Lift Up Your Hearts!

 Healing through Exercise:  Scientifically-Proven Ways to Prevent and Overcome Illness and Lengthen Your Life, by Jörg Blech  (Da Capo Press, 2009)  Originally published as Heilen mit Bewergung (S. Fischer Verlag, 2009)

We all know exercise is good for us, right?  So who needs yet another book telling us so?

Knowing what we should be doing is one thing, but actually doing it is another, and Healing through Exercise provides motivation in spades.

Beware the cure that is marketed as a panacea, we are told:  if it claims to fix all ills, it’s probably a fraud.  That’s sound advice, but Jörg Blech makes a convincing case that simple, regular exercise is as close to a cure-all as we’ll ever find.  Whether the issue is heart disease, diabetes, osteoporosis, cholesterol, hypertension, Alzheimer’s disease, back pain, cancer, impotence, ADHD, depression, brain development, immune system health, stress overload, or “old age,” moderate, regular exercise is essential—and in some cases even sufficient—for preventing illness and restoring health.  We’re more familiar with the preventative side, but Blech cites study after study showing how exercise can even reverse existing damage.  It’s never too late to take advantage of the benefits of exercise.  (Note to self:  this should be incentive to get started at any age, but never an excuse for procrastination.)

The specific studies and amazing results showing the power of exercise to heal are too numerous to detail, although as usual I’ve provided some teasers below.  I highly recommend that everyone find and read a copy of this book, especially if you are young, old, middle-aged, or have children.

The bottom line?  Get moving!  It’s critically important, the best thing you can do for your physical and mental health.  Get your children moving!  It’s essential for the development of their brains as well as their bodies.  It doesn’t need to be onerous.  Thirty minutes of moderate exercise (such as brisk walking, jogging, or bicycling) five times per week seems to be the threshold at which all sorts of wonderful effects begin.  Make that 60 minutes, and throw in some light strength training a couple of days per week, and you will be giving your body and mind a real treat.  Furthermore, the effect is cumulative, so every little bit of action you add to your day will make a difference.

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According to the evolutionary biologists, we have to rethink the old view of exercise:  movement is by no means just a useful added way to improve our health.  In fact, it is absolutely necessary for the human body to work normally.

You can debate all day about the value of an evolutionary perspective, but whether you say “evolved” or “designed,” we surely weren’t meant to spend most of our days sitting.

In the United States, children grow up in a world that leaves no time and no room for physical activities.  For most of the baby boomers, it was common either to walk or to ride a bicycle to school.  In these days, kids are moved around in minivans, and teachers have a hard time advocating walking days.  Once in school, students will rarely be challenged physically because many school systems struggle to finance a physical education program worthy of the name.  At recess, video games and other gadgets have taken the role balls and skipping ropes used to occupy.  The idle members of generation XXL spend their youths indoors, and they would rather travel online than by foot.  Granted that some ten-year-olds design impressive Web pages, but many have difficulties climbing, jumping, or pitching a ball.

The abandonment of exercise is a global trend affecting not only kids growing up in American suburbia but also youngsters living in walkable areas of Europe.  Wilhelm Nieblung has a doctor’s office in the idyllic Black Forest.  As he puts it:  “Many children in our town are not able to balance backwards.”

In [the] early years, while the brain downsizes and develops at the same time, it is extremely important that a child has sufficient physical exercise.  Good coordination of the body helps to preserve nerve cells in the brain and promotes their wiring to each other.  Evidence indicates children need a certain minimum amount of exercise to develop a brain malleable or plastic enough to adapt to ever-changing environments.

Children can develop their mental abilities properly only if they do enough running, jumping, and physical playing as well.  Motor and cognitive skills develop in unison and stimulate each other within the brain.  Researchers in the field of neuroanatomy at the University of Bielefeld sum up what that means for parents, children, and teachers:  “Learning needs movement.”

If we train our motor abilities by exercising, at the same time we strengthen regions of the brain that are important for paying attention and other cognitive capabilities.  Playing sports makes us smarter, and all children can benefit from this effect.

Physical activity not only enriches chemistry in the gray matter; it also alters the structure of the brain.  First, exercise promotes the production of new nerve cells in the hippocampus….  Second, exercise creates new synapses, thereby establishing and maintaining the vast network of connected nerve cells in the brain.

The brain of an active creature produces especially high numbers of nerve cells that can be used to process … new stimuli.  The new cells mature into fully functioning neurons when they are challenged with new tasks.  In the absence of such challenges, it is thought, a big portion of the new nerve cells die before long.  And in the absence of physical activity, the production of new nerve cells largely ceases.

Alzheimer’s is a disease that strikes with age….  Besides age, there are other risk factors.  It may not be a good omen when family members have suffered from Alzheimer’s because that suggests a genetic predisposition to it.....  These factors are hard to change … but there is another way to postpone the onset of the disease or to prevent it altogether:  activities such as brisk walking or bicycle riding….  Older men aged 71 to 93 who walk at least two miles every day cut the risk of Alzheimer’s in half, compared to people the same age who walk only a quarter of a mile per day.

William E. Kraus at the Duke University Medical Center has found that a certain type of exercise is especially good at keeping lipoproteins in check:  longer spells of moderate exercise seem to be more beneficial than shorter, more intensive workouts.

Exercise is … a proven and reliable remedy for people with hypertension, although this is not widely appreciated.  [F]requently the treating doctors are to blame, says Hans-Georg Predel of the Sports University in Cologne, Germany.  He has made the sobering observation that physicians “often don’t consider the effectiveness of an intervention without drugs and that they lack a sufficient expertise in prescribing lifestyle changes.”

If you, like me, have been subjected to regular bone-density (DEXA) scans since reaching a certain age, you will be interested to note that some countries—Germany is one—no longer pay for the procedure on the grounds that bone density measurements have been shown to be useless for preventing broken bones in the elderly.  So have drugs prescribed for osteoporosis.  What does help?  Exercise.

Time and again, trials of menopausal women have confirmed that moderate aerobic and strength training make the spine stronger.  And in order to reduce hip fractures, walking seems to be the best medicine.

Although exercise is one of the most potent and effective remedies in existence, it plays only a small role in medical-school training.  For this reason, American doctors rarely recommend exercise.  Even though some doctors do prescribe exercise, physicians can make a much greater profit with drugs and operations.  Faith in the power of medicine is another reason why people tend to underestimate the value of exercise.  The number of back surgeries has increased dramatically in recent years, while pills for high blood pressure and drugs to lower cholesterol have sales in the billions of dollars.  This fuels the medical industry and might meet the expectations of many patients, but it still amounts to nothing more than tinkering with the symptoms.

Even when doctors are willing to use the new science of healing through exercise, they often find that patients would prefer an invasive procedure and drug regimen, rather than the supposedly silly advice of bicycling 30 minutes a day.

The sun is shining, the air is cool, and I need to go for a walk.  See ya!

 No More Christian Nice Girl, by Paul Coughlin and Jennifer D. Degler (Bethany House, 2010)

No More Christian Nice Girl?  Yuck.

Don’t judge a book by its cover—or title—I told myself; there must have been a reason why I accepted this book from the publisher for review.

Flip to a random chapter.  Yeech.  If the title made me gag, this chapter nearly made me lose my dinner.  Well, accepting the book is a promise to review it, which implies I must read it.

I didn’t care much for the beginning, either, but fortunately, it got better.  I don’t like the authors’ style, so it helped to separate that from the content.  They do have some good points to make.

Foremost is the idea that even in the 21^st century too many women have bought into the idea that they must be “sugar and spice and everything nice”—and for Christian women, this is often exacerbated by the messages they receive from their churches.  However, being “nice,” as opposed to being good, turns us into unhappy, frustrated doormats who try to please everyone, do other people’s work for them, injure our own families by never being able to say “no” to others, and generally end up doing more harm than good in the process.  What’s more, we lose rather than gain respect and appreciation for all our efforts.

The authors make the point that “gentle Jesus, meek and mild” is not precisely the Jesus presented in the Bible, and that by glossing over passages that show his righteous anger, hard words, and assertive actions, we give ourselves an inaccurate model to follow when considering, “What would Jesus do?”

Even though I, myself, have some of the problems the authors delineate, I was not inspired by this book.  I’d like to see the same topic dealt with in a way that feels less condescending.  But that may be just me; I’m sure there are many “Christian Nice Girls” whose fractured and stressful lives could benefit from the wisdom the authors present.

Here are some things I did like:

Before looking at how God created most women, a quick caveat:  The research findings presented are for the majority of women.  Some women’s brains are wired more like the typical man’s brain, and the reverse is true of men as well.  Having “majority wiring” is not better or more pleasing to God than “minority wiring.”  Both types of wiring are valuable and useful to God, whether they are found in women or men.

I appreciated this.  I’m tired of books that say “women are like this,” or “women want that”—such as the Eldredges’ Wild at Heart and Captivating—when as far as I’m concerned they miss the boat completely.

The sugar-and-spice expectations start in infancy when baby girls are dressed in ruffles, pastels, and bows while boys are dressed in brighter colors and sports-oriented clothing.   Adults treat girl babies more gently than boy babies, even though girl babies are physiologically heartier and stronger.  Parents provide dolls to daughters and trucks and sports toys to sons, and reward play behavior that is gender stereotyped.  Across the world, girls spend more time doing household chores and helping with child care, while boys spend more time in unsupervised play.  It’s true that girls may prefer to play “relationally” with toys, and may want to be helpful given their empathetic wiring, but when Christian parents, often unknowingly, send solely the message “girls should be nice and helpful and boys should be active and independent,” they are hemming in their children and making it more difficult for girls and boys to grow into the full 360-degree image of Christ.

Still?  After all these  years?  Apparently so.

Some churches don’t allow women to be involved in any form of leadership, unless it’s singing on the worship team or teaching children.  This means that the important insights and contributions available from women’s god-given, intuitive, empathetic minds are undervalued, unheard, and unheeded.  In other churches, where women are encouraged to be more assertive and expressive, it’s often highly compartmentalized.  Being animated and spirited is okay—but only during worship.  It’s good to be courageous—when sharing the gospel.  It’s right to be firm—when disciplining your children. … And when women are allowed to lead, some are trained that when it comes to a disagreement, men win by virtue of gender, not accuracy.

Christian Nice Girls tend to minimize their negative experiences by saying, “What happened to me wasn’t that bad.  Other people have had it worse.”  Yes, perhaps other people have had it worse, but that doesn’t mean that what happened to you should be ignored or judged as unworthy of examination.  You have to look for what’s perpetuating a problem before you can fix it.

What are people learning from their relationship experiences with you? Firmly speaking the truth in love and maintaining healthy boundaries in relationships will teach most people to treat you respectfully.  However, not everyone is teachable, and ultimately, you aren’t responsible for how people accept your truth spoken with love and grace. ... If someone is not teachable, you will completely waste your time and energy if you try to teach them what they aren’t interested in learning or changing. … [P]ray for them, get out of the way, and let God get to them.  He will orchestrate life lessons that will teach them what they need to know.

Most people grow up watching mothers pick up after their children, finish the last of the dishes, etc.  Women like to help, and it is hard to stop this rescuing behavior in the workplace.  But it’s a big mistake to rescue incompetent co-workers by doing their work for them.  Everyone needs a helping hand now and again, but there is a difference between giving someone a helping hand and enabling them to be a perpetual slacker.

Women bond by sharing the intimate details of their lives….  Because of their strong need for approval, Christian Nice Girls share more than is necessary or wise to connect with others.  This can come back to haunt them….

You have to set limits with [some] people, or they will tend to take increasingly large amounts of the energy, time, money, and talent God gave you to accomplish his purposes.

For Christian Nice Girls with anxious parents, the message transmitted was “Life is to be feared.”  This type of caretaker hovers like a search-and-rescue helicopter, transmitting fear and overprotecting children by:

• Not allowing them to regularly go outside and play in a reasonably safe neighborhood, but watching them like a hawk when they are allowed outside, which thwarts their play.
• Setting limits that would only be appropriate for a much younger child on how far they can ride their bikes or walk with friends.
• Overreacting to and overanalyzing normal childhood developmental challenges or minor injuries.
• Painting a verbally frightening picture of the world by continually pointing out any possible dangers, however remote or unlikely.
• Performing tasks that they could do themselves … which reinforces beliefs of inferiority and powerlessness.
• Intruding into and trying to control all aspects of their children’s free time, relationships, and jobs.
• Constantly calling them on their cell phone … just to “see how they’re doing.”
• Making all of their children’s decisions.
• Rescuing their children from any mistakes and not allowing them to suffer any negative consequences.

Needless to say, this is as important for boys as for girls. It could have come straight out of Free-Range Kids.

God takes the sin of cowardice very seriously.  Revelation 21:8 states, “The cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars—their place will be in the fiery lake of burning sulfur.”  Cowardice is included among the worst temptations you can give in to.

Ouch.

Temple Grandin (HBO, NR)

Why are you reading this post when you could be rushing to your nearest video store (is that phrase as passé as "dialing a phone number"?) and grabbing a copy of Temple Grandin?  It would be trite to say that this is one of the most amazing and inspiring movies I have ever seen, though it is.  It would be understatement to say that Temple Grandin is an incredibly amazing and inspiring person.

"Highly functioning autistic" doesn't begin to describe this brilliant visual thinker—and university professor—whose humane designs have revolutionized livestock handling.  My introduction to Temple Grandin was through her TED lecture, The World Needs All Kinds of Minds.  That's a good place to start, but don't miss the movie.  (As far as I can recall it is completely grandchild safe.)

Normally I don't care for the DVD special features that make you watch the entire movie again to hear the commentary; I love learning about how the movie was made, but prefer it in condensed form.  Here it's well worthwhile taking the extra time, because unlike many DVD commentaries, there's very little inanity—and most of all because one of the commentators is Temple Grandin herself.

It was a little disconcerting to note how well I understood some of her problems; enough so that I took this autism spectrum self-test I found in Wired.  The results were as I suspected:  I'm not close to the diagnostic level, but well above average.

I'm looking forward to reading some of Grandin's books, having ordered The Way I See It: A Personal Look at Autism and Asperger's, and Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals from our library.

Stella Sung: The Phoenix Rising
Chausson: Poème
Tchaikovsky: Romeo & Juliet
Vaughan Williams: The Lark Ascending
Stravinsky: The Firebird

This concert was pure pleasure.  Five gorgeous works, two new and three old favorites.  Plus I found a new and much easier way home. 

Ready for Anything:  52 Productivity Principles for Work and Life, by David Allen (Viking Penguin, 2003)

Having been so impressed by the ideas, if not the writing, of Allen's Getting Things Done, I was eager to read more.  His latest book, Making It All Work, isn't yet available at our library, so I grabbed Ready for Anything.

As I began reading, I thought this would be a short review because there wasn't much new, that the book would be valuable as inspiration (very important!) but wouldn't add much to what I'm already working on.  Now that I've finished, however, I know that this will be a short review because there is too much here, that there is much benefit I could reap by buying the book and taking time to work through the ideas and exercises.  I'm not ready, as I'm still in the early stages of implementing the Getting Things Done ideas, but it will be a worthwhile later step.

Allen's New Age spiritual inclinations show more in Ready for Anything than in the previous book, but they're easy enough to ignore if you're alert to them, and don't detract significantly from his useful ideas.  As with anything, take what's good and true and helpful, and leave the rest.

These quotes don't begin to cover Allen's ideas, but they're a taste.  I have one more, but it merits its own post.

I just spent all morning pruning my large pine tree.  It felt great…  But it wasn’t on a list.  This morning it just seemed like the thing to do.

If I didn’t have the lists I have, and if I hadn’t done a thorough review of them within the last few days, I wouldn’t have been able to trust that my inventory of “defined work” was complete and current this morning.  And that it could wait.  Without that conscious self-renegotiation process, there would be at least a slight gnawing sense of anxiety that there were shoulds lurking in the shadows that could attack me at any moment! And what’s the best (temporary) relief and (false) protection from the unseen and ugly shoulds?  Get busy.

Without my lists, I would probably still have pruned my pine tree this morning—but for all the wrong reasons.

[I]t’s easy to create fancy systems in concept, software, and seminars, [but] how will they work when you have the flu and feel awful?  Real systems must be solid enough to hold up in the toughest reality—when we least feel like maintaining them.

Rules tend to show up because principles are not clear or trusted.  When you know that people have bought into standards, you can give them freedom for decisions and behaviors.  If this alignment doesn’t exist, you must micromanage with regulations, expending much more energy in the long run.

I contend that a competitive edge, personal and organizational, is maintained by one’s ability to deal with surprise.  It’s when the pressures of unexpected change challenge the systems and behaviors that excellence is really demonstrated.

Uh oh.  I’m in deep trouble.

Your power is proportional to your ability to relax….  Find out what’s stressing you, and deal with it—now—if you want to be truly effective on all levels at once.  Being relaxed and capable of focusing on what’s at hand, when it’s at hand, without over- or underreacting, is a master skill.

Ahem.  New Year’s Resolution #3.

What do you not have time to do—something that might feel like a waste of time—but you know that it’s time to do?  Walk in the garden?  Have dinner with a friend?  Take your team off site just to hang out together?  Play laser guns with your kids?  Walk away from the canvas, until you can’t help taking up the brush again?

Relax.  You have to put in the clutch to shift gears.  You have to let go to reengage at another, more high-leveraged ration.  When you least feel like slowing down my be the most critical time to do it.

The Sabbath was made for man…. (Mark 2:27)

Small things, done consistently, create major impact.  Real change occurs not with a flash in the pan but with steady engagement at some new level of interaction….  What’s tricky is that it takes an equally small amount of consistent negative behaviors to create significant unwanted consequences.  Habitual self-degrading self-talk, though seemingly minor in the moment, reinforces lowered self-esteem and performance overall.  Little stuff, unchecked, can create some of the worst problems.

Aim for success, not perfection.  Never give up your right to be wrong, because then you will lose the ability to learn new things and move forward with your life.  Remember that fear always lurks behind perfectionism.  Confronting your fears and allowing yourself the right to be human can, paradoxically, make you a far happier and more productive person. – Dr. David M. Burns.

Introverts in the Church: Finding Our Place in an Extroverted Culture, by Adam S. McHugh (IVP Books, 2009)

This isn't actually a review—yet.  But this is clearly a book I need to read, so I've ordered it from the library despite my already intimidating "to read" list.

Adam McHugh was interviewed in the most recent Mars Hill Audio Journal, and I was hooked immediately.  (Something like this happens every time I think about letting my Mars Hill subscription lapse.)

McHugh tells the story of one little girl who was astonished when mother commented that she was being awfully quiet—because it was anything but quiet in her own mind.

Introverts have constant activity going on in their heads; neurological studies have shown that the brains of introverts actually show more blood flow, more activity, than the brains of extroverts; this, it is speculated, is why they need less external stimulation.  IN fact, they need solitude in order to be able to deal with all that neurological action, and if they don't get it, their brain chemistry becomes imbalanced.

So.  Li'l Writer Guy is not my own invention, but the normal manifestation of an introverted brain.

Another reason I was intrigued by this particular book was the author's view that the Church marginalizes introverts, making them feel unwanted, ungifted, and inferior—and in the process missing out on the particular gifts introverts have to bring to the Body of Christ.  The reason, McHugh explains, is that most American churches, like our society in general, are run by extroverts and promote a culture of extroversion.  I suspect I'll agree with him when I read the book, but I'm almost certain my son-in-law, the extrovert, will strongly disagree.  Perhaps it is the endpoints that are marginalized, and feel that society is bent towards the other extreme—the way my liberal friends see a strong conservative bias to the news media, when it is so obviously the other way around.  :)

McHugh has a website, Introverted Church, which I've only begun to investigate.  I think it's going to be fun, and maybe helpful.  I've already found a number of Yes! moments, such as this comment in a discussion about introverts in communal cultures.

[L]iving in West and Central Africa as an introvert was very hard. My housemate (also an introvert) and I basically took turns dealing with the streams of people. Having a housemate also took care of some other introvert pitfalls, like the fact that it was considered horrible that someone should be alone while they were sick. The cultural norm was that your friends should come sit by your bedside. Our African friends assumed that my housemate was doing that for me, when what she was *really* doing was letting me have alone time.

While it's nice to have someone around to help out when one is sick, having someone constantly by my bedside would definitely impede my recovery.

Have any of you read McHugh's book?  What are your thoughts?

Non Campus Mentis:  World History According to College Students, compiled by Anders Henriksson (Workman Publishing, New York, 2001) (Later retitled Ignorance Is Blitz)

This compilation of major historical events was pieced together from the essays and exams of students at a variety of colleges in the United States and Canada.  If you know a reasonable amount of world history and geography, you will find it hysterical, at least till you get to the quiz in the back of the book.

It would be a good book to read aloud at a party, although you would miss some pretty funny misspellings.  Reading it aloud in the car, however, as we did, would be unwise:  If you think texting puts the driver at a disadvantage, you should see what happens when he's doubled over with hysterical laughter.

Here are some excerpts, in roughly historical order, for your enjoyment.

Zorroastrologism was founded by Zorro.  This was a duelist religion.

The history of the Jewish people begins with Abraham, Issac, and their twelve children.  Judyism was the first monolithic religion.  It had one big God named "Yahoo."

Moses was told by Jesus Christ to lead the people out of Egypt into the Sahaira Desert.  The Book of Exodus describes this trip and the amazing things that happened on it, including the Ten Commandments, various special effects, and the building of the Suez Canal.  Forty centuries later they arrived in Canada.  This was the promise land of milk and chocolate.

Pythagasaurus fathered the triangle.

Augustus (a.k.a.Octagenarian) founded the Roman Catholic Empire.

When they finally got to Italy, the Australian Goths were tired of plungering and needed to rest.  Italy was ruled by the Visible Goths, while France and Spain were ruled by the Invisible Goths.

During the Middle Ages everyone was middle aged. ... Power belonged to a patriarchy empowering all genders except the female.  Nuns, for example, were generally women.

In a Romanesque church the stone roof is held up by a system of peers.  The usual design was a long knave split by a crosshair.  Without the discovery of the flying buttock it would have been an impossible job to build the Gothic cathedral.

Finally, Europe caught the Black Death.  The bubonic plague is a social disease in the sense that it can be transmitted by intercourse and other etceteras.  It was spread from port to port by inflected rats.  ... Victims of the Black Death grew boobs on their necks. ... Death rates exceeded one hundred percent in some towns. ... The plague also helped the emergance of English as the national language of England, France, and Italy.

Ferdinand and Isabella conquered Granola, a part of Spain now known as Mexico and the Gulf States.

Calvin was born a generation after Luther and is seen as one of Luther's greatest predecessors.  He accepted all Luther's ideas except that of birth.  Calvinists were the only ones who believeed in pre-detonation.  It is not surprising that their preaching consisted mainly of dogmatic explosions.

The Popes, of course, were usually Catholic.

Henvry VIII survived an assault from the Papal bull.

The Thirty Years War began with the Defecation of Prague. ... Prague was the capitol of Bulemia.

These good times ended when England suffered Civil War between the Musketeers and the Round Ones.  Oliver Cromwell solved this and other problems by removing prominent things from people who disagreed with him.

Next time you hear Porter shout, Queen of Hearts-like, "Off with their prominent things!" you will know why.

East of the back of the beyond were the Russians, who knew nothing at all during this period.  A factor in this was their use of the Kinetic alphabet. ... Russian nobles wore clothes only to humour Peter the Great.  Peter filled his cabinet with accidental people and built a new capital near the European boarder. ... Catherine the Great rose to power only because her husband had been murdered by his clothiers for failure to incubate.

Americans, of course, wanted no involvement in the French and Indian War because they did not want to fight in India.  ...  The Boston Tea Party was held at Pearl Harbor.  The Quebec Act was an Intolerable Act becaude it would have required Americans to learn French in School. ...  Benjamin Franklin, already famous as inventor of the light bulb, persuaded French King George III to help the USA.

Another problem was that France was full of French people.  Dickens made this point in The Tail of Two Sisters, which he required us to read.

An example of the importance of women during the industrial revolution was the work of Spinning Jenny, a young girl forced to work more than 40 hours a day.

Another man to influence the state and others was Karl Marx, who advanced his theory of dialectical maternalism. ... According to Marx the stages of history are canabalism, slavery, fuedalism, capitalism, and back to canabalism.  These are the moods of production.

Nearly everybody breathed a sigh of relief when the Communists were able to restore chaos.

When the Davy Jones Index crashed in 929 many people were left to political incineration.  Some, like John Paul Sart, retreated into extraterrestrialism. ... The New Deal was an idea inspired by President Franklin Eleanor Roosavelt.

Stalin, Rosevelt, Churchill, and Truman were known as the "Big Three."

John F. Kennedy worked closely with the Russians to solve the Canadian Missile Crisis.

Mohammed Gandi...was the last British ruler of India.

[T]he fall of empires has been a good thing, because it gives more people a chance to exploit their own people without outside interference.

The Civil Rights movement in the USA turned around the corner with Martin Luther Junior's famous "If I Had a Hammer" speech.

East and West made mends with each other. The Berlin Mall was removed. 

Free-Range Kids:  Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry, by Lenore Skenazy (Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 2009)
Paperback subtitle:  How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children (Without Going Nuts with Worry)

I've been following (and blogging about) Free-Range Kids for quite a while now, so it's about time I finally read the book.  First off, in case you don't bother to read the rest of this post:  Get a hold of a copy of this book and read it.  If you are tempted to dismiss the free-range movement as crazy, irresponsible parenting, this will reassure you.  If you're already sold on this idea, it will open your eyes to how we got to the point of needing it.

Being so familiar with the Free-Range Kids blog, and even having made some contributions myself, I thought I knew what to expect from the book.  Boy was I wrong.

I was shocked.

It was a revelation nearly as great as the one I had seven years ago, when I discovered the sea change that had taken place in childbirth practices since our children were born.

Lenore Skenazy, dubbed "America's Worst Mom" (google it) and made the center of a media storm for daring to let her New York City-bred, public transit-savvy, nine-year-old son take a trip on the subway by himself; Lenore Skenazy, Ms. Free-Range Kids herself, is ...

Tame.

Tame.  There's no other word for it.  That someone as mild and safety-conscious as Skenazy is considered dangerously revolutionary shows just how much has changed in the last 30 years.  She sings the praises of car seats, never suggesting that, for example, Pennsylvania's laws requiring them for children up to eight years old borders on the ridiculous.  She wouldn't hear of letting a kid ride a bike without a helmet.  She trusts government studies and mainstream medical associations like the American Academy of Pediatrics, never questioning the back-to-sleep campaign, nor the current childhood vaccination schedule.  I'm not saying she's necessarily wrong (though I certainly don't always agree), but she's hardly radical.

Here's an example of what she's fighting, where she stands, and a scenario many would call crazy (though I call it wonderful).  Let's begin with her description of the Lou and Lou Safety Patrol videos available online from Playhouse Disney.

The Lous are a brother and sister of maybe three or four years old who call themselves the "Safety Patrol."  They spring into action when their six- or sevenish sister actually wants to make their dad breakfast for his birthday.

"Not so fast!" squeak the safety-loving sibs as their sister tries to cook some eggs.  "Never touch a pot or pan on the stove.  Let a grown-up."  They plunk an orange safety cone in front of the stove to keep her away.

Undaunted, the sister drifts down the counter and reaches for a knife.  "You have a safety violation!" chime her bad cop-bad cop siblings.  "You should always stay away from sharp knives and let a grown-up help if you need to slice something."

Skenazy's response?

Now, I'm not saying that six-year-olds make the ideal short-order chefs and let's let 'em loose near the french-fry vat.  But the constant refrain of "Get a grown-up!  Let a grown-up!" reinforces the whole idea that, rather than trying to learn any kind of real-world skill, kids should sit back and leave it all up to the adults."

Of course, she's right, and apparently it needs to be said.  But contrast this with a scene I observed on a recent visit with our daughter's family.

Our granddaughter, barely two years old, is helping cut vegetables for an omelet.  With her small paring knife, she hacks contentedly at a mushroom while Mom works on the rest of breakfast.  She has been begging for months to be allowed to do this job, and her mother has recently decided she has the coordination to begin her apprenticeship.  At her current skill level—about 10 minutes per mushroom—her contributions are small, but her brothers, ages four and six, began at the same age and are now safe, effective, and  enthusiastic vegetable choppers.  And stove users.  (Not to mention that the six-year-old is a dab hand with an electric drill, but that's another story.)

Now that might be considered radical—but 40 years ago I babysat a couple of British boys, ages three and five, who fixed their own dinner, including heating vegetables on the stove.  I wonder what their parents thought about their American neighbors' kids—and vice versa.

Read the book, and you'll get a glimpse of what children are up against these days.  Read about the sixth grader, assigned to design and execute a "free-range" project.  Feel her fear of the strangers on the sidewalk as she walks solo to the grocery store (half a mile away from home) for the first time in her life, and feel her humiliation when one of them asks, "Where is your mommy, young lady?"  Sixth grade.  Since Skenazy neglects to mention that this was a six-year-old prodigy, I assume the girl walking without her mommy was at least 11 years of age.

Or consider this report, written by another girl from the same middle school class.  She had taken her dog to the vet, where at first she was merely ignored.

"Good morning," Emma said and the vet turned sharply around.

"Hi. Where is your mommy, little girl?"  Her sharp voice echoed against the green walls.  A little surprised by the vet's tone, Emma answered that her mom was at work.  The vet looked troubled.  "Do you have your mom's phone number with you?  I might have to give her a call."  She quickly dialed the given number.  "Hi!  This is Dr. S.  Your daughter is here.  Can I actually give her instructions?"

In the end, the vet wrote a page of doggie dos and don'ts and handed it to Emma.  "Oh wait!"  The vet snatched the letter back.  "Can you read?"

I could quote pages and pages of this kind of story.  But I won't.  You'll enjoy them much more if you read the book, because Skenazy is the kind of writer I want to be.  She writes well, she writes seriously—and at the same time she's so funny I'd have enjoyed the book even if I didn't agree with the premise.  I know that, because I still laughed in the sections were I disagree vehemently with what she says.

Read about how DVD's of the original Sesame Street shows are labelled "intended for adults"—because they "model the wrong behavior," e.g. "Alistair Cookie" with his pipe, children playing in a vacant lot, a girl riding her tricycle without a helmet.  Take a look at how television (news and other programming) begat and nurtured a culture of fear and a totally skewed view of what's dangerous in our lives—and what's not.

TV historian [Robert] Thompson [says], "I don't think there's a single episode of Law and Order that could have even been shown before 1981."  That's because, until then, [its] graphic images were taboo.  In fact, they were the stuff of porn.

[O]nce we see horrific images, only half of our brain takes the time to say, "Wow.  That makeup person did an incredible job with those puncture wounds." ... The other half of our brain just takes in those gruesome images wholesale and files them under "Sick World, comma, What we live in."

In his book The Science of Fear, Daniel Gardner explains that once an image gets into [the] "reptilian" part of the brain, not only can you not shake it, you also can't extricate it from all the other images and feelings jostling around in there, either.  After all, it's only been the last hundred years or so that the brain has started seeing realistic-looking images (TV, movies) that weren't directly applicable to its fate (lions, spears).  So it hasn't figured out yet how to separaae the real form the manufactured.

Thanks to the news media, we have absorbed a completely false view of the chances a child will be abducted and murdered by a stranger.

According to Warwick Cairns, who wrote the book How to Live Dangerously:  if you actually wanted your child to be kidnapped and held overnight by a stranger, how long would you have to keep her outside, unattended, for this to be statistically likely to happen?

About seven hundred and fifty thousand years.

How about the Hallowe'en candy scare that altered trick-or-treating forever? Razor blades in apples, poisoned candy?  The truth?

There has never been a single substantiated instance of any child dying from a stranger's poisoned Halloween candy.

Never.

And here's one after my own heart:  The danger of salmonella from eating raw cookie dough?  Much too low to deprive our children of one of life's glories.

The next excited me, too, because even 50 years ago eating snow was a forbidden pleasure.

Joel Forman, a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics committee on environmental health, was quoted as saying, "I can say that I'm not aware of any clinical reports of children becoming ill from eating snow.  And I looked."

On the other hand, when I was a child the snow was picking up residue from atomic bomb tests, so I can't blame my parents for a little paranoia.

If you study the odds, the one thing you will not let your children do is go anywhere in an automobile, car seat or no.  But that's not going to happen, which may explain why we prefer to avoid risk calculations.

Our misguided hysteria is not all the media's fault.  Lawyers can take a hefty share of the blame, as many bizarrely restrictive policies are the direct result of lawsuit-phobia.  Such as school buses that will not drop children off unless they are met by a "responsible adult"—if not, the child is taken back to school.  And the demise of really exciting playground equipment, and diving boards at swimming pools.  Here's one for the record books:  a release form from California.

I fully understand my minor's participation may involve risk of serious injury or death. 

That's for a piano recital.  What are they afraid of?  The ghost of Beethoven causing havoc over a mangled Für Elise?

While we're assigning blame, let's not forget greedy capitalists.  Like the "professional babyproofer" who promoted toilet lid locks on national television by intoning, "On average two children a week die in toilets."  The stats from the Consumer Product Safety Commission on accidental drowning in toilets of children under five?  Four per year.  Or the sellers of the "Thudguard," a helmet to protect toddlers learning to walk.  Dr. F. Sessions Cole, chief medical officer at the St. Louis Children's Hospital, reports that of their sixty-five to seventy thousand patients per year, exactly none were toddlers with significant head trauma from instability while learning to walk.  (No statistics available on the instability caused by wearing a helmet while trying to learn to walk.)

There are hucksters everywhere happy to take advantage of parents with more money than sense.  Don't trust your own hand to make sure the bath water is safe for your child?  Buy a turtle bath toy that will flash, "too hot!"  Don't trust your child's natural padding (and unnatural diaper padding) to protect his little bottom from falls while he learns to walk?  Someone will sell you a harness to hold him up while he toddles.  Too busy or too frightened to let your little girl experience the joys of water firsthand?  "Baby Neptune exposes little ones to the wonders of water in their world—whether they're stomping in the rain, splashing in the bathtub, playing 'catch me if you can' with the tide on the beach...."  And how does Baby Neptune accomplish this feat, safely and dryly?  It's a video of other children doing all those wonderful wet things.

Still another culprit inciting us to terror:  the busybodies who not only encapsulate their own children, but feel it their duty to do the same for yours, even to the extent of reporting you (anonymously, of course) to Child Protective Services.  Unfortunately, as I learned on the FRK blog, that's not a baseless fear.  But, like much of what terrifies us, it is an uncommon occurrence.  More common are the other parents who will merely try to shame you for taking the shackles off your kids.  As John Holt said,

One of the saddest things I’ve learned in my life, one of the things I least wanted to believe and resisted believing for as long as I could, was that people in chains don’t want to get them off, but want to get them on everyone else. “Where are your chains?” they want to know. “How come you’re not wearing chains? Do you think you are too good to wear them? What makes you think you’re so special?”

Skenazy has some good advice for this problem, too.

Blamers thrive on shame.  Take away their power.  Do not be ashamed of making parenting choices based on who your kid is, rather than on what the neighbors will say.  Why are they talking about you anyway?

Did I say Lenore Skenazy's book was tame?  Well, yes.  It is.   But that doesn't mean it's not vitally important, on the order of Last Child In the Woods.  If you have young children, read it.  If your children are grown, read it anyway; it will make you laugh, and your grandchildren will thank you.  But don't waste any time bemoaning what you wish you had done differently.  I've done more than my share of that, and it's counterproductive. That's another message of this book:  Children are amazingly resilient, and their well-being does not hinge on every parental decision we make.  It really doesn't. We don't have that much power—and we shouldn't want it.

One more quote and the sticky notes bristling from the pages of Free-Range Kids will be gone.  Free-ranging is not about irresponsible parenting, any more than unschooling is about leaving children without educational support and guidance.  (emphasis mine)

Free-Range Parents are not hands off.  We give our children the tools to be safe and independent, and we listen to them too.

Fruitless Fall:  The Collapse of the Honey Bee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis, by Rowan Jacobsen (Bloomsbury, New York, 2008)

Fruitless Fall had been my "to read" list since mid-2009 and, thanks to generous family, on our bookshelves since Christmas.  I loved Jacobsen's Chocolate Unwrapped, so why it took so long to begin this book is beyond me.  Once begun, however, I couldn't stop, and finished it the same day.  There are a few compensations for being sick and not having the energy to tackle much of anything else.

Speaking of feeling sick ... Fruitless Fall is scarier than The Omnivore's Dilemma, Food, Inc., and Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal combined.  Or perhaps the effect is cumulative.

That's not to say the book isn't a delight to read, doing for honey and beekeeping what John McPhee's Oranges did for the citrus industry many long years ago.  (I wish someone would write an update, as McPhee's book ends when frozen concentrate was king.)  The overall theme is the recent precipitous and inexplicable decline of bees and beekeepers, with many side notes (some delightful, some frightening) along the way.

Did you know that bees make great minesweepers?  They can be trained in two days, can cover vastly more territory than dogs, are as accurate as humans, and don't get themselves blown up.  This may not be the most important reason for us to worry about their health and safety, but I find it incredibly cool.

Bees, and consequently beekeepers, have faced a daunting couple of decades, especially in Europe and the Americas.  Loss of habitat, savage mites, virulent viruses, the stress of industrial agriculture, widespread pesticide and antibiotic use, and the still unexplained Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), have dealt a near-fatal blow to bees and the crops that depend on them for pollination.

It's a terrifying story, but maybe too much to take in all at once, especially when food is still plentiful on the grocery store shelves.  Here's something more immediate (and familiar) to make you think twice before buying your kids Honey Nut Cheerios.

[I]f you asked [beekeepers] to list the biggest challenges they face, development wouldn't even make the top three.  CCD wouldn't necessarily be number one, either.  That honor would go to China and its deluge of honey—real and otherwise. ... Almost 70 percent of the honey consumed in the United States is imported, with China the top source. ... And Chinese honey producers sell cheap.

That's "cheap" as in about half what it costs to produce honey in the U.S.  Lest you think that this bad news for American beekeepers is good news for American shoppers,

A powerful drug used to treat anthrax and other severe infections, chloramphenicol is banned for agricultural use in the United States, Canada, and Europe to prevent bacteria from developing resistance to it.  It also can cause deadly aplastic anemia—bone marrow failure—in people. ...  Between August 2002 and February 2003, FDA agents seized massive amounts of chloramphenicol-contaminated Chinese honey from several importers....

A February 2003 raid is particularly distressing.  Back on August 19, 2002, the FDA had informed the packer that its honey might be contaminated with antibiotics.  But the packer continued to sell the honey, including 155,000 pounds to Sara Lee, which put that honey into five hundred thousand loaves of bread that were sold to consumers before Sara Lee finally stopped using the honey ten days later.  On September 18, 2002, the FDA informed the packer that its honey was indeed contaminated with antibiotics.  Why it then took the FDA five months to seize the honey, and how much was used in the meantime, is unclear.

A tariff, and a temporary ban on Chinese honey, allowed the price to rise some, but "honey laundering"—sending Chinese honey to the U.S. through other countries—was rampant.  Then, on the strength of a Chinese promise (will we never learn?) to stop using chloramphenicol, the ban on Chinese honey was lifted.  And a loophole was found to circumvent the tariff.

[T]he honey packers, the middlemen, resolved that they would never again be caught short.  Honey ... can stay good for decades.  So now we have walls of Chinese honey in Florida and warehouse after warehouse of clover honey in the Dakotas, ensuring that whatever happens on the world market, industrial honey in the United States will remain cheap.

You may not want to eat it, however. ... In January 2006, [a leading food safety lab] analyzed a random sample of Chinese honey, taken from a Florida honey packer, and found 48 parts per billion ciprofloxacin in it.  Yes, Cipro, the last-defense, über-antibiotic used to treat the anthrax attacks in 2001.  [The top German food safety lab] has found Cipro in numerous batches of Chinese honey.  [That honey, rejected by the EU, eventually came to the U.S.] Apparently Chinese beekeepers are tossing it into their hives to deal with the raging bacterial chaos simmering in a country with rampant pollution, spotty sewage treatment, and few agricultural standards.

An estimated 70 percent of Chinese beekeepers use antibiotics.  One entrepreneur leased a nature preserve of acacia trees from the Chinese government and recruited forty-five beekeepers who agreed to make honey in the reserve without antibiotics and without metal storage containers, which can contaminate honey with iron and lead.  For his troubles, he was ambushed by fifteen other local beekeepers who didn't like the competition, beaten, and left with a concussion.

Does this next situation sound eerily familiar?  It should, because it was just such a situation with home mortgages that precipitated the recent financial crash-and-burn.

Of course, on an ingredients label for honey-mustard dressing or honey-baked ham, you have no way of knowing who made the honey.  Thanks to the international shell games, neither do the food manufacturers.

It gets worse.

[The product] may not even be honey.  Honey is expensive to produce, while corn syrup is cheaper than dirt.  Honey producers in the 1900s got rich cutting honey with corn syrup ... but methods for detecting it soon developed.  Then the adulterators got better. ... [In 1998 American honey buyers received an offer from] a company in India to supply "honey analog" by the ton.  This analog, made from corn or rice syrup, was "enzymatically processed" to resemble honey, physically and chemically.  The company assured buyers that the syrup would pass any test for natural honey....

Sometimes the fraud is chemical, as when rice syrup is doctored to resemble honey, and sometimes it's ontological.  For instance, what is honey?  If you answered something like "a syrup made entirely out of nectar by bees," then consider yourself hopelessly out of date.  Let me introduce you to "Packer's Blend," the latest offering from China.  It appeared on the market in 2006, shortly after the [tariff] loophole was closed by Congress.  Chinese honey may be subject to tariffs, but if a product is less than 50 percent honey, it isn't covered by the law.  This "funny honey," as beekeepers call it, is between 40 and 49 percent honey.  The rest is syrup:  corn syrup, but also rice syrup, lactose syrup—whatever's on hand and cheap.  The importers who bring in these blends may sell them to manufacturers as blends or as pure honey, adding some nice American or Canadian clover honey to give the blend a semblance of the real thing and get it past the manufacturers.

Packer's Blend sells for forty cents a pound and may be in more foods than any of us realize.  You won't see "Packer's Blend" on an ingredients label.  You may see "rice syrup" and "honey," listed separately, or you may just see "honey."  Do food manufacturers understand what they're getting when they buy Packer's Blend?  Are they being told it's honey?  Do they know they're using Chinese honey that may be contaminated?

We can't say for sure.  But what we can say is that American beekeepers can't compete.

The price for industrial-grade honey remains depressed, and one reason ... is that honey laundering is out of control.  Millions of pounds of illegal Chinese honey continue to enter the United States.  The honey is first shipped to the Philippines, Thailand, Russia, India, Australia, and other countries, where papers are forged falsifying the country of origin.  Then the honey is shipped to the United States.  Some of the smugglers know it is contaminated with outlawed antibiotics.  "There is definitely this problem," one Chinese shipper wrote to his U.S. importers.  "I'm worried whether the FDA or USDA may get involved.  Our future shipments will definitely have this fluoroquinolones, and it may take a couple of years to improve."  The honey was sold to major U.S. food companies.  So far, the USDA has made a few arrests, but not enough to staunch the flow of illegal honey.

Nor is our own government squeaky-clean:

[Florida's state apiarist decided]   to quarantine any Australian colonies coming into Florida until he got a cycle of brood out of them, just to be safe.  He was told that if he did that he'd be sued by the government for disrupting international trade.  Somebody really wanted those bees here.

I can't end on such a depressing note.  Much as Polyface Farms is the bright jewel of hope in The Omnivore's Dilemma, Kirk Webster's apiary in the Champlain Valley of Vermont is the sun and air of this otherwise dark story.  As Joel Salatin's Christian faith infuses his farming practices, so Webster's Buddhism led him to conform his practices to nature, rather than the other way around.

[Webster writing] "In my own search for a healthy beekeeping future, I have found the World of Nature herself, the old beekeeping books and journals, and the original accounts of the pioneers of modern organic farming to be far more helpful and inspiring than most of what has been published, talked about and done by the beekeeping community during the last 8 or 10 years.  Here were people who worked hard to solve their own problems in a creative way, often with very few resources.  They looked deeply into the world of Nature searching for examples of balance and stability, and always gave their crops and livestock the last word."

[Sir Albert Howard, father of the modern organic movement, believed] successful farming and food production—healthy plants, animals, and people—required balance.  Any agricultural enterprise must achieve a state of equilibrium that mimics nature if it is to survive and prosper. ... When an imbalance took hold, Howard believed, nature let you know.  The heralds of this imbalance were often pests and disease, which could get a foothold only if something was out of whack in the system.  In this way, pests and disease are not the enemies of the farmer; they are actually allies, helping to illuminate weaknesses in the system before irrevocable damage—exhausted soil, genetically weak crops or animals—is introduced.

In 1998 [Webster] decided to stop fighting the mites and instead see what he could learn from them.  By his own admission, he might not have done it if an easier solution had presented itself. ... "I decided this whole thing was a freight train heading for a wreck, and that I was going to go through the wreck early.  And hopefully recover early."

Recover he did.  The years of letting nature take its course and in the process breeding more robust bees were years of poverty, and even now, with a healthy, prospering, sustainable apiary of mite-resistant bees, he's not going to get rich.  Fortunately, he doesn't want to.

For decades ... honey bees have been selected for traits that had little to do with resilience.  Maximum honey production tops the charts, with maximum bee production closely linked to that.  Gentleness is essential.  Qualities that contribute to self-reliance—resistance to pests and disease, overwintering ability, frugality—are less valued because it's more efficient to rely on petrochemicals to solve such problems.  Who needs bees that can overwinter when it's cheap to truck them down to Florida for the cold months?  Who needs to worry about self-reliant bees when it's more cost-effective to buy new [bees] from Southern breeders or Australia in the early spring?  Why find forage for bees when high-fructose corn syrup is cheap and plentiful?  Why spend years breeding mite- and disease-resistant bees when the chemical conglomerates have all these miticides, fungicides, and antibiotics available right now?

You can manipulate a natural system into doing things it wasn't designed for, but you're always running the risk of collapse.

[Webster again] "Beekeeping now has the dubious honor of becoming the first part of our system of industrial agriculture to actually fall apart.  Let's stop pretending that something else is going on.  We no longer have enough bees to pollinate our crops.  Each time the bees go through a downturn, we respond by making things more stressful for them, rather than less—we move them around more often, expose them to still more toxic substances, or fill the equipment up again with more untested and poorly adapted stock.  We blame the weather, the mites, the markets, new diseases, consumers, the Chinese, the Germans, the (fill in your favorite scapegoat), other beekeepers, the packers, the scientific community, the price of gas, global warming—anything rather than face up to what's happening.  We are losing the ability to take care of living things.  Why?"

Did I say that the decline of bees was the overall theme of Fruitless Fall?  Perhaps it is.  But there's a supertext also:  We need to stop working against our environment and start working with it; to observe carefully and take heed to the ways of the natural world, rather than assuming we always know best and can run roughshod over it with impunity; and to recognize that Creation is not a commodity, but a community.  Joel Salatin would call this "honoring the bee-ness of the bee."

 

Christians Are Hate-Filled Hypocrites ...and Other Lies You've Been Told, by Bradley R. E. Wright (Bethany House, Minneapolis, 2010)

Frankly, my expectations were not high when I picked up this book.  The title may be eye-catching, but for that reason it doesn't inspire confidence that there's serious writing between the covers.

There is, however, and serious research, too.  Bradley Wright is a sociologist, a professor at the University of Connecticut.  His words are aimed at the layman, not the academic, and he writes with a nice sense of humor; even so, the array of facts and graphs and studies is dizzying.

Why are we so quick to believe bad news, and to propagate it?  Bad news titillates, and what titillates, sells.  Bad news also frightens, and that sells, too.

Wright tackles several areas in which both the secular and the Christian world have been flagellating the church:

• Is American Christianity on the brink of extinction?
• Are we losing our young people?
• Are Evangelicals all poor, uneducated, southern whites?
• Do Christians think and do Christian things?
• Have Christians gone wild?
• Do Christians love others?
• What do non-Christians think of us?

Although his research is specifically about Evangelicals (and his definition is problematic; see below), the statistics and studies he uses reveal a broader picture as well.

As you might expect from the book's title, Wright's studies reveal that on nearly all these fronts the news is much better than we have been led to believe, and gets better still with increasing frequency of church attendance.  Contrary to what bombards us almost daily from the media, when you look at well-ordered studies, Christians are doing significantly better than average with respect to personal habits, the strength of our marriages, charitable behavior, and the character of our children.  We are reasonably orthodox in our beliefs.  Young people are not leaving the church in droves, even though many continue to follow the age-old pattern of sloughing off as they gain their independence and returning to the church when they start families of their own.  We are a diverse lot, and on the whole are better thought of by others than we think we are.

The bad news? We still have a long way to go with respect to the second of the greatest commandments:  loving our neighbors.  We're measurably prone to forgetting that the second part of "hate the sin, but love the sinner" is as important as the first.

We're also far too gullible, believing anything that's written down, that comes from a "study," that throws around statistics, or that is said by a popular Christian leader.  Many misleading or blatantly false statistics are used (presumably with the best of intentions) as advertising gimicks by those in our own camp.

A four-page advertisement in evangelical Christianity's flagship magazine boldly states:  "Christianity in America won't survive another decade unless we do something now."  Why?  "This generation of teens is the largest in history—and current trends show that only 4% will be evangelical believers by the time they become adults....  We are on the verge of a catastrophe."

Where did this 4% figure come from?  Ten years ago a seminary professor did an informal survey of 211 young people interviewed in three states.  The question was poorly worded, and the study probably used a convenience sample.  In terms of quality, this statistic is about as valid as someone putting a survey question on their Facebook page and then having their frinends and acquaintances answer it.  There's nothing wrong with doing it, it's just not very trustworthy.  Motivated by this questionable statistic, a Christian organization was asking tens of thousands of youth pastors around the country to spend $39 to attend a conference on how to avoid this coming catastrophe.

What's more, we worry too much about what others think of us, which causes us to circle the wagons, further weakening our attention to the neighbors it is our job to love.

Ever the professor, Wright gives the Church an overall grade of B.  Not what we'd hope for, not what we should settle for, but more than enough reason to work diligently rather than to drop out in despair.

Here are a few interesting tidbits from the book, pulled without any of the surrounding statistical justification, so feel free to question them, per Wright's instruction—or better yet, to look them up yourself.

No doubt because of the statistical studies which are available, Wright uses a standard classification system, based on denominational affiliation, to define "Evangelical" and distinguish it from "Mainline Protestant."  Unfortunately for the statistics, this skews the results of many who would self-classify as evangelical but attend churches in "mainline" denominations.

Evangelical parents worry about the faith of their children, and understandably so.  For some, this leads to attempts to shelter the child from "secular" society and its various religious perspectives.  Ironically, however, engaging society might actually be the best way for Evangelicals to strengthen their faith.  Evangelical parents:  Do you want your child to stay with the faith?  Perhaps one of the best things you can do is make sure he or she is well-educated.  At the very least, sending your children off to college is not necessarily something to fear (at least for their faith—for your finances, yes, run away screaming).

Membership figures for the Catholic Church have remained remarkably steady, but that's deceptive, the way climbing a mountain is a level hike, on average.  The Catholic Church is losing people in large numbers, but they are being offset by new immigrants, who are mostly Catholic.

Catholic women were the least likely to have had an abortion, with about 1 in 5 of them having done so.  About 1 in 4 Protestant women have had abortions, and about 1 in 3 religiously unaffiliated women and members of other religions have had an abortion.  Among both Protestants and Catholics, abortion rates dropped considerably with increased church attendance.  About 1 in 3 Protestant women who rarely attended church had abortions compared to about half that rate, 1 in 6, of the weekly attendees.  Likewise, among Catholic women, abortion rates drop from about 1 in 4 to about 1 in 8.

Wright cites these statistics to support his case that church affiliation and attendance measurably affect behavior when it comes to abortion.  And so they do.  But what dreadful statistics!   In the very best case (weekly-attending Catholics), one out of very eight women (your pew, or maybe yours and the one in front of you), has had at least one abortion.  This is not so much an indictment against the church, which is in the business of accepting sinners into the family, but of the sheer number of abortions that are going on.  I guess it's like the federal deficit—too large to comprehend.  Following Wright's advice, I seriously questioned these numbers, but even the Alan Guttmacher Institute, which is obviously not using the statistic to raise an alarm, admits, "At least half of American women will experience an unintended pregnancy by age 45, and, at current rates, about one-third will have had an abortion."  Given that such numbers are far more likely to be under- than over-reported, this is mighty scary.  I actually support leaving desperate personal decisions in desperate personal circumstances up to the primary people involved—but these numbers bespeak decisions made with less thought and research than goes into deciding which college to attend.  In making abortion legal, we appear to have made it almost casual.

Overall, non-Christians view Christians surprisingly positively—surprising, that is, if you have any connection with academia.

In 2007, the Institute for Jewish and Community Research surveyed the religious beliefs of over twelve hundred faculty members at various American colleges and universities.  As I understand it, this study was looking for anti-Semitism among faculty members, but they instead found something surprising:  a strong intolerance toward Evangelical Christians. One of the questions asked faculty members if they had negative feelings toward various religious groups....  [O]ver half—53%—of the faculty members reported having negative feelings toward Evangelical Christians, and this was far more than toward any other group.  Twenty-two percent of faculty members had negative feelings toward Muslims, 18% toward atheists, 13% toward Catholics, 9% toward non-Evangelical Christians, 4% toward Buddhists, and 3% toward Jews.  The study's authors concluded that "if not outright prejudice, faculty sentiment about the largest religious group in the American public borders dangerously close."

Wright enjoins us not to fear statistics, and not to trust them if they don't jibe with our experiences, especially if we have reason to doubt the motives or biases of the person citing them.  Christians are Hate-Filled Hypocrites... is not light reading, but a solid weapon for the arsenal of those who hope to counter fear-mongering and hand-wringing with knowledge and intelligence.

Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 2,  "The Musician's Stimulus Package"

Okay, so that's not the name Mahler gave to this symphony, but he didn't call it "Resurrection," either, which is what usually shows up on concert programs, so I claim the right to my own title.

Last night was the Orlando Phil's season opening concert, consisting of but this one work.  The ticket-takers thoughtfully warned us, as we entered, "Ninety minutes, no intermission!" causing an immediate run on the bathrooms.

Gustav Mahler pushed the limits of orchestral size, and it was a mite crowded on the stage of the Bob Carr Auditorium.  I counted (in the program, not live) 156 musicians, including two full sets of timpani (maybe more—some percussion was off stage), eight trumpets, ten French horns, and as many strings as could fit.  No wonder Mahler isn't played as much as he should be—who can afford it?  Kudos to the OPO for taking on the problem of musician under-employment in this magnificent way.

This was my first hearing of this particular symphony, and I wish I had had Bob Greenberg to explain it to me.  It seemed disjointed, random, and haphazard—but I know it wasn't.  There's hope that it will grow on me, for I love Mahler's First, and in fact kept recognizing brief musical snatches from that symphony in this.  It was finale of the First that echoed in my mind on the drive home.  Mahler is so Mahler.

        

The Saturdays
The Four-Story Mistake
Then There Were Five
Spiderweb for Two:  A Melendy Maze

by Elizabeth Enright (Holt/Square Fish, New York, 2008)

I've heard it said—and often by teachers—that it doesn't matter what children read, as long as they're reading.  I couldn't disagree more.

Actually, there's just enough truth there to be dangerous:  When one is learning to read, the very best path to the next level is merely to read, and read, and read.  It doesn't matter if it's Dr. Seuss, Calvin & Hobbes, Star Wars, or Anna Karenina—almost anything will do that is decent and holds the reader's attention long enough for the practicing to work its magic.  When my father was sick and terribly thin, we pressed upon him high-fat, high-calorie, high-sugar foods that would normally have been anathema to a sensible diet.

The trouble with carrying forward a laissez-faire attitude toward the content of children's reading is that our early experiences influence so strongly the habits and tastes we will take with us into adulthood.  If our childhood has been reasonably happy, it's almost impossible not to retain an uncritical fondness for what we enjoyed then.  It's as important to encourage in our children a taste for nourishing books as it is a taste for nourishing food.

I find Elizabeth Enright's Melendy Family books to be exactly this sort of nourishing book, so much so that on a recent rereading I probably enjoyed them not one bit less than my first enchanted encounter.  Maybe even more, because they reminded me so much of my favorite families, many of whom read this blog.  Noisy, lively, adventuresome children who occasionally make bad choices and get in trouble—but always repent and are forgiven by loving adults.  (I do like a book where "bad choices" means things like climbing out the window when one is supposed to be sick in bed—remember when sick kids were supposed to stay in bed?)  Siblings who love each other, and enjoy each other's company, even if they occasionally quarrel a bit.  Children who respect the adults in their life.  Adults who know how to give their children both roots and wings.  (I know it's a cliché, but it's true, and important.)

What struck me most this time as I read the books was how very much they are a Free-Range Kids manifesto.   The kids are far less worldly-wise than today's average children, but far more competent.  They are entertained and even awed by things that would cause most modern American kids to yawn with boredom and make rude remarks.  But they wander New York City on their own at 10 years old (with permission) and even six (without); they love Beethoven, and Shakespeare; they wander over hill and dale (in the country), sometimes gone all day and returning home after dark; they sew, and cook, and build things; they put on plays and arrange benefit concerts for the war effort (the books were written in the 1940's); they get into scrapes and get out of them by a combination of their own ingenuity and knowing when to ask for help from the adults around them.  They know the "don't talk to strangers" rule, and more importantly they know its many exceptions.

Yes, I know this is fiction!  And I'm not saying the family is ideal—no family without a mother can be.  But it's a lot more true to what I knew when I was growing up than most of today's "realistic" children's fiction.  The people over at Free-Range Kids are an eclectic lot, and I doubt they'd all enjoy Enright's books, but to me the Melendys are a shining example of the "normal childhood" that many Free-Rangers are working hard to promote.  Books like these can encourage both children and their parents in that endeavor, promoting simultaneously family love and loyalty, parental authority, and children's competence and independence.  I'm keeping them for the day the grandkids are ready for them (and enjoying them myself in the meantime).

Or maybe I just like the books because the Melendys' attic playroom looks an awful lot like our grandchildren's room even now!

Murder Must Advertise, by Dorothy Sayers (Avon, New York, 1967)

Dorothy Sayers is one of my favorite authors, both fiction and non-fiction, and her Lord Peter Wimsey mystery stories among the best of that genre.  I've read them all so many times that quotations from them worm their way up from the depths of my brain unbidden, enabling me to appear knowledgeable in fields where my ignorance is nearly complete, as happened earlier this year while I was sitting in on a class about medieval manuscripts.

The beauty of Sayers' writing makes re-reading her murder mysteries delightful even when you know whodunit.  I was nursing a cold, and trying to forget the agony of descending from high altitude with completely clogged ears, as well as the frustration of not being able, at that hour, to purchase real Sudafed, but only the ersatz variety that proudly proclaims on the box that it contains none of the ingredient that really works.  In the mood for something that would distract without taxing to my befogged brain, I shunned my burgeoning "to read" pile and reached (again) for Murder Must Advertise.

This tale of Lord Peter's ventures into the British equivalent of Madison Avenue is a full of philosophical observations as it is of murder and intrigue, and the following passage struck me as particularly appropriate today.  Sayers—who herself worked as an advertising copywriter for a number of years—wrote Murder Must Advertise in 1933.

Where, Bredon asked himself, did the money come from that was to be spent so variously and so lavishly? If this hell's-dance of spending and saving were to stop for a moment, what would happen? If all the advertising in the world were to shut down tomorrow, would people still go on buying more soap, eating more apples, giving their children more vitamins, roughage, milk, olive oil, scooters and laxatives, learning more languages by gramophone, hearing more virtuosos by radio, redecorating their houses, refreshing themselves with more non-alcoholic thirst-quenchers, cooking more new, appetizing dishes, affording themselves that little extra touch which means so much?  Or would the whole desperate whirligig slow down, and the exhausted public relapse upon plain grub and elbow-grease? He did not know. Like all rich men, he had never before paid any attention to advertisements. He had never realized the enormous commercial importance of the comparatively poor. Not on the wealthy, who buy only what they want when they want it, was the vast superstructure of industry founded and built up, but on those who, aching for a luxury beyond their reach and for a leisure for ever denied them, could be bullied or wheedled into spending their few hardly won shillings on whatever might give them, if only for a moment, a leisured and luxurious illusion.

The Chronological Guide to the Bible (Thomas Nelson, Nashville, 2010)

My review copy of this book arrived from the publisher at a fortuitous time:  I happened to have recently begun reading Susan Wise Bauer's History of the Ancient World.  Each book is good; together they are a great window on the historical and cultural settings for Biblical events.

The book meant to be read with the Chronological Guide, however, is the Bible, and I look forward to that adventure in the future.  A Bible itself, arranged in chronological order, would be easier than flipping back and forth, but the Guide is small (not much over 200 pages) and easy to read even though dense with facts, works with any Bible translation, and lets the reader decide how to proceed in places where historical order is uncertain or controversial.  It really is just a guide; you must do the work of actually opening the Bible yourself.

Each book of the Bible is set in its historical and cultural context, which both brings it to life and provides clues for understanding.  It also leaves me hungry for more—there's only so much a book this size can do—which is not a bad thing.

I have but one complaint:  Although the Guide touches on the Apocrypha and the historical period between the Old and New Testaments, it provides none of the informative analysis for the Apocryphal books themselves that it does for the Canonical books.  Even Martin Luther called them "useful and good to read," and it would be helpful to understand more about the history, culture, and philosophies that set the stage for Jesus' time.

Even so, The Chronological Guide to the Bible is a worthwhile addition to the library of anyone who wishes a better understanding of the Bible and how its stories fit into their cultural and historical context.

Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal:  War Stories from the Local Food Front. by Joel Salatin (Polyface Inc., Swoope, Virginia, 2007)

Until now, I've written more about Joel Salatin than I've read by him:  almost a year ago in Strange Bedfellows?  Not Really, and three months later in my review of The Omnivore's Dilemma.  Wanting to correct that sin of omission, I grabbed the only one of his books available in our local library:  Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal.

On every side, our paternalistic culture is tightening the noose around those of us who just want to opt out of the system.  And it is the freedom to opt out that differentiates tyrannical and free societies.  How a culture deals with its misfits reveals its strength.  The stronger a culture, the less it fears the radical fringe.  The more paranoid and precarious a culture, the less tolerance it offers.  When faith in our freedom gives way to fear of our freedom, silencing the minority view becomes the operative protocol. — Joel Salatin

Salatin wants to opt out of a little more of the system than I do, but I hear his cry.  You could call him bitter, but if you consider the miracle that is Polyface Farms, you have to wonder why our government is working so hard to stamp out such elegant, inexpensive, healthy, delicious, and truly "green" (in a conservationist sense) endeavors.

There's another whole blog post in the answer to that—involving sustainable agriculture, home education, midwives, family businesses, free-range kids, raw milk, and even the Duggar family—so for now I'll move on to the quotation section of this review. Otherwise I'll never get it back to the library tomorrow today, when it's due.

The quotes are selected from collection of pink sticky notes bristling from pages all over the book, as I marked passages I found especially interesting.  Unfortunately, they're rather random, and generally miss the most important thrust of the book, which is that

• Both governmental regulations and societal expectations (i.e. the belief that governmental regulations guarantee safe food) have devasted small, local, sustainable agriculture, because they greatly favor large corporations and factory farming.
• Governmental regulations and inspections do not, in fact, promote a healthier food supply, because the big guys (from Archer-Daniels-Midland to Wal-Mart) can afford high-powered attorneys and lobbyists, and because too many bureaucrats are more concerned with healthy paperwork than with healthy food.  (When you read about what the bureaucrats and  big companies did to the very word "Organic," you will no longer be so happy in that section of your grocery store.)
• Small, local, sustainable agriculture is our best hope for producing safe (from salmonella to bioterrorism threats), healthy food.  And taste!  Don't forget about taste!

When it comes to trying to protect our food system, both from internal carelessness and external attack,

[T]he things we're moving heaven and hell to stop are not the things we need to be concerned about.  The stuff that we turn a blind eye to and don't even care about is the bigger problem.  We really do worry about the wrong things.  And we devote precious resources inspecting, measuring, and vilifying the antidote to the wrong things.

Did you really think food regulations were all about ... food safety?

I spoke with an attorney who represents one of the largest food businesses in the world.  He came to the farm for a visit, a delightful gentleman. ... He said he would put it to me straight, "People don't trust the large corporations.  If you're a large corporation, you need that trust to survive.  How do you get that trust?  You create a system that makes it look like you care.  People want to see you doing something that protects them. ... But, and here's the other part of the equation, if you're the chief executive of a large business, you don't want to pay for it.  Instead, you wine and dine politicians to convince them that they will curry favor with their constituents if they demand this program.  Now you have people's faith without having to pay for it."

 And what did you think an ambassador's job was supposed to be?

Allan Nation, editor of Stockman Grass Farmer magazine ... took a group of American grass farmers to Argentina to tour the world's best grass-based farms and ranches.  When the American ambassador found out a group of American farmers and ranchers was in town, he invited them over to the Embassy for refreshments.

"What are you all doing in Argentina?"  he asked.

"We're here to study grass-based agriculture and see firsthand how to finish beef on grass instead of in feedlots," replied Nation.

At that point, Nation said the ambassador nearly kicked them out of the embassy, proclaiming, "Don't you understand why I am here?  I am here to make Argentina quit grass-finishing beef and begin using corn in a feedlot."  There's the good o' USA, friend of environmental agriculture, respecter of other cultures.  Yessireee.

Salatin may be strident at times, but he's not a conspiracy theorist.

At the risk of sounding completely naïve, I will say flat out that I do not sense a conspiracy behind this effort.  Like so many other government plans, this is another well-intentioned idea with incredibly terrible consequences.  I happen to believe that when the food police say raw milk will kill you, they actually believe it.  When they say my outdoor chickens are dangerous to the Tyson houses, they sincerely believe it.  When they say consumers are too stupid to make food choices, they actually believe it.  I think people sincerely believe a lot of stupid things.  This is just stupidity, not conspiracy.  It's a fraternity of stupidity, to be sure, but we need not label it a conspiracy.

I've never worried much about eggs and salmonella—always let the kids lick the cake bowl and eat raw cookie dough, if they beat me to it.  But I'm less worried about the eggs I scooped from under the hen myself at a local farm than about the free box of factory-farmed eggs I picked up at Target.  The recent salmonella outbreak, due to tainted eggs from large, federally regulated egg farms, makes even more significant the following story of Salatin's encounter with a health department representative who had accused his unwashed eggs of carrying salmonella:

Although she admitted that the regulations did not require washing, she simply sniffed and said, "An unwashed egg is inedible."  Then I told her we did in fact culture the eggs, including the manure, and they were clean.  It was like talking to a fence post:  "An unwashed egg is inedible."  End of discussion.

I hung up and immediately the phone rang, even before I could take my hand off the receiver.  I answered and it was Allan Nation. ...  He and his wife, Carolyn, had just returned from a fact-finding trip to Europe, with a heavy emphasis on range poultry in France.  Without any prompting from me, he started the conversation with, "Hey, guess what?  In France, you can't sell a washed egg.  If it has to be washed, it must go into a pasteurized product in liquid form.  Only unwashed eggs are legal to sell as shell eggs."

More about eggs in Europe:

I was showing my eggs to a chef once and he wanted to buy them right away.  To be perfectly transparent, I warned him that in the winter they wouldn't be as deeply orange as they are in the green grass season. ... He immediately cut in.  "Oh, that's no problem.  In chef's school in Switzerland we had recipes for March eggs, recipes for June eggs, and other recipes for October eggs in order to accentuate the nuances of that particular season's eggs."

Of animals, people, and politics.  One reason I like Salatin is his rejection of the political boundary lines that are hardening like arteries in our society and constricting the healthy flow of ideas:  Republicans and Democrats are both helpful—and hurtful—to his cause.  His views land him squarely on both the Left and the Right.

When the only interaction between people and animals is in a pet situation, it jaundices the historical and natural relationship between the two. 

Amazingly, the [animal rights activists who object to] abortions in the third-trimester of a bovine pregnancy tend to support that action in humans. ...

... It's as inconsistent as the pro-lifers eating disrespected, factory farmed meat out of Costco ... The people who should be most concerned about respecting and honoring animals are the members of the religious right.  Instead these folks defend the right to abuse animals, to disrespect their chickeness and pigness.  And they even applaud their own ability to find the cheapest food.  I wonder if they think the best church comes from hiring the cheapest pastor.

What good is the freedom to worship, the right to keep and bear arms, and the freedom of the press if we don't have the freedom to choose what to feed our bodies so we can go sing, shoot, and speak?  The only reason the founding fathers did not grant the freedom to choose our food was because it was such a basic, fundamental personal right that they could not conceive that special protection would be needed.  Granting citizens the right to choose their food would have been similar to granting them the right to see the sun rise, or to breathe.

We believe that our pluralistic society is stronger for allowing home schooling and private schooling alongside public schooling.  Our culture is stronger by letting people buy different kinds of cars or none at all; have health insurance or none at all; build a house or none at all.  The freedom to opt out of the mainstream paradigm is the cornerstone that preserves the minority view, differentiating between top-down societies and bottom-up societies.  Our opponents favor coercing consumers to buy only government-approved food, thereby denying opt-out freedoms.

[Modern society thinks] we can save things from the top down ... but ... the only safety comes in our communities, our homes, our families, from the bottom up. And these institutions must be free to experiment, to innovate.  I confess that I do not hold optimism for our culture as a whole.  Indeed, we are destroying agrarianism and seeing the same political graft and moral debauchery that brought the Roman culture to ruins.  I am, however, optimistic about the power of one.  The strength of you and me and others, touching our spheres of influence, taking individual responsibility.

And finally, this is a minor side story, but I love it:

I have a friend who at 13 decided he wanted to cut firewood for a living.  His family had an old 1965 International loadstar dump truck with a two-speed rear axle.  A little big for his age, he began cutting firewood—yes, with a chain saw.  He could drive that truck as well as any adult, and delivered a load to a customer in Waynesboro about 15 miles away.

A neighbor saw the load being dumped and walked over to ask for one himself.  The boy said he'd be there the following Saturday with the load.  He cut the wood after school and in a week had another dump truck load.  He arrived at the man's house on schedule.  The customer was dubious about the boy's ability to back the truck around a crooked driveway, swing set, picnic area, and dump it onto a concrete pad in the corner of the back yard.

The boy assured the customer that it was no problem and proceeded to back the truck expertly right up to the pad.  He dumped the load and pulled out.  What I didn't tell you was that this man happened to be a city policeman, and this week happened to be in uniform because he was getting ready to go to work.  When he got ready to pay the boy, he asked him:  "Son, how old are you?"

My friend, who confesses that his heart skipped a beat when he pulled in and realized he was delivering wood to a policeman's house, just looked down from the cab and confidently but with a mischievous grin responded, "How old do you want me to be?"

Taken aback, the policeman asked him, "Do you have a license?"

To which the 13-year-old replied, "I have a couple, but I'm not sure I have the one you're interested in."

Completely enthralled by the whimsical youngster, the policeman said, "Listen son, I'll follow you to the edge of the city limits.  And please, please don't drive that truck back into this city."

Two weeks later, the boy had another load to deliver to Waynesboro.  As luck would have it, when he entered the city, there on routine traffic patrol was his firewood customer friend.  They locked eyes, and the policeman just shook his head, took off his hat, and covered his eyes.  Now there is a true public servant.  That boy could drive that truck as expertly as any adult.  Ho could anyone deny this self-motivated, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed boy his firewood business?  To be honest with you, I wouldn't let my 13-year-old do this.  And it probably wasn't the wisest thing to do.

But for crying out loud, must we criminalize everything we don't think is wise?