Study: Economic Boost of Deforestation Is Short-Lived

"The argument for deforestation has always been that the economic benefits to local communities are too great to overlook. But now a new study in the current issue of Science suggests that's not true. A team of researchers from Portugal, France and Britain studied nearly 300 Brazilian municipalities on the frontier of the Amazonian rain forest, assessing their development levels — based on income, life expectancy and literary rates — before deforestation and afterward. Researchers found that logging forests and converting the land to pasture and agriculture initially raised development levels in a burst of prosperity. But in the years that followed deforestation, that bubble of prosperity popped, and development levels declined until on average the communities were no better off than they had been before the trees were destroyed."

Economic Crisis Stirs Free-Market Debate

"For months, the U.S. government and financial institutions have been operating in crisis mode, frantically crafting emergency programs designed to forestall a systemic economic collapse. The steps taken during these times have challenged longstanding assumptions about the operation of modern free-market capitalism and the role of the government in the economy. In the aftermath of the crisis and the inauguration of a new, more activist Democratic administration, U.S. economic thinking seems to be at a historic turning point."

Too Many Cultures -- Part 2

Before the work of 20th-century ethnographer Franz Boas, culture was still a matter of human freedom, variously expressed in terms of corporate or particular acts of creativity; after Boas, the twentieth century entered a debate as to free or determined action of human beings; namely, does a culture create its members or do they create the culture? For example, within Ruth Benedict's work, cultural relativism took only an absolutist quality and strangely is no final authority for the cultural interpreter. Yet she judged cultures on their ability to satisfy personal gratifications and avoid personal suffering. In other words, despite her relativist stance, she had overriding assumptions about the nature of human life and suffering.

Thus, despite the claim to be objective, anthropological studies were freighted with their personal worldviews and value judgments. Indeed, how could they not be? Alfred Kroeber, famously identified 171 definitions in 13 subsets, concluding that to describe without evaluation is simply impossible. Leslie White in 1959 would hold that culture is a mentalist notion of the symbolism of material objects, a supra-organic system that resides outside of any one individual. Culture is not "intangible, imperceptible, and ontologically unreal abstractions" but "real, substantial, observable subject matter" (234). In other words, the culture of the observer inevitably shapes his or her findings about another culture. By 1960, the term culture had the quality of what Mikhail Bakhtin has called heteroglossia; the word's history carried conflict within its unstated assumptions, which only when challenged, revealed themselves as contestable traditions as to what "culture" actually warranted.

As Terry Eagleton observes, "Culture is said to be one of the three most complex words in the English language, and the term which is sometimes considered its opposite--nature-- is commonly awarded the accolade of being the most complex of all." Culture fluctuates between referencing

1. the immaterial culture that transcends and informs physical civilization;
2. the high culture or aesthetic cultivation that makes one "cultured;"
3. the educational training of the intellectual and moral abilities;
4. the sociological and anthropological use of the word, that is the beliefs and life-ways of a group of people.

Culture can, thus, carry resonances of the loft elite and the broadly popular, of the pristinely spiritual and the socially constructed, of the intellectually astute and the unthinking mass appeal, of the traditional and the experimental. In short, it is can everything and nothing. One is reminded here of Walt Whitman's quintessential claim to bragging rights: "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes."

This leaves those who claim that cultures can be understood and compared via a set of scientific claims with several questions to answer:

• How does one coherently speak of an ethic of anthropological (i.e. cultural) description, given that an ethic is always the product of a social way of life?
• What guarantees a good, fitting, or well-done analysis of one culture from that of another?
• Likewise, how does one cultivate culture and why should one? Can one?
• Or does the lifeway of a people set the terms for anything like significant meaning to begin with?
• Can the "culture" of science or the "culture" of literature observationally offer truth about another's rituals, arts, and words?
  

Too Many Cultures--Part 1

The anthropological meaning of culture has its origins in attempts to be both descriptive and proscriptive. The typical definitions of culture by their very claim to be objective hide from themselves their own assumptions, that is the history of inquiry out of which they function. The way they observe the world doesn't come out of a vacuum. Instead, it has a history of seeing and asking certain questions about things. A short history of the word "culture" helps make this point.

The word "culture" has its origins in the Latin cultura Cultura described the practice of cultivating plants and domestic livestock. This meaning by the Renaissance expanded to include the idea of human development. William Caxton's Golden Legend (1483), for example, could decry the loss of correct worship: "Whan they departe fro the culture and honour of theyr god." (81.1). In similar fashion, Thomas More's Life of John Picus, Earl of Mirandula (1510), could speak of "the culture and profit of theyr minds" as opposed to the "pomp and ostentation of their wit" (1.369). By the Enlightenment, Thomas Hobbes could write of the training of the human body as culture, and as the eighteenth-century closed, one could speak of a culture of human improvement (OED). The Romantic and pre-Romantic uses of the German Kultur also remained undefined because they had yet to suffer the linguistic rupture that the late 19th century would bring. One could still be cultured, i.e. trained by others to cultivate for oneself a spiritual, aesthetic, intellectual, and material way of life, one embodied in a people and period. Culture, as far as they were concerned, must be encultured.

