to the alcoholic drink.

Cider usually has an alcoholic content of 5% or more. It is generally stronger than beer. The British are the greatest cider drinkers in the world. In the UK it is available in many forms, such as sweet, medium or dry.

Not to mention the fact that the writer of the article has no idea that in the United States, at least in the Northeast, real cider—unpasteurized, unfiltered, varietal—is one of the most delicious drinks in the world. "Non-alcoholic apple juice"? You might as well describe Everest as "a mountain" or Shakespeare as "a playwright." True, as far as it goes, but it misses nearly everything important.

One recent morning I suddenly realized the theme from the Addams Family television show was running through my head. What brought about this bizarre occurance I have no idea. As far as I remember, I have not heard the song in some 40 years, and I even remembered some of the lyrics.

Be that as it may, it sparked a few thoughts about the evolution of the television experience. Regardless of how macabre Charles Addams' original cartoons, or the more modern stories of the Addams Family, may have been, the 1960's television show was more funny than disturbing. And that was about as deviant as television shows got back then. If most of the shows of that era can be accused of showing life as unrealistically innocent, today's stories (be they television shows, movies, or books) depict life as unrealistically foul, freakish, and frightening. Both approaches may be in error, but I know which is more likely to promote hopeful individuals and a healthy society.

Okay, the latest airport security problem is not in the least bit funny. But sometimes you have to see the humorous side to stay sane, especially when you have loved ones planning to fly in the next few days.

All liquids and gels are presently banned from carry-on luggage at U. S. Airports. Exceptions are being made for certain medications and for pre-mixed baby formula, which will be allowed after inspection. After getting the word, parents at the Orlando International Airport (and no doubt elsewere) were frantically preparing bottles of formula and hoping they wouldn't spoil on the trip, since they couldn't bring bottled water on board.

How nice to have your baby's food with you at all times, handy, pre-mixed, with no fear of spoilage, and in a form that can't be consigned to checked baggage.

It was nice of the Transportation Security Administration to reassure us on that last point, however (emphasis mine).

Exception: Baby formula, breast milk, or juice if a baby or small child is traveling; prescription medicine with a name that matches the passenger’s ticket; and insulin and essential other non-prescription medicines

I'm guessing they're referring to expressed breast milk in a bottle...but still...it makes one think....

Tom Grosh alerted me to this October, 2003 Christianity Today interview with Yale University professor Lamin Sanneh, Sanneh's observations are especially important in light of the great division in the worldwide Anglican Communion between the Third World countries and the West, particularly the American Episcopal Church.

Sanneh was born in The Gambia of African royal descent, raised an orthodox Muslim in a highly-educated family, and became interested in Christianity through reading about Jesus in the Qur'an. He eventually became a Christian—with more hindrance than help from missionaries and Western-based churches—and contributes all this perspective to his analysis of Western Christianity and the future of Christianity in general.

Some points that particularly interested me:

• [When asked how his early life differed from that of the typical North American] It's like living on another planet. I was raised in a culture where the stress is not on the individual but on the community, on tradition, on fidelity to past models, on respect for parents and elders, on rote memorization of knowledge, on scarce material resources offset by a wealth of social capital. We had limited access to the modern world, but lavish access to family and clan achievement and honor. We had close proximity to the natural world without the demand to subdue and exploit it.


• Once the choice was made about the significance of Jesus in God's work of salvation, it was not difficult to make the decision to join the church. Getting accepted in the Protestant church, however, was a different matter altogether, thanks to the church's suspicion and skepticism....I do not know the reason for that. It could be cultural, it could be liberal distrust of religion, it could be residual hostility toward converts as illegitimate fruits of mission, it could be unfamiliarity with non-white people, it could be presumptions about my political motives and leanings, it could be any or all of the above.


• We should remember that while God and Jesus are swear words in the West, that is not so in the Muslim world. People would never take the name of God and God's prophets in vain. We need a dose of Islam's reverence to keep us honest about our own faith.


• The African members of my extended family have little conception of my world, little idea of the milieu of my life and work and the expanding network of friends and colleagues spread across the world. For many of them, the West is the land of riches, and so it appears implausible to them that anyone could be said to be successful who was not successful in the financial sense. I am often tempted to lecture them about mortgages, college tuition, about the insurance Leviathan that engulfs home, car, body, limb and teeth, about fuel and utility bills, or about Uncle Sam's long and heavy hands on our wages and our spending. An occasionally sympathetic listener might say perceptively, 'but you don't own yourself anymore,' but otherwise it is a futile exercise. The love of money is a universal desire, admittedly, but being in America turns it into a prerequisite. It trumps everything else.


• The cultural captivity of Christianity in the West is nearly complete, and, with the religion tamed, it is open season on the West's Christian heritage. But I don't believe that dismantling the West's Christian heritage will protect the West from ideological intolerance of the most damaging kind. I worry about a West without a moral center facing a politically resurgent Islam.


• [Comparing Christianity in Africa and in America] The main difference I see is the difference between a post-Christian American society and a post-Western Christianity rising in Africa and elsewhere. The one is in decline, at least intellectually, and the other is in spate.


• [On the role of Christianity in preserving indigenous life and culture] Christianity is invested in languages and cultures that existed for purposes other than Christianity, including the names by which local people call God. To that extent, Christianity has been anticipated, and to that extent, too, it has fulfilled the potential of cultures. Christianity has not so much been divided by the languages of the world as been enriched by them, and enriching them in turn. The overwhelming majority of the world's languages have a dictionary and a grammar at all because of the modern missionary movement. With such systematic documentation the affected cultures could promote themselves in unprecedented and unsuspecting ways. More people pray and worship in more languages in Christianity than in any other religion.


• At [the Anglican Communion's Lambeth Conference], and subsequently, there was widespread consternation among Western bishops that the Third World bishops seemed misguided enough to think that the Bible could replace enlightened reasonableness as a standard of guidance and Christian teaching. The unprecedented large conversions taking place in Africa and elsewhere were viewed as unwelcome resistance in the path of the West's cultural juggernaut.


• The West limits its role in the new Christianity to taking precautions against too close an encounter with it. According to many church leaders, the Anglican Church is threatened with a major schism in the foreseeable future. The extraordinary irony is that Anglicanism has never been stronger, never more appealing and more global in membership than at present. In the mystery of God, you wonder whether that energy will find other channels rather than dissipate entirely.

It is interesting how some of his comments resonate differently with me after having read Mere Discipleship. The interview closes with these challenging and encouraging words:

An extraordinary new world of Christianity is now unfolding before our eyes. It is an unprecedented world, something that will change the face of Christianity. In other words, Christianity today has never been more vibrant, more varied, more pro-active, and more widespread. The text for it might be, "Behold, I make all things new."

You didn't think our political culture could go any lower? In a reminder that we have made no forward progress since 1999, when David Howard of Washington, DC was forced to resign his city government job because he used the word "niggardly," Massachusetts' Governor Mitt Romney has apologized for referring to the disastrous Big Dig project as a "tar baby."

I tend to be overly sensitive to hurtful language. I dislike "humor" that gets its laughs from insult or mockery, and I hate it when people hurt each other and call it jest. Words spoken in anger, whether directed at me or at others, sting like a whiplash. The Bible says it well: "Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen." (Ephesians 4:29)

But today's hypersensitivity to "incorrect" speech, where people choose to be insulted where no offense could possibly have been meant or implied, is frightening. Surely most of it is based on ignorance. Not everyone's vocabulary includes the meaning and origins of the word "niggardly," and we can no longer assume that Americans know the Br'er Rabbit stories, once part of our common culture. With their origins in Africa, developed by southern African-Americans, popularized by Joel Chandler Harris (Uncle Remus stories) and Walt Disney (Song of the South), these stories should not have been lost. But Disney will not even release Song of the South on DVD for fear of controversy. Perhaps if they had, more people would have appreciated Romney's reference, which says so much more than calling the Big Dig a "sticky situation."

From someone who has heard the expression "tar baby" used as a racial slur, or who has been so hurt by the word "nigger" that "niggardly" brings pain merely by the association of sounds, an initial reaction of anger is understandable. But the apology went the wrong way. Once the context and meaning are understood, the one who misinterpreted should apologize to the one his anger wronged.

Literacy should never have to apologize to ignorance. Explain, yes. And educate. But not apologize.

In 1971 I worked with researchers at the University of Rochester who were studying the algae blooms that were making a mess of Rochester, New York's Irondequoit Bay. At the time, the limiting factor for algae growth in the lake was phosphorous, and household use of detergents containing phosphates had fueled an algal population boom. Thanks to such research, low-phosphate detergents soon became. I presume the effect on the Bay was salutory, though I graduated and lost track of the researchers.

That was 35 years ago, but apparently we are still learning the same lessons. Please take time to read the long, but worthwhile, article from the Los Angeles Times on the frightening overrowth of toxic algae and other primitive organisms in our oceans.

While doing a Google search for a friend's blog, I came upon this exchange on someone else's blog. To be fair, I know nothing about the blogger, and haven't yet taken the time to read her other posts. My reaction is based solely on her post and the subsequent comments. But it shocked me so (and the comments even more than the original post) that I'm inviting comment here—by anyone at all, but especially by those who think they know what to expect from someone calling herself, "Little Miss Reformed."

In short, while she was working in someone else's church, she came upon a plaque that offended her. Wanting to copy down the words, she took it home, at the urging of a friend, who said no one would notice. Once finished, she decided against returning the plaque to the church, on the grounds that it was "bad theology" and could endanger the soul of whoever might read it.

Eventually she said she would take the plaque back, though I don't know if she has yet nor what the consequences might have been. I'm concerned that I saw no remorse, no repentance, nothing but trying in one place to make light of her actions, and in another to paint the situation as so serious as to justify breaking the laws of God and man. One person tried to call her on that, and was promptly denounced by other commenters for being "unloving."

It would be easy for one who doesn't care about theology, or believes theologies cannot be labelled bad or good, right or wrong, to mock or denounce Little Miss Reformed. I'm not interested in that kind of comment. But I do want to know if I'm crazy, or if the world has changed so much that someone from a branch of Christianity that pales at the thought of Postmodernism or Relativism can still have so much difficulty distinguishing right from wrong.

I freely admit that not all issues are black and white, that shades of grey are important, that legalism is dangerous, and even that there are times when we "must obey God rather than man." But this one seems glaringly clear to me: Little Miss Reformed was a guest who took away, without permission, something that belonged to her hosts. Theft, plain and simple. A violation of "Thou shalt not steal" that could land her in jail if the church wanted to press charges. Not to mention unmannerly. Nor do I think much of her reasoning that she was committing the act to save someone's immortal soul, since that kind of logic is exactly what led to the tortures of the Inquisition.

Don't get me wrong. I do believe theology can be both bad and dangerous, and that words themselves (though not the particular words that bothered her) can do great harm. But this essay, and most of the comments that followed, struck me as the work of people without a moral compass, or at least one that has been badly skewed, despite their protestations to the contrary.

What do you think? Has anyone else run into this kind of fuzzy reasoning?

When Larry Summers, then President of Harvard, dared suggest that genetic differences between men and women might, in general, predispose them to greater abilities in different fields, I had no problem with that. When he was pilloried and forced to resign, I was appalled (though not surprised) at the continuing evidence that liberals aren't necessarily liberal, those who call loudest for tolerance aren't tolerant, and "academic freedom" is an oxymoron. If the presence of a Y chromosome instead of an X can make differences that are visible and obvious, to insist that it can't possibly make more subtle differences, and to forbid inquiry into the matter, is as bad as the Catholic Church in Medieval times. Worse, because I don't think the Church ever claimed to be open-minded.

Yet as fast as Harvard tried to distance itself from Summers' heresy, there are more serious worms in its own apple.

Ben Barres is an M.D./Ph.D. professor of neurobiology at Stanford University. What makes his comments on sexual discrimination in science and academia especially insightful is that until 10 years ago, he was Barbara Barres. As a man, he suddenly found himself receiving much more respect than he had as a woman, at least among people who don't know his history. Even in such a hotbed of liberalism as Cambridge, Massachusetts, both MIT and Harvard failed the test. When Barbara was the only person in a class full of men to solve a difficult math problem, her professor suggested that her boyfriend had solved it for her. At Harvard the situation was even more interesting, because Barbara became Ben in the middle of her/his graduate studies. One faculty member (who apparently knew neither Barbara nor Ben very well) remarked, "Ben Barres gave such a great seminar today, but then his work is much better than his sister's.

It matters not a bit to me if there are differences between groups of people considered en masse, because everyone deserves to be treated as an individual. Insurance companies have some justification for considering a person in terms of his inclusion in broad classes (male, Asian, non-smoker, overweight, etc.) because that is what makes insurance work. The rest of us have no excuse, and the educational system especially; from preschool to Harvard, should be looking at individuals, not stereotypes.

The sad thing is, I'm not surprised.

During the 18 months we lived near Boston we heard a lot about the Big Dig, experienced plenty of inconvenience thanks to the Big Dig, and heard much political grumbling about cost overruns, delays, and incompetence. We didn't actually see much work being done on the project, however, and it was hard not to wonder if there was some politcal/union stranglehold on the project. Accustomed as we were to Florida roads projects, in which a "crew working" sign is usually followed by a crew working—day, night, weekends, holidays, whatever it takes to get the job done—it was shocking to see the massive construction project lying fallow so much of the time. But apparently such lack of haste did not reflect a commitment to doing the job right.

Will yesterday's partial collapse, in which a concrete slab fell from a tunnel roof onto a hapless motorist, finally cause someone to examine the entire political system that bred such tragedy? It's only the latest in a decades-long series of problems, so I doubt it.

Which is too bad. I fell in love with Boston, and Massachusetts in general, during our stay. There is much about that part of the country that I miss terribly. But the Big Debacle seems only to be a sign, not an abberation. The rest of the country—Massachusetts included—mocks Florida's politics and its voting problems, but as one who has lived and voted in both places, I can say without a doubt that democracy is alive and well in Florida, while the political process in Massachusetts sometimes felt like a tunnel with a crumbling roof.

A 62-year-old British woman is being called selfish, ridiculous, irresponsible, and unnatural because of the recent birth of her son, who was conceived through in vitro fertilization with a her husband's sperm and a donated egg. I have serious problems with the extremes to which many people are resorting to combat infertility, but age has nothing to do with it. A post-menopausal woman who uses unnatural means to conceive a child is no more absurd than an older man with a Viagra prescription.

This Memorial Day I honor my grandfathers, who served our country in World War I.

Howard Harland Langdon, 219th Aero Squadron

George Cunningham Smith, Sr., 5th Engineers, Co. B

Click here for a previous tribute.

I like to check out Google News every morning, and I'm especially interested in their Health section. Today there were two headlines that caught my attention, and each turned out to be totally misleading.

Flying does not cause blood clots, say experts

Do you feel safer now, as you prepare for your long flight? Do you think you can relax, forget about periodically wiggling your toes, stretching your feet, and disturbing your seatmates so you can get up and walk around? Not so fast! What the article says is that low cabin pressure and reduced oxygen do not increase the risk of blood clots. The damage is done by reduced circulation caused by long periods of inactivity, whether on plane, train, bus, or car. Although the article does not address this issue, I'm guessing sitting at a desk all day isn't a good situation, either.

Considering the relative leg room offered by the other modes of transportation, it's not surprising that the problem appears more often among those who fly. To give the casual reader the impression that he's safe from bloodclots on a long flight is misleading and dangerous.

Nonsmoking Men, Women Face Same Lung Cancer Death Risk

Same as whom? The point of the article is that among nonsmokers, women face no greater risk of lung cancer than men. But the impression I received from the headline itself was that nonsmokers face the same lung cancer risk as smokers, a truly startling (and untrue) finding.

Thomas Edison said that genius is 5% inspiration and 95% perspiration. Anders Ericsson, a psychology professor at Florida State University, would agree. His studies of what makes someone really good at something are discussed in the May 7, 2006 New York Times column, A Star Is Made, by Freakonomics authors Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt. (The New York Times requires registration before you can read their content, but it's free and worth the effort.)

What Ericcsson concludes is that talent is overrated; what really makes the difference for success—in any field, from art to sport, from finances to computer programming—is hard work and deliberate practice. Here are some quotes to whet your appetite (and maybe make it worth your while to go to the effort of getting to the article):

Here is more information on the subject from the Freakonomics website.