Tradition! Tradition!

A tradition of inquiry, for Maclntyre, is thus a morally grained, historically situated rationality, a way of asking and answering questions that is inescapably tied to the inculcation of habits in the life of the knower and to the community that originates and stewards the craft of inquiry through time. Tradition in this sense is the word that best describes the forms of life that were ancient Christianity and Stoicism.—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 184

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I could hear the Fiddler on the Roof song, "Tradition! Tradition!," running through my mind as I read this. Of course, he is correct—which has ramifications for what we consider to be scholarship and education, doesn't it? I'm still thinking about what that means, and probably will be for the rest of my life.

But it definitely aligns with Jesus's command to make disciples, doesn't it? Knowledge transfer doesn't transform lives; models do. Not that knowledge transfer isn't important! It definitely is. But in order for that knowledge transfer to stick, it needs to be modeled, which is what this whole chapter is getting at.
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Apprenticeship?

Fourth, in the same way that an apprentice learns from a teacher how to acquire the skills needed to practice a craft well, a participant in a tradition requires a teacher of the craft of inquiry. It is true, Maclntyre argues, that there is a resident, Inherent potential for transformation; otherwise, we could not learn what we need to know to take part in a tradition. But not only does a teacher “help actualize” such potential in a particular direction we would not necessarily find ourselves, a teacher is also the concrete authority on what we need to learn. “We shall have to learn” from a teacher, says Maclntyre, “and initially accept on the basis of his or her authority within the community of a craft precisely what intellectual and moral habits it is which we must cultivate and acquire if we are to become . . . participants in such enquiry” (63). Learning the rationality of inquiry is not a matter of striking out on one’s own but of submitting to the judgments of those who have already mastered the craft. In this way, the apprentice makes the “prior commitment" necessary to develop the habits that are prerequisite to becoming a competent member of the craft community (60-63).—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 183 (quotations from Alasdair MacIntyre's 1988 Gifford Lectures)

Wisdom required

That someone would need to be wise in order to read texts well is as far from encyclopedic understanding as it is from modern natural science in which wisdom is not taken to be requisite for interpreting the “behavior” of a proton. And yet it is endemic to the notion of tradition as a craft of inquiry. There is an “understanding of [a tradition’s] texts which becomes available only to the transformed self” (82). But this creates an apparent paradox: “Only insofar as we have already arrived at certain conclusions are we able to become the sort of person able to engage in such enquiry so as to reach sound conclusions” (63). How, then, does such transformation occur?—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 183 (quotations from Alasdair MacIntyre's 1988 Gifford Lectures)

Rationality

To be rational, that is, is not to follow reason’s timeless principles but to participate in the tradition’s particular shape of rationality as it has developed through history: “The participant in a craft is rational qua participant insofar as he or she conforms to the best standards of reason discovered so far, and the rationality in which he or she thus shares is always, therefore . . . understood as a historically situated rationality” (64–65). Rationality is thus learning a particularized skill in the midst of time.“—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 182 (quotations from Alasdair MacIntyre's 1988 Gifford Lectures)

An alternative

The genealogical vanquishing of the encyclopedia does not mean, however that every rival has been laid to rest. Indeed, in MacIntyre’s view, tradition can defeat genealogy on its own terms. But a tradition of inquiry is not simply one more version of pure reason’s best workings; it is, rather, more like a craft…—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 182

Pick and choose

The genealogist thus does not so much make arguments that go toward anything as he does take a momentary stance, pose as a critic for the time being, adopt a particular posture on a certain stage. For him, there are only masks to be worn, roles to be played, for this or that purpose—according to genealogical desire. The style can therefore be personal, even aphoristic, because the mask that is momentarily worn is particular to the role at this (and not that) moment. Foucault, for example, a master of genealogical inquiry, takes the word author to “name a role or function, not a person, and the use of a particular author’s name discharges this function by assigning a certain status to a piece of discourse” (51). Hence can genealogical inquiry dispense with the consistency that universal rationality requires. Authors are momentary functions, texts words that play this or that role, rationality the “this kind” or “that kind” of the role the words play. If “this kind” fundamentally conflicts with “that kind”—or if we can understand “this kind” but are completely puzzled by “that kind”—so much the better.—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 180-81

But is it possible?

Second, we continue to act in alarge-scale way as if the encyclopedic inquiry is a live option. “Even now the organized institutions of the academic curriculum and the ways in which both enquiry and teaching are conducted in and through those institutions are structured to a significant degree as if we did believe much of what the major contributors to the Ninth Edition believed.” Institutions and curriculum, of course, are not the same thing as the publication outlets for scholarly world—journals, monograph series, and the like—but in fact these outlets often simply reflect the assumptions of the larger university’s structure. How we train is how we publish. “We often still behave as if there is . . . some underlying agreement about the academic project of just the kind in which those contributors believed.” Knowledge, Maclntyre implies, is socialized in a way that contradicts what we now know about knowledge; it is time to recognize the contradiction. “The ghosts of the Ninth Edition haunt the contemporary academy. They need to be exorcised” (171).—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 179 ((quotations from Alasdair MacIntyre's 1988 Gifford Lectures)

Quotation for the day

We have beguiled ourselves with gadgets, with machines that work for us, and think for us, and entertain us, and (as we believe in our folly) educate us, until our God-given powers have become atrophied through disuse.—A. Whitney Griswold, president of Yale, 1951, quoted in the Congressional Record

Tozer for Tuesday

Religious education at best is training men and women to think right and act right. Certainly, it is not to be decried, but rather desired. But without the secret and mysterious internal change, all of this outside change ultimately will be found only wasted.—A.W. Tozer, Living as a Christian, 65

So-called benefactors

On the Anxious Bench the other day, but I just finished reading it now (I’ve taken it in chunks), reflection on the the mature Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

This paragraph sums up what I’ve thought:

It was perhaps King’s commitment to the alleviation of poverty that got him killed. The night before his assassination, he was working with striking sanitation workers because it would expose the need for economic equality. King’s Poor People’s Campaign was meant to do precisely that work because after he moved his ministry from the South to the North, he was reminded that the fight against racism necessarily included a fight against poverty.

Yep. The one thing that the oligarchy has always feared is that the various groups of exploited people would see that actually they have more in common with each other than they do w/the oligarchs—the ones Jesus said call themselves “benefactors.” (As an interesting experiment, search that term in the books of the Maccabees for some context.)

A footnote in the book I’m editing sums up the benefactors pretty well:

Yale Daily News, November 10, 2021. A study by Philp Mousavizadeh found that the administration had expanded an incredible 44.7 percent since 2003, and that Yale had the highest manager-to-student ratio in the Ivy League and the fifth highest in the nation among four-year colleges. Thus the administration was larger than the faculty and cost $2.7 billion annually, with a 5 percent increase in only one year. An article by Isaac Yu, Yale Daily News, September 9, 2021, noted that over the same period, some key administrative units had grown 150 percent in staffing, as opposed to a 10.6 percent in faculty growth, and that Yale had gone from five vice presidents to thirty-one. The salaries of the president had increased 17.2 percent, of the General Counsel 6.2 percent, but of the faculty 3.6 percent.

I’m sorry to say that a recent survey found that Harvard has now surpassed Yale in the highest manager-to-student ratio…

Everybody needs to read ch. 1 of Heschel’s The Prophets at least once a year…

Just an
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Meritocracy in the university setting

The Atlantic has an interesting article about the myth of meritocracy in the university setting. It got me to thinking. Read the article to understand my

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No doubt a mixed bag, at best. I’m not sure where I stand. Both my parents taught at a state university, but hardly an elite one; my dad regularly gives to his alma mater, a state school. I went to multiple undergraduate schools: University of Wisconsin-Stout, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Asbury College (now University), as well as graduate schools: Asbury Seminary, University of Kentucky, and University of Chicago. I regularly receive donation requests from about half of them. I’ve never given, feeling my cash goes further in supporting homeless shelters, etc., than in supporting the already upper-middle-class attendees of those schools.

But, I wonder if I believe in meritocracy? I think I do, to an extent. But, I also have no doubt that there is someone currently working a low-paying job who, with the options I had would be much better than I am at what I do. There was a study back in the 1980s (I forget now where I read it—it was years ago) where some college professors went into the inner city and ran a summer program for disadvantaged youth and uncovered multiple people with genius-level intelligence who would never get the opportunity to develop it because of cultural limitations. And the current admissions scandals don’t exactly encourage belief in meritocracy, do they?

I had read elsewhere about the just-world hypothesis. I see it, but NIMBY tendencies keep anything from happening to fix it. Common good seems to be a diminishing commodity : (

Just a Sunday morning
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Thought for the day—on education

Great post on what's going on in the perennial "education wars" on the Curmudgucation blog. The penultimate paragraph is a good riff on a (misattributed) quotation from Alexis de Tocqueville:

A nation is great because its people—its persons—have the chance to become great. Not just the ones who believe The Right Thing, not just the ones who come from The Right Background. Education is not a commodity sold to parents, but a public good and a societal responsibility shared by us all because we all have to share in the results. That's the promise of public education that I believe in and that I will continue to argue for—that it is a debt we owe to every young human in this country to provide each and every one with a free quality education that empowers them and builds a better nation for all of us (not just the fortunate few).

How much time are you willing to give?

From the Curmudgucation blog:

I see this thread from time to time, this insistence on denying that students are bad at something. "No, you just weren't taught that well" or "Your teacher lacked the right tools" or "You are the victim of too-low expectations" or "You just needed more opportunities to master the material and concepts." Sometimes these ideas make it all the way into policy: if you are a teacher of a Certain Age, you may well remember sitting in a PD session in which you were told earnestly that "All can learn all."

No. Some students are bad at some things. This should not come as a surprise; all human beings are bad at something.

…

We have a finite number of hours to invest, and we all make choices about how to invest them. It's a weird brand of age-ism to imagine that students do not make similar choices. I don't believe in lazy students, but I absolutely believe in students who will sit in your class and make a rational decision that they do not want to invest the kind of time in your subject that judge would be necessary.

Go read the rest for the full scope of what he is saying. It's worth your time.

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Yep. Time and energy, as well as innate capabilities. In graduate school, with two kids, I had to budget my time, so at the beginning of each term, I decided which class I would settle for a B in. If I had the extra time after assuring an A in the other ones, then I would attempt for an A in that one too. I rarely did, and sometimes I didn’t get an A in some of the ones I was aiming for an A in.

And when it comes to Akkadian, I suck at the signs. Never could wrap my head around the multivalency of them. I enjoyed Hittite because the multivalency was much more limited and the sign list was manageable. I did fine in the grammar and reading of Akkadian once it was transliterated, but the signs? Yuck.

And when I was in engineering, before seeing the light and becoming a humanities major, I hit a brick wall in linear algebra. I just couldn't wrap my head around the concept of six, seven, or nine space. Matrices just blew my 20-year-old mind. Now, I understand the concept, but I'm forty-six years older…
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Bored?

Man cannot live by sedatives alone. He needs not only tranquilizers and sedatives, he also needs stimulants.

In search of exaltation man is ready to burn Rome, even to destroy himself. It is difficult for a human being to live on the same level, shallow, placid, repetitious, uniform, ordinary, unchanged. The classical form of exaltation is worship. Prayer lifts a person above himself. Life without genuine prayer is a wasteland.

But exaltation is gone from the synagogue, from the church, and also from many a classroom and university. The cardinal sin is boredom, and the major failure the denial to our young of moments of exaltation. We have shaped our lives around the practical, the utilitarian, devoid of dreams and vision, higher concerns and enthusiasms. And our religious leadership suffers from a me-too attitude toward fad and fashion, accommodation and progressive surrender.—Abraham Joshua Heschel in Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays, 228

The importance of a real education

I read an intersting article in the Atlantic, concerning the importance of teaching critical thinking (bascially the Humanities) for society and the dangers of the competitive attitude among administrators who have lost sight of what a college/university was created for. Here's a couple of snippets, but do yourself a favor and read the whole thing.

The turn away from the humanities is a sign of competitive schooling’s most far-reaching effect: It perverts our culture’s understanding of what education is, and makes us forget that schooling has value beyond status seeking.

and

When schooling is the path to income and status, students study the subjects that yield the highest wages and the greatest prestige, inducing too many people to study finance and law and too few to study education, caregiving, or even engineering. But private wages are not the same thing as the public interest. Child-care workers, for example, give much more to society than they take from it, generating almost 10 times as great a social product as they capture in private wages. Bankers and lawyers, by contrast, capture private wages that exceed their social product—they take more than they give. The distortions reach beyond specific jobs. Art, culture, and community all make the world a much better place, but they are notoriously difficult to monetize in the market. Competitive schooling therefore drives students away from these fields. No surprise, then, that the rise of competitive education has been accompanied by a steep decline in student interest in the humanities.

and

Education’s core purpose is (or once was) to help people engage with the world and grow into themselves—to discover the overlap between their interests and their talents and develop it. Different people and schools each embrace distinctive visions of empathy, understanding, wisdom, and usefulness: The scholar aspires to know the forces that drive history forward, the inventor seeks to bend technology to practical ends, and the activist strives to reform institutions and inspire citizens to embrace justice. Schools with different educational missions ought to favor different students, and students with different aspirations ought to favor different schools.

Once more, round the 'Net

Not sure where to start this week. Maybe let's start with this, from Bicycling, on how social media affects, wait for it. . . what you eat! Yep. According to this article, "new research shows you’re more likely to consume the types of food you see most while scrolling on the ’gram." Not only are you what you eat, but you eat what you see. I guess placement ads must work for the same reason. There's a theological lesson there, isn't there. Something about fixing our eyes on Jesus.

But how about the mouth? Well, for you word of faith people, Andrew Gabriel, an Assembly of God theologian, so no cessationist, says it's overblown:

When I point out that there is no verse in the Bible where anyone ever says, “I decree and declare X over my life,” one question Christians sometimes raise is, “But don’t you believe the Bible when it says there is power in the tongue?”

Yes, I do. But we have to ask, what does the Bible mean when it refers to the power of the tongue?

Some Christians claim that because we are created in the image of God, we, like God, have the power in our tongues to speak things into being.

This is poor reasoning. God spoke the world into being literally out of nothing. No human has ever done that. And this is why no theologian in church history has ever suggested that being created in the image of God means that human words have creative power. Well…this, plus the fact that this idea has no biblical support.

But, as he does not hesitate to point out, the tongue does have real power to hurt and to heal, a theme that Ron Sider takes up via a guest post. Final two paragraphs:

We are speaking and hearing creatures. We live by words spoken and heard, words addressed and answered. In Finally Comes the Poet, Walter Brueggemann writes, “How we speak matters enormously…because the shape and power of everything else is put at risk and made possible by our speech with each other.”

Given our current situation, we have an option. Obama didn’t walk on water, but we have in him something far better in presidential rhetoric than what we’ve heard over the past three years. It seems worth talking about the difference words make and voting for something better in November.

Speaking of which, Heather Cox Richardson posted this Feb 23:

Ukraine journalist Marko Suprun and Russian-born foreign policy journalist Julia Ioffe said something interesting this morning on CNN. They were pointing out that observers often make the mistake of thinking that Russian disinformation is designed to pit the American left against the American right to sow chaos. But, in fact, they pointed out, Russian disinformation is designed to pit the American left and the American right against the American center, because it is in the great American center that democracy lives.

And David Fitch has this to say about reconciliation (part 2 to follow next week):

The “enemy-making machine” is my label for how antagonisms work in a society that lives in autonomy from God. Using observations taken from the field of “critique of ideology” (or “critical theory”), I’ve noticed several repeatable patterns to how antagonisms work in our culture and even in our churches. There are several elements to it that can help us ask the right questions, diagnose what is happening, and resist entering into the enemy-making machine. I contend if we can resist its temptation, we can open space for the presence of the living God to unwind the antagonism and make way for grace, forgiveness, and healing.

He follows that with some solid advice; read it!

On a darker side of things, this op-ed says that maybe it's just a dark comedy

I’m sorry not sorry to be a Cassandra about this — and I sure hope I’m wrong. But confronted with this reality, it is staggering to me that anyone can say we should chill. The nature of Trump’s instinctual tyranny is that it never stops by itself. And, like any psychological disorder, it never rests. It has an energy all its own. Each new beachhead of power is simply a means to acquire more of it in an ever-more ambitious and dynamic form. This is not a comedy; it’s a tragedy we want to believe is a comedy. Because the alternative is too nightmarish. A Kierkegaard quote, of all things, popped on Twitter this week that seemed to capture the dynamic beautifully: “A fire broke out behind stage at a theater. The clown walked out to warn the public and they thought it was a joke and they applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that’s exactly how the world will end: to generous applause from wits who think it’s a joke.”

Or maybe, this whole thing is because we have a warped view of masculinity.

The gospel of Jesus is not a gospel of proving yourself or measuring up. It’s a gospel of acceptance. Proving yourself is unnecessary. Before you can make your case that you belong, the Father places his signet ring on your finger and calls you “son.” Your title, your place, your identity has been secured by an act of love. Not a show of strength.

This one is compliments of Jim E. (who says he got it from James E.). David Bentley Hart looks at what socialism really is, not the imaginary versions that are used as scare tactics, and then proceeds to dismantle a few things that need dismantling. I'll just grab one paragraph, but as always, read the whole thing

Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth. They know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know little or nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like “socialism” and “capitalism.” Chiefly, what they have been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions. This is at once the most comic and most tragic aspect of the excitable alarm that talk of social democracy or democratic socialism can elicit on these shores. An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete. They are far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone to irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth, while effectively paying more in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local, and sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover). One might think that a people who once rebelled against the mightiest empire on earth on the principle of no taxation without representation would not meekly accept taxation without adequate government services. But we accept what we have become used to, I suppose. Even so, one has to ask, what state apparatus in the “free” world could be more powerful and tyrannical than the one that taxes its citizens while providing no substantial civic benefits in return, solely in order to enrich a piratically overinflated military-industrial complex and to ease the tax burdens of the immensely wealthy?

OK, this is getting long, so a couple on education. First, the situation for adjuncts. Summary: not good. Fix: complicated. And Chris Gehrz asks if your Christian college will close. Hard thoughts, but good ones. And the old curmudgeocrat takes a look at the loss of shared public spaces via technology. Worth a read.

In other news, A.J. takes a look at productivity. BW3 quotes from Volf on divine retribution. Interesting quotation and worth thinking about (chase the link). And Christianity Today talks about identificational repentance.

Daniel was taken into captivity along with thousands of other Israelites during the Babylonian exile. There he was confronted with the complexities of living out his faith in a foreign culture while working for a pagan king. His prayer comes after decades of service to a foreign nation.

You do not have to read very much of the text to recognize the prayer as a confession. Daniel finds just about every way imaginable to ask for forgiveness. And he fully identifies himself with his people: We have sinned. We have rebelled. We have not listened. We have done wrong. We have been wicked. We have transgressed. We have turned away. We have been unfaithful. We have refused to obey. We have not sought the Lord. We have not turned from our sins. We have not given attention to your truth.

You would be hard-pressed to find a more comprehensive acknowledgment of guilt, which is a little mystifying because, up until this point, Daniel hasn’t exhibited any obvious moral lapses. He’s been the very model of a faithful servant of God.

There’s a disconnect between his exemplary behavior and his humble confession. It makes you want to protest and say, “Daniel, you don’t have to do that. You didn’t do anything wrong. It’s those who were unfaithful who should be apologizing!”

Daniel’s approach is so opposite from my own. When it comes to collective sins—whether those of the church, the clergy, or the nation—I want to distance myself from the offense. I want to point out why “they” are not “me.” And I want to denounce what I see “them” doing.

Yep. Here's an encouraging post, via Jim E. again, about a boss who put actions to his words by taking a pay cut back in 2015 and giving that money to his employees. Guess what? It worked. His employees are more productive and less stressed. Whodda thunk, eh? If you're not spending all your energy working 2–3 jobs to make ends meet on minimum wage, maybe you'll have energy to do one job well. Duh, as we used to say.

OK, two final posts on books. Nick Norelli on book gluttony (he should post more often). And the Literary Review of Canada looks at a book about books:

One thing to keep in mind when we talk idealistically about books is that many of the people who work directly with them—publishers, retailers, librarians, and authors alike—generally value one form of paper over all others: money. Publishing, like all other industries, is a profit-minded business, and bottom-line thinking often has ugly consequences for the object itself. Price’s book, for instance, contains a provoking “interleaf”—a section of about eight pages in which you read each line of text from the left-hand page across the gutter of the book to the adjoining right-hand page. It’s a clever game of mise-en-page, driving home visually and phenomenologically how our posture affects our experience of books and how habituated we are to using the material form of a book one page at a time. But the “interleaf” is also a failed experiment, thanks to the sloppiness with which Price’s book was bound up. Not a single one of the eight pages in my copy lines up properly across the gutter, rendering a hands-on study in graphic design just an unreadable, vertiginous nightmare. You should love books, we are told, even when they’ve been assembled with the care usually allowed to a last-minute science project.

Ouch! Wish I could disagree with them, but I can't.

That's it for this week. Hope you found something worth reading and didn't get too mad at me : )

In case you've been living under a rock this last week...

Christianity Today published an op-ed endorsing impeachment and removal of the current president. All that needs to be said was in that op-ed. Of course, the resulting onslaught of criticism is to be expected. When you put your hope in an idol, any idol, and that idol gets attacked, you fight back, right? That's what the Israelites did when Jeremiah confronted them. That's what happened to Amos when he confronted the Northern Kingdom. Of course, that doesn't make it any fun for the ones being attacked. Here's the final paragraph of the editorial:

We have reserved judgment on Mr. Trump for years now. Some have criticized us for our reserve. But when it comes to condemning the behavior of another, patient charity must come first. So we have done our best to give evangelical Trump supporters their due, to try to understand their point of view, to see the prudential nature of so many political decisions they have made regarding Mr. Trump. To use an old cliché, it’s time to call a spade a spade, to say that no matter how many hands we win in this political poker game, we are playing with a stacked deck of gross immorality and ethical incompetence. And just when we think it’s time to push all our chips to the center of the table, that’s when the whole game will come crashing down. It will crash down on the reputation of evangelical religion and on the world’s understanding of the gospel. And it will come crashing down on a nation of men and women whose welfare is also our concern.

Well said. Yes, I wish they had taken a stand years ago, but at least they did it now. Galli is well-aware that it probably won't make a difference in the general evangelical population. CT has always been a magazine for the evangelicals who tend to be more intellectually inclined.

Here's a couple responses that I would consider balanced: The Atlantic; John Fea has had numerous posts, but this one sums up the hypocrisy of certain "court evangelicals". I could link to others, such as Warren Throckmorton, but you get the idea.

The Anxious Bench reflects on Ron Sider and his influence. Summary statement at the end: "Ron Sider is still trying to evangelize the evangelicals."

Meanwhile, someone raised evangelical reflects on that heritage. Worth pondering. In my experience, people are always receptive to bringing up church history, the church fathers, etc. when explaining why a certain doctrine is the way it is, and why another one is incorrect. What they won't tolerate, though, is when I start drawing conclusions on how we should live based on those doctrines. In other words, keep it in the mind and you are fine. Touch my stuff, and you are in serious trouble. That seems to be a recurring theme, doesn't it? Genesis 3 anyone?

Speaking of that, remember the Wheaton professor who wore a hijab? Remember her name? I didn't think so; neither did I, but her life is slowly being put back together. A documentary is being made. Read the article for a small taste of what it must be like to be an Afro-American woman at an evangelical school who dares to say something less than acceptable to the alumni. Remember, for small evangelical schools, the alumni are what keeps the school afloat. As high as the tuition is at those schools, that doesn't pay the bills. Not even close. And the endowments aren't huge. I know; I went to one: Asbury College (now University). And over the years, I've watched the alumni at other small schools force those schools to give "the left boot of fellowship" to professors who said things they didn't like. Didn't matter whether what they said was true or not. Of course that shouldn't surprise us, should it? The Old Testament prophets wouldn't win any popularity contests, would they?

But the US evangelical scene isn't the only evangelical scene in disarray. Brexit, the never coming, never going away issue for the (un)United Kingdom has evangelicals there in disagreement.

And speaking of the UK, my favorite Classicist, who happens to have been born on my birthday (only a few years earlier), Mary Beard, reflects on the current status of higher education. Many good points there; do read it.

As long as we're in academia, how about a feel-good piece? Times Higher Education (THE) asks "Is there still a place for kindness in today’s harsh academic environment?" And then gives personal testimonies by academics on how little acts of kindness went a long way when they were just starting out. I'll have more to say on that next week (I hope) as I recount a couple from my past. Meanwhile, be sure to check it out; here's a taste:

This act of academic kindness occurred some years ago, but I only heard about it recently, from its beneficiary. She was teaching part-time at my university when, at short notice and in the middle of the marking season, she was shortlisted for a full-time post at another institution. Two of my colleagues—one a full-time lecturer, the other part-time herself—took all her marking off her so that she had time to prepare for her presentation and interview.

In their book On Kindness (2009), Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor argue that kindness is now seen as “a virtue of losers”. They attribute this to the ascendancy of free-market individualism, which has cultivated competitiveness and mistrust and led to “a life of overwork, anxiety, and isolation”.

If they are right, then kindness should also be endangered within the university. The new managerialism urges us to see ourselves as hard-nosed entrepreneurs competing for awards, grants and research time, while also making us feel that no amount of success will ever appease the gods of compliance. It makes the modern university not so much a cruel as a callous place, one where feeling harassed and stressed makes us thoughtless and self-absorbed. We are rarely unkind on purpose, but being unkind by accident usually has the same effect.

What is remarkable, though, is the doggedness of our desire to be kind. There is still room in academia for what A.H. Halsey, in The Decline of Donnish Dominion (1992), calls “commensality”, which literally means sharing a table and which he uses to mean that intangible sense of collegiality on which we thrive. Universities would grind to a halt without these millions of small, inconspicuous acts of goodwill.

On that same hopeful note, here is a nice advent meditation. A small excerpt, but it's a short enough piece you should read the whole thing:

Instead, Jesus completely disregarded the idea that the woman or himself were defiled, inherently capable of defiling others, or needed separation from others. The woman wasn’t an obstacle to overcome on his way to arguably more important tasks, nor was she an object of defilement he had to protect himself from. Jesus instead acknowledged and blessed her publicly then went on his way unflustered, undeterred.

Paranoid? Think you are being followed? Well, you probably are, but it's that smartphone in your pocket that's doing the following. And the data are being monetized to target you with ads for stuff you don't need, but probably think you want. Read this. Of course, I doubt you'll give up your phone (I won't), but at least consider turning off tracking on as many apps as you can. And, remember that the ads you see are designed to own you. You read that right. They aren't just trying to part with your money; they want your soul. They want you to buy into the lie that without stuff you are less a human.

OK. This is getting long, but I have three more links, all tied to bad practices by the current administration (and in one case, the past two administrations):

You've been lied to about the war in Afghanistan. OK, you already knew that, or at least suspected it. But the real crime is

The lack of accurate statistics should bother us, just as the misrepresentation of them should disturb us even more. But the greatest outrage over these numbers is the fact that the United States never seriously considered that they needed to document the loss of Afghan lives in the first place.

We need to stop and pause at this reality because within it is the entire reason why the war has become the disaster that it is today. The United States never cared about counting the bodies of dead Afghans caused by the war they started. They didn’t count the dead, they didn’t count the wounded, and they didn’t count the displaced or traumatized.

They didn’t count the Afghans because the Afghans didn’t count.

As Christians, that should bother us. 'Nuff said there. Next, the new rules about sexual assault on campuses. What? I can't even begin to describe how wrong that is. Ask any rape counsellor about that idea. Want the number of reported assaults to go down without actually doing anything to prevent them (and possibly even encouraging more!)? They just wrote the ticket.

Final link. The FCC is stealing part of the radio spectrum set aside for improving car, bicycle, and pedestrian safety and giving it to, wait for it, Facebook and other commercial entities. As if you don't already check your Facebook status too much! Here are the bullet points, but read the whole article for more details:

The FCC recently announced it was reducing the airwave spectrum for vehicle-to-vehicle communication in cars.

This technology is supposed to reduce the amount of car wrecks by communicating from car to car things like speed, acceleration, hard braking, and red lights.

The move could set back the forward movement of vehicle-to-vehicle or vehicle-to-infrastructure communication in the U.S.

On that note, I'll end. This world is a mess, but Jesus is the hope. Someday, he will come back and set things straight, but in the meantime, we are called to live in love to our neighbors, praying for them and assisting them. All this can only happen by the power of the Holy Spirit living within us and through us. Don't forget that and fall into self-righteousness and pride—or despair that you don't reach some goal.

Pseudo-literacy and the U.S. school

One cannot, beyond a severely limited and superficial degree, inject sensibility and intellectual rigour into the mass of society. One can, instead, trivialize, water down, package mundanely, the cultural values and products towards which the common man is being directed. The specific result is the disaster of pseudo-literacy and pseudo-numeracy in the American high school and in much of what passes for so-called ‘higher education’. The scale and reach of this disaster have become a commonplace of desperate or resigned commentary. The predigested trivia, the prolix and pompous didacticism, the sheer dishonesty of presentation which characterize the curriculum, the teaching, the administrative politics of daily life in the high school, in the junior college, in the open—admission ‘university’ (how drastically America has devalued this proud term), constitute the fundamental scandal in American culture. A fair measure of what is taught, be it in mathematics, be it in history, be it in foreign languages, indeed with regard to native speech, is, in the words of the President of Johns Hopkins, ‘worse than nothing’. It has produced what he calls ‘America’s international illiteracy’ or what Quentin Anderson entitles ‘the awful state of intellectual affairs in this country’.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, pages 293–94

Schools

Schooling today, notably in the United States, is planned amnesia.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 15

Learning styles?

I've been hearing about learning styles for what seems like forever—especially related to language acquisition. It sounds good in theory, but...

“by the time we get students at college,” said the Indiana University professor Polly Husmann, “they’ve already been told ‘You’re a visual learner.’” Or aural, or what have you.

The thing is, they’re not. Or at least, a lot of evidence suggests that people aren’t really one certain kind of learner or another. In a study published last month in the journal Anatomical Sciences Education, Husmann and her colleagues had hundreds of students take the vark questionnaire to determine what kind of learner they supposedly were. The survey then gave them some study strategies that seem like they would correlate with that learning style. Husmann found that not only did students not study in ways that seemed to reflect their learning style, those who did tailor their studying to suit their style didn’t do any better on their tests.—The Atlantic, April 11, 2018

<idle musing>
Yep.
</idle musing>