By Sir Edward Burnett Tylor's Primitive Culture (1871) and by Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy (1869) "culture" already contained within itself fundamental disagreements as to the nature of human meaning and happiness. The way of life of a people as a Geist was to be studied in an objective manner. For the ethnographer Tylor, culture was a system of human development that may be objectively observed and whose laws may be discovered. "The condition of culture among the various societies of mankind, in so far as it is capable of being investigated on general principles, is a subject apt for the study of laws of human thought and action."

For Arnold, on the other hand, culture was a particular capacity that has been cultivated, an aesthetic and moral ability that is educated and matured: "Culture is then properly described not as having its origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection. It moves by the force, not merely or primarily of the scientific passion for pure knowledge, but also of the moral and social passion for doing good" (31).

These two definitions ironically contain the apotheoses of each other. The Darwinian Tylor's approach to culture enshrined a set of investigative virtues and values: knowledge of principle, disinterested, detached study, an ability to extrapolate natural laws from environment and social behavior, and so on. These are social and ethical values with a certain standard in view arising from a certain point in history. Arnold's protest against the philistines also contained a measure of detachment, in that the good and pleasing are considered something that can be kept in view; they are in a sense presumably undisputable. In other words, the idea of culture now faced a potential set of contradictions: To observe culture in Tylor's sense one had to cultivate a culture of learning in Arnold's sense. Likewise, culture in Arnold's sense could be rendered simply relativistic by students of culture in Tylor's sense. But this raises a unique dilemma: how can observer of culture in Tylor's sense claim to stand in a objective (i.e. cultureless) space in order to reach such conclusions?

Nothing illustrates this quandary better than the unraveling bankruptcy of the term in anthropology in the 20th century.

Ageing Populations: A Slow-Burning Fuse

"The rich world’s population is ageing fast, and the poor world is only a few decades behind. According to the UN’s latest biennial population forecast, the median age for all countries is due to rise from 29 now to 38 by 2050. At present just under 11% of the world’s 6.9 billion people are over 60. Taking the UN’s central forecast, by 2050 that share will have risen to 22% (of a population of over 9 billion), and in the developed countries to 33% (see chart 2). To put it another way, in the rich world one person in three will be a pensioner; nearly one in ten will be over 80."

Complaint and Prayer

The Psalter models for us that the way of complaint is part of biblical fidelity and troth--at least a certain kind of complaint joined to an expectation of shalom. The psalmists complain to God, objecting that he could have and on the surface should have intervened in any number of horrific circumstances. The sheer weight of atrocity is often cited by them, speaking from a wounded position, an exhausted position. The believer says to God, "As best I can understand from my limited position you appear to have allowed horrible things to happen. Why? Should you do such a thing?"

Then, rather than walk away in disgust or disbelief, the believer waits on God. Believers protest from the ground of covenant—this is what God has promised us and who he is; therefore, should not God intervene? (i.e. Ps 44, 74, 88, 102, 142) This position at its best seeks to continue to affirm God’s mystery and goodness even amidst confusion and doubt. It has its own kind of eros, its own kind of ascending desire.

Likewise, this response holds it important to identify with the suffering of others, not to make light of their pain by seeking easily to explain it. This kind of sympathetic and confused covenantal response is loving, full of the charity of agape. The isms of the twentieth century remind us well of the failure and dangers of utopian visions. Our eschatological rationality should act in full awareness of the dangers of demagoguery, either in believing that we ourselves can change the world or in the furor of a people disappointed by that world. But this need not mean we do not reach out with the hands of love, offering the gospel of Christ.

With this in mind read (or pray) the following:

You have made us like sheep to be eaten and have scattered us among the nations.
You are selling your people for a trifle and are making no profit on the sale of them.
You have made us the scorn of our neighbors, a mockery and derision to those around us.
You have made us a byword among the nations, a laughing-stock among the peoples.
My humiliation is daily before me, and shame has covered my face;
Because of the taunts of the mockers and blasphemers, because of the enemy and avenger.
All this has come upon us; yet we have not forgotten you, nor have we betrayed your covenant.
Our heart never turned back, nor did our footsteps stray from your path;
Though you thrust us down into a place of misery, and covered us over with deep darkness.
If we have forgotten the Name of our God, or stretched out our hands to some strange god,
Will not God find it out? for he knows the secrets of the heart.
Indeed, for your sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.
Awake, O Lord! why are you sleeping? Arise! do not reject us for ever.
Why have you hidden your face and forgotten our affliction and oppression?
We sink down into the dust; our body cleaves to the ground.
Rise up, and help us, and save us, for the sake of your steadfast love.

Charity and the Politics of Honors

Caritas is the ancient Christian notion of love as concretely expressed in public and private actions. As a Latin term it almost functions as a cognate to the New Testament notion of agape. The two certainly overlap. Love (caritas, agape, call it what you will) can expose the hidden motives behind our attempts at honors, including that of academic programs.

Marilyn McCord Adams has observed that evils in life are not limited to questions of pain and morality. Esteem and disesteem make up a serious component in the way we value our lives: “[T]he category of honor centers, not on the evaluation of deeds, but on the sacred quality of persons," which is not to deny there is any relationship existing between conduct and honor. As a public and social system of regard, honor is something that is garnered because it is both owned by the person and given by the society. That universities regularly trade in systems of honor and shame: grades, awards, regalia, scholarships, and so on, should give us pause. As Adams further notes, honor (or shame) takes both “ascribed” and “acquired” forms: the former is given because of a person’s birth, class, or station; the later results from highly regarded deeds or misdeeds. The emphasis, rather than being on the quality of the actions themselves, however, falls on the person in toto. (The honors student is, well, more honorable, right?) We should not forget that symbolic systems of identity such as these are real matters of import for our students. Honor and shame have painful implications. The experience of even minor evils can disgrace a person, and that loss of honor can result in real anguish and humiliation. Psychic pain is as real as physical pain, and at times even more important for how it deforms and even destroys human self-regard.

Nothing about this understanding need assume the academic "innocence" of the “victims” who are "robbed" of self-respect. A poor performing student is a poor performing student. But our gifted students, the kind I tend to see in honors education, even more often have their reputations and self-conceptions tied to the academic system of rewards. The student in question may not think of himself or herself as a participant in a combative academy of honor, but something like that does continue to exist. A system of honor and shame takes place inevitably in an environment of challenge and riposte. Honor is a symbolic quality that must be maintained by the person in question. One either continues to gather and defend one’s honor, or one loses it. Any challenge--let us say, an average or poor grade-- to a person’s honor calls for some kind of response:

1. “positive rejection,” in which the person (or professor) making the challenge is deemed inferior and therefore unworthy of consideration at all;
2. “negative refusal,” in which case the person is now considered shamed--always a dicey approach in academics; or
3. “acceptance of the challenge” which can result in a war of wit (or arms) in a cycle of counter-challenges (Adams 109-110).

This pattern can take academic forms, even in a Christian environment that prides itself as a supportive atmosphere.

We need to take a long look at how their system of honor feeds into the modern social imaginary. The economic state of the West appears to be built more and more on a new pagan desire for libidio and power and for a stable control of human destiny; it wants to offer a revised salvation of personal prosperity and life needs satisfied. What kind of honor are we preparing our students to receive?

An eschatological structure, as I've discussed in the last two posts, can move in repentant or rebellious directions, moving toward or away from God's intended pattern of development. Offering a new millennium, the current libidinal world economy offers a false eschatology, narratives of sexual and consumerist salvation--an end to repression, an awakening to utter multiplicity of desire; the body as pseudo-sacramental hypersexualization able to endlessly buy and consume products of desire. The modern media and consumerist state functions as a secular soteriology which will not permit the claims of Christ as the only Lord (Caesar). Our modern social spaces are what Graham Ward calls cities of aspiration and desire; unable to offer a true community, they only manage autonomous individuals in their personal choices. "It is not good to eat much honey, or to seek honor on top of honor. Like a city breached, without walls, is one who lacks self-control." (Prov 25:27-28). Such a statement, I realize, sounds faintly puritanical and bizarre, maybe even unpatriotic, to modern ears.

To speak of the "politics" and "economy" of the Christian Church is to risk confusion because to speak of the Church (and the Christian university) as a counter-polis is to expand the definition of Realpolitik to a sacramental vision of virtue-oriented traditions. These traditions have the end of God's kingdom reigning over all. The libertarian society of atomic individuals, by contrast, is a truncated politics. The purpose of power and honor is forgotten; or worse, it is made into insatiable desire itself. To train our students for this, to make them leaders in such a system, is problematic. The church as public polis is really trans-political in the modern sense of that word, and the local and the small may reflect far better the kind of honor and worth we wish to train our students to undergo and to give away. In the same way the oikos of God, God's household, transcends our normal conceptions of economics as certain macro and micro-systems of human monetary exchange.

Admittedly, this seems like an uphill battle when we as Americans, for example, treat our educations as economic counters of the more limited kind, but we as global Christians have the gifts of congregation and scripture to counter them with. The cross of Christ is, after all, an apocalypse, a revelation of God's judgment on the powers that be. His stigmata are signs of compassion. Atonement makes our education both polis and oikos, politics and economy, but of a far wider place. The sacrifice and splendor of a cross-shaped teaching will be wasteful in its love for and on the students. The crowns of heaven we receive can be cast down at the feet of Jesus, and now we multiply honor when we freely pour it out in sacrifice.

We cannot squander what we cannot exhaust. The love of God is a generative principle within our pedagogies.

Creating a Culture of Advent

There is more than one way to talk about expectation and education. We should remember as Christian educators and students that we are a people "outside the city" still awaiting the full vindication of God on that last of all days, and even in that vindication we expect our academic service and ministry to be tried by the fire of Christ's judgment seat. Our programs, lesson plans, and papers will be purged. What will remain of my own, I wonder?

The season of Advent, for example, stresses not only the first coming of Christ, but also the second coming. It is a season about being prepared, and such annual preparation is good for our academic calendar-driven mania. Advent reminds us that we are called to waiting, to patience between the first and second advents of our savior. To wait is to remember how fragile our egos, how empty our claims for ourselves are, how partial our self-concepts are. When we wait, we may be left alone for a season, staring into the silence, unable to be propped up by another's friendship or false praise or kind mercy. When we wait, we may face temptations to be afraid, to fear that God will not act. When we wait, we also face the temptation to onui, to boredom and to cynicism. In the midst of our longing and our vulnerability, we may even be tempted to disbelief, to wonder if any of this that we hold to is true at all.

But this waiting, this "being put on hold" is good for us. In our flattened-out economy of instant everything, we need to learn to wait in silence. Silence is an important preparation for learning, a fertile field sowed in both peace and suffering. To create a culture of Advent is to place our honors and awards within the context of eternity, to see them as gifts to be given away. They are accolades in the academy that we sometimes achieve in sweat and tears and sleepless nights, yet they are finally still gifts--not paper and parchment we can hold on to forever. It is better to wear them lightly as Thomas, Archbishop Beckett secretly wore a hairshirt under his Canterbury robes. We either undertake this voluntarily or what we are left with is finally a far more painful separation. T.S. Eliot's masterful Little Gidding reflects on this strange choice of persecution or of apostasy:

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire (sec. IV).

This I admit seems entirely counter-intuitive to the mission of higher education. We are accustomed to the work of words and knowledge. To consider that our calling might deserve divine wrath seems offensive at best, and possibly sadomasochistic. Paul warns us, however, that "[w]e know that we all possess knowledge. Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. The man who thinks he knows something does not yet know as he ought to know" (I Cor. 8:1-2). We need to go without; we need to find ourselves alone; we need to be left with ourselves trembling before the throne of the Almighty Judge and before the Master of All Things.

During our waiting, we remember that we need Jesus to come and to tear down our career pretenses, to curse our pedagogical inadequacies, and to pronounce a warning to our inflated souls in order that we might be saved. Only when we give ourselves over to such a place can we receive the blessing of renewal that God has for us, including the form it must take in the academy. Only when we ourselves are aware of our own limitations, our self-deceptions, and our sin are we then prepared to extend the promise of God's good peace, his good wholeness, his honor to others. Only then can we begin to see our students and teachers as Christ sees them. May this prayer be our own:

May God be merciful to us and bless us,show us the light of his countenance and come to us.
May your ways be known upon earth,your saving health among all nations.
May the peoples praise you, O God; let all the peoples praise you.
May the nations be glad and sing for joy, for you judge the peoples with equity and guide all the nations upon earth.
May the peoples praise you, O God; let all the peoples praise you.
The earth has brought forth her increase; may God, our own God, give us his blessing.
May God give us his blessing, and may all the ends of the earth stand in awe of him (Psalm 67, BCP)

Advent, after all, means "appearing." We are each to prepare our hearts to be images of God, to be an advent of Christ--an appearing of Christ-- in our circle of influence, wherever that may be. The nations need his saving health. If the primary ontological reality is participation (caritas), then a history based on power abuse is a partial history, a history of evil only as negation. We look for our eschatological bodies to be perfect and to behold the beatific vision. What we are is not lost but refined.

A culture of Advent is a culture of forgiveness, living in two times: the past offense and God's completed restoration held together but the later like a counterpoint revising the former's meaning. Our final unction is a pledge of our final healing. The beatific vision need not be understood as a static vision that privileges the theoretical disciplines over the applied as more reflective of the eschaton's final state. If the energies of God are active, ever circulating in love, then as the children realize in C.S. Lewis' The Last Battle, we can go forever "further up and further in."

Response to Online Education Post

I certainly appreciate your views on online education; however, the education system is not what it was over 26 years ago when I attended public school. Children are introduced to computers throughout elementary school these days. The penmanship of our youth today is evidence of the negative impact technology has played in the teaching styles of today.

The technological advances of today have also enhanced the opportunities to participate in distance learning. I have attended traditional college classes throughout the years; however, I prefer attending classes online. I find my university's online format structured and engaging.

I definitely think it is important to have a strong support system, but I also reflect on the intrinsic motivation that led me to return to school.

We all have different learning styles; online education isn't for everyone, but at least it provides a viable option to traditional learning.

Dawn Workman

The Trouble with Teacher Unions

New York has an interesting mess on its hands. The teacher unions exude so much power that teachers accused of misconduct not only receive due process in the form of a disciplinary hearings but their full salary with benefits until the matter is resolved. Granted, most people wisely believe that the educators should receive a fair adjudication with the chance to fight the complaint against them. Teacher unions do afford their members protection against termination without viable cause or the wrath of vengeful administrator.

However, New York's process is strange to say the least. The teachers cannot return to the classroom until the matter is resolved. The city that never sleeps (or at least the Bloomberg administration) requires the accused educators to spend their working days in holding cells or "rubber rooms" as the teachers refer to them. They are not required to perform any work on behalf of the school district yet still receive full compensation.

While that sounds crazy, the wheels of justice crank so slowly in New York that many teachers enjoy the cozy confines of the rubber room for six years! Therefore, New York taxpayers are still paying the salary of teachers who are not equipped to be in the professions as well as those wrongly accused teachers who are rotting away while they should be in the classroom helping children.

Perhaps I should be railing against administrative incompetence and red tape!!

Anxiety and Expectation

What does it mean to long for the end times, for the apocalypse? And why is it that all cultures seem to have some variation of a story about the end of life and time? Definitions are perhaps in order here. An apocalypse, first and foremost, is a narrative of the world, both present and to come. It tells a story of both what we long for and therefore, what currently we do not. Apocalupsis means an “unveiling” or revelation. In that sense, eschatological expectation still awaits decisive moments of victory, even if already declared. We are longing for an end to the wickedness, evil, and grief of the world. We look for the promise of judgment, as well as the promise of the universe made new and renewed.

Bernard McGinn's definition of apocalypse is fairly typical and quite comprehensive:

“Apocalypse" is a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, in so far as it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial, in so far as it involves another, supernatural world.

Thus, apocalypses reach both into the future and into the heavenlies. They bring together the future ahead of us and the eternal above and outside of us. They long for the merging of the two: the holy and everlasting realm comes to earth, touches down into the time-bound realm to remake it in the image of the eternal.

Of course, it is possible to treat apocalyptic longing as nothing but a species of sublimated and anthropological longing. Just as something that humans do to help make this pain-filled world a little more bearable. Frank Kermode, for example, notes how apocalyptic thought nearly always operates out of the “fiction of transition,” the belief that the writer’s own era is a period between the golden past and the coming restoration. The present era becomes a saeculum, an era in providential history, subject at present to “intemporal agony” as it awaits its salvation. Such a conception of the age as a period of transition lends also itself to a feeling of pent-up waiting. One is continually denied what has been promised. Apocalyptic endings, in this view, always end in anger and frustration.

But surely the answer for Christians is not a refusal of the ending or a transposition of it into nothing but a small meditation on our personal deaths, as important as that can be. We cannot privatize the apocalypse. We hold out hope for God to judge this world and make a new heaven and earth not just for ourselves but for all creation--humans, other species, the ecosystems themselves.

An apocalypse is a theodicy (i.e. an answer to the problem of evil) and, therefore, a meditation upon one large aspect of the educational project as well. An apocalypse answers the problem of evil by tying a description of the world’s evil to hope in God’s actions and trust in God’s justice. It suggests that the problem of evil is answered by the decisive, future answer that God will give—an eradication of all that offends. Likewise, it trusts that the end result will be so decisive, so embarrassingly bountiful, as in some way to compensate or reconfigure what has come before. An apocalypse, even in its stark ash and blood of destruction and judgment, is finally an epistemology of abundance. God will not leave us to ourselves, nor will he leave the evil of existence without a flood of good that promises to drown (baptize, if you will) and cleanse the sin-stained world.

Thus, apocalypse is also a word for justice. As Stephen O’Leary observes, “Evil is or will be justified and made sensible in the ultimate destiny of the cosmos." Experientially in the present, an apocalypse is a theodicy because it offers the resources to name and manage evil's ability to unhinge the rationality of our lives. Life makes sense again when we understand at least in part what the end will be to the story. But an apocalypse is not just an existential moment of deep and dependent awareness; it is also a socio-psychological response and one that can be defensive in nature. Apocalypse operates as a “resistance to the powers that be," as Paul Fiddes puts it. And because it often gives voice to the disenfranchised, it challenges the “imperial speech” that “all is well."

Apocalypse is a call to social action and community formation, to praise and repentance. In short, to worship.

The Vanishing Theocracy

The U.S. Constitution includes language written to protect religious liberty while limiting the corrosive effect politics has on faith. Iran provides a good argument for maintaining this approach.

World Bank Delivers Haymaker

Presumably, the World Bank serves as the international lender for struggling, developing nations. The bank lends money to nations in need of infrastructure enhancements and economic growth. The goal is sustainable improvement in the standard of living for citizens in developing nations.

Today, the bank delivered a knee-bucking report on the health of the global economy. The global economy will shrink by 2.9% during 2009, according to the bank.

The carnage is not isolated but extends across the entire globe. Overall, global investment dropped by nearly 40% over the past year. Scary.

The Vanity of a University Education

"I said to myself, ‘I have acquired great wisdom, surpassing all who were over Jerusalem before me; and my mind has had great experience of wisdom and knowledge.’ And I applied my mind to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is but a chasing after wind.

For in much wisdom is much vexation,and those who increase knowledge increase sorrow." (Eccl 1:16-18)

Why, then, do we university professors, students, staff, and administration often fail in this Christian pedagogical project? We should begin by recognizing this implication of Scripture: The university is full of lies.

But, then, so is every aspect of human life. This ubiquity and immersion of evil is the meaning of total depravity: not that human beings are incapable of good, even great good, but that every aspect of our good is subject to corruption and that our “good” is inevitably mixed in its motives and ends. The language and lessons of paradox are profitably invoked before our attempts at the true understanding, the righteous act, and the sublime beauty. Sometimes the honorable and the dishonorable are impossible in practice to tease apart, as are the wise and foolish, the noble and ignoble, the selfless and selfish, and the attractive and repulsive. There is no perfect Christian education. Every university begun by people of faith is subject to the same forces of sin that infect everyday life. Thus, we must be willing to face the truth about our best efforts even in the name of Christ. All our efforts contain a measure of vanity. We should not be shocked to discover this worm at the heart of our pedagogical projects. Instead, such knowledge should force us back on God’s grace and mercy.

I would contend that Ecclesiastes is a good “prelude” to the Christian college or university and is especially instructive to honors students who strive, even expect, to thrive in the collegiate academic environment. It offers an astringent lesson on the failure of temporary happiness. The author of Ecclesiastes (hereafter Qohelet, meaning “teacher,” “preacher” or “gatherer”) invokes vanity (hesed) not just as an observation about life, but also as a judgment on its qualities. Hesed for Qohelet is the finding of evil in what we count as important and in what we suffer. The inevitable nature of death (Eccl 12:1-8) haunts our mirrors of self-delusion, and the limits of human memory haunt the shelf life of our scholarly reputations and our past students’ recall of our curriculum (Eccl 12:11-12; 8:13-18). The ephemeral nature of what we seek to attain and to retain is often invoked in satires on education such as Erasmus’ Praise of Folly or John Trumbull’s The Progress of Dullness, to name only two of multiple examples, but admittedly it is not a subject we are prone to return to. Critical realism suggests that we should.

Qohelet’s dissatisfaction with his various explorations of happiness is a sharp challenge to the promises by which universities sell themselves. He recounts the inevitable disappointment with pleasure, consumption, great works, ownership, power over others, possessions—monetary, aesthetic, territorial, sexual, even pleasure in work and in fame (Eccl 2). This is in part why the tradition of American education distorts the self as a basis and end for learning--because education is held out as the key to the promised good life, one built on all the above. Offering ourselves as a necessary step to career success may have a measure of truth to it, but we commit ourselves to an economy other than Jesus’ when we also tacitly suggest that this is the center of human meaning and purpose. "Since it is hard to market subversion, that creates a certain cognitive dissonance for colleges that retain the liberal arts ideal as more than a shibboleth," so says Merold Westphal. But at the same time, this negative potential is also true of a promotion of liberal arts as in itself being fulfilling.

Without the context and telos of the Christian eschaton, the liberal arts as career pursuits are also false gods subject to disappointment and human pretension. Qohelet treats work in a complex way—it is a burden and a labor, as full of conflict, danger, and the perversion of power, yet it is also a gift from God. This can be said of careers in academics and in politics, in business, in the human services sector, and so on. Work inevitably contains suffering, and that personal “happiness” is not itself a guarantee of anything, especially the condition of true blessedness which carries with it the deep joy of true happiness. Ordinary happiness is right and good, but it should not become a god, an attempt to escape the conditions of our existence as God’s creatures (Eccl 8:16-17; 9:7-12). The Christian university should offer a more full-bodied portrait of human existence and vocational fulfillment, including its sinfulness.

By themselves, career success and the liberal arts are both subject to the corruption of instrumentalism. Qohelet here, too, is instructive. We are all subject to nature’s limitations, to the seeming caprice of the world (Fortuna), to death. The university can overcome none of these, and we fool ourselves if we claim to be able. Ecclesiastes is a lesson that evil is not a question of systemic mismanagement or of an environmentally defective upbringing. Better organization and better education do not of themselves eradicate evil. To speak of the foolishness of the university may seem counter-intuitive to us, but we must recognize that its educational pretensions are finally empty. The disappointment surrounding portions of the postmodern multiversity is similar to the sage’s dark wisdom. Only when we come to understand deeply the failure of the university may we pursue a Christian education that seeks to align itself with God’s wise order for creation and the human person.

The misuse of academic power calls for Christian hospitality, as the economics of education must be chastened by Christian concern. As Jacques Ellul points out, “Our pursuit of money is infinite;” we can never have enough. Economic unrest is devouring in its service to the god Mammon. It is lost before death’s nullification: “The evil lies in the fact that money makes everything possible, yet it is nothing." In similar fashion, liberal arts, which in theory are for “nothing” but themselves, really become instruments of human pretension, a belief in career success, over-therorization as a tool for locating and creating illusions of order. “The sayings of the wise are like goads, and like nails firmly fixed are the collected sayings. . . Of anything beyond these, my child, beware. Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh” (Eccl 12:11-12).

Qohelet’s wisdom, we should not forget, is not at the center of the canonical truths, but functions (as does all the wisdom tradition) as an expression of creational and covenantal purpose. To fear the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (Prov 1:7). “The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God, and keep his commandments” (Eccl 12:13).

The Formative Role of Congregational Worship

"Sunday morning is the practice of a counter-life through counter-speech" -- Walter Brueggeman

Our ethical lives, as I've suggested in a number of posts lately, are best understood in a narrative that has key moments; they are full of defining events, as well as continual movement and development. Our personal plots, our characters' origins, climaxes, and dénouements, occur within particular settings that give shape and meaning to our stories. This is assuredly true of Christian tradition. There is a direct connection between the practice of congregational life and liturgy and the practice of Christian higher learning. The pursuit of Christian education must have as its end the good of worship because worship restores the practice of university learning to its original meaningful good.

Debra Dean Murphy notes that in worship, we practice being a certain kind of person; the same is true of classroom learning. True knowledge is committed to action, practice, habit, even ritual. For the Christian, such knowledge is at the heart of worship--it is doxological, Eucharistic, and liturgical. We are learning "to live by the story that has called [us] into existence." We cannot be outside the Christian story to truly experientially know it; instead, we must practice it.

True education is performative and therefore, transformative. Nisi crediertis, non intelligitis. (Unless you have believed, you will not understand.) Communion with God and his people and the pursuit of truth are not separate for the Christian--conversion is life-long because the relationship with God and others is life-long. True knowledge, then, involves desire for the other and is dependent upon the other (i.e. God). The typical pattern of congregational worship teaches us an alternative language that helps us resist the fallen powers of this world, which are expressed as false worldviews and as false social structures. This congregational pattern is participatory--it involves learning a language and a bodily habit. It involves learning to see, imagine, and practice the world differently than how our culture sees and enacts it. According to Murphy, in place of planned obsolescence, self-dependence, and a "myth of scarcity," Christian worship offers a pattern of ritual return:

1. Entrance: Gathering for worship and opening worship initiates us into another way of understanding the world, by its nature deeply physical. Its liturgical space, rituals, and scriptural and traditional imagery set us apart as a separate community.
   
2. Proclamation and response: The church in worship seeks a Holy Spirit-guided, mutual discerning of the scriptures as the Word of God. The Bible rightly interprets the world, instead of the reverse. Preaching and teaching are acts of holy imagination. They are also invitations to a corporate knowledge that begins by abiding in the triune life of God.
   
3. Thanksgiving and communion: All prayer has a corporate, transformative aspect to it, but we need to do a better job teaching ourselves what prayer does so that it can truly shape our identities. In the same way the "prayer" of the Lord's Supper is an expression of the mystery of God and, therefore, is essential to our identities in Christ.
   
4. Sending forth: The act of ending worship, especially with a prayer of blessing or commissioning, reminds us that our worship is our ethic; it is our condition rather than simply a source of ethical reflection. We are called to live out on a day-to-day basis all that our baptisms (i.e. our commitments to Christ) imply, and this is a life of worship in all its aspects--including the work of worldview transformation, the sharing of the gospel, and the work of justice in all its expressions.

We are formed and shaped by the practices that we submit ourselves to intellectually, emotionally, intuitionally, bodily, and socially, yet this pursuit of worship through education is finally dependent upon the Creator who transcends us and yet freely offers himself in Christ and in the Holy Spirit. Glen Stassen and David Gushee have labeled this triune character formation which is social and sacramental, and therefore, which is obedient in its liturgical dependence, as "[p]articipative grace." The cooperation of God's people with the in-breaking of his eschatological reign neither claims for itself a works-based righteousness nor acquiesces to moral passivity. Instead, it is the evidence of the work of the Holy Spirit on the heart of the faithful Christian. It is centered on the kind of virtuous habits the Christian internalizes and practices. It cannot be isolated as a topic for discussion only; it must arise out of internally reflective practices and commitments.

The actions commanded by Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, for example, are spiritually formative--they remake our hearts and whole persons when we practice them in grace. "Character is shaped in community, and that means churches must be communities, not mere preaching stations. . . . [K]oinonia . . combines the meaning of community and fellowship with the meaning of service" (Stassen 61). It seems to me that such an understanding can be embraced by both Catholic and Lutheran, by both Calvinist and Arminian. The debate as to whether God's righteousness is judicially designated or covenantally received, as well as whether it is infused or imparted, justifying us before and/or during the process of sanctification, certainly impinges on this question, but all these positions can accommodate the practical reality that (to quote Bono of U2) grace "she travels outside of karma."

Bernanke Under Investigation

Congress has initiated an investigation into Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's role in forcing Bank of America to buy troubled Wall street investment banking firm Merill Lynch.

This is scary since the president's new fiscal policy would appoint the fed as watchdog for our economic system.

Democracy or Dictatorship in Disguise?

My American Government course always begins with lectures and discussions on Christian citizenship and Democracy. One of the topics within Democracy is what I call the "Institutional Requirements" for Democratic governance. In other words, which leadership activities or characteristics are non-negotiable if a country wants to be considered a true democracy.

Here are some examples of said requirements:

1. Elected Officials

The people hire and fire so "leadership" never forgets who is the boss. Democracy requires popular sovereignty.

2. Free & Fair Elections

The leadership selection process must be open to most citizens. The country can only restrict voting rights based on legitimate reasons. Fair elections means there are no barriers (such as literacy tests, poll taxes, closed polling locations) to exercising one's right to vote.

Additionally, elections should be held frequently to keep officials on their toes. Twenty year terms would prove ineffective in keeping politicians in line!

3. Inclusive Suffrage
While some of these have overlapping rationale, I should reiterate that citizens must have the right to vote that cannot be taken away based on racial or religious profiles.

4. Right to Run for Office
Citizens must enjoy the right to actively pursue public office without barriers. This guarantees a variety of diverse voices.

Of course, many would argue that our own country falls short of this ideal since running for public office currently carries an enormous price tag.

5. Freedom of Expression/Alternative Sources of information

It is vital in a democracy for citizens to receive information regarding public policy and governing activities from a source other than the government itself. Many democracy think tanks or NGO's hold that alternative news sources are the most "must-have" to achieve a democratic reality.

How does Iran and its recent elections hold up against these standards? The estimable Christopher Hitchens weighs in with less than optimistic analysis.

The Online Experience

This post comes from Rebecca Newton. She is a student in my online American Government course.

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In the ever evolving world of technology, it is evident that what once was, is no more. Life affords us what some would consider luxuries. The convenience to attend school online was not available a few years ago.

However, are we really better off? Maybe not. Face-to-face instruction has been replaced with virtual learning. But, I have to question whether we are garnering the same quality education that we would if we were in a traditional classroom. Most students look for that nurturing and "at a boy" encouragement that instructors provide. Also, instant feedback and constructive criticism is gone. Not to mention, research. The encyclopedia is obsolete. Now, we have the Internet. Although the Internet is faster and more up-to-date, it is not always credible. So, stepping out of the classroom has it's advantages and disadvantages.

I still remember my favorite teacher from high school that pushed me to do my best and helped me to recognize my true potential. That was sixteen years ago. She took extra time with her students, and that is what students need; no matter what age or environment.

So, with online, higher learning, do we sacrifice what is readily available at smaller community colleges or technical schools? I think so. It is not bad. But, we as students, have to encourage ourselves and use outside influences like family to push us to our full potential.

We have become complacent with the way things have evolved.

Who was Charles Ponzi

and what was his famous scheme? Wikipedia provides a solid bio and explanation.

I think it is interesting that his original scheme was legal and sought to profit from market inefficiency. He also did a decent job of defending himself while acting as his own attorney. This may tell us something about the legal profession.

Here is a short video that provides further explanation of a Ponzi and how it works.

Stanford Due in Court

One of the most allegedly heinous villains of the Wall Street meltdown will fight accusations that he bilked investors out of $8 billion. The federal proceedings begin today in Houston.

The treacherous Texan presumably followed in the steps of Bernie Madoff by promising investors solid returns on safe, conservative CDs offered by Antiguan banks. However, Stanford actually used the funds to purchase real estate and stock for his own portfolio.

Stanford and Madoff are both significant case in de-regulation or non-regulation. Both funds were not certified by the SEC so investors based their decisions on the integrity and investing acumen of the 2 future inmates. I think we can safely say they chose poorly.

This is also a lesson in psychology. Con artists like Stanford and Madoff are typically wise in the ways of human nature. Their targets thought they were too rich and too smart to be duped.

What Is Faith-Learning Integration?

A phrase we often use in Christian education is "the integration of faith and learning." What exactly does that mean, anyway? For professors, our area of study (such as literature, economics, history, ethics, politcal science, or theology--just to mention those represented by the professors who contribute here) shape the way we view the world, the questions we ask, and the answers we receive. Looking at the broad picture, unpacking the assumptions of a academic field, and digging deeper into its conversation and controversies requires that we learn to appreciate the models, applications, and pedagogy that our various academic fields demand. Professorship requires of us a certain examination of the foundations of our subjects, a certain mastery of the content, and a strong sense of how the field is divided into differing schools and approaches. Even this point should not overlook that differing fields and courses and teachers also take differing shapes. There is no one complete metapedagogy, that is no one complete way of teaching everything.

William Hasker in his "Faith-Learning Integration: An Overview" (1992) offers a helpful model for Christian disciplinary engagement, observing that the approach to the field has much to do with how compatible that the scholar perceives the subject in question to be with the teachings of his or her faith. Hasker suggests that a continuum exists between those who feel little tension and those who feel great tension. He gives these positions three names:

1. The compatabilist, at one end of the spectrum, assumes a fair amount of overlap between the ideals of the faith and the claims of the discipline; thus, “[t]he scholar’s task is one of showing how shared assumptions and concerns can be profitably linked." For example, a Christian psychologist might see a large amount of simple compatibility between current models of behavioral addiction and the Christian understanding of bondage. In this case, the practitioner would be more concerned with how best to apply their insights in a way that is faithful to the Christian offices of prophet, priest, and prince regent.
2. The transformationist, however, would go further because while a true or acceptable model is present in the field, it needs to be reworked “into one with a Christian orientation." Our Christian counselor might find in family systems models several key insights worth adopting, all the while recognizing that some of the theories fundamental assumptions are incompatible with Christian teaching on the family.
3. The reconstructionist, Hasker’s third category, must go even further: "the existing disciplines are so deeply permeated with anti-Christian assumptions of secularism, rationalism, and naturalism he has no choice but to reject them and to begin at the beginning in a radical reconstruction of the disciplines on . . . fully biblical foundations." Our psychologist might reject the field of evolutionary psychology as hopelessly built on naturalistic assumptions about human desire and sexuality and in need of an entirely new proposal as to analyzing the sources of said desire.

In each case, some aspect of all three approaches might be necessary.

Nicolas Wolterstorff in his book Education for Shalom has also analyzed how disciplinary engagement can contain potential points of deceit for the Christian scholar (or student), precisely because none of us want to live too long with cognitive dissonance. "Harmonization," Wolterstorff charges, is the temptation to revise the faith to meet the convictions of the discipline. The research specialist, rather than live in the tension between a doctrine of the embodied soul and current models of brain chemistry, revises her faith to a materialist position on personality.

Wolterstorff designates the word "compatibilism" in a different way from Hasker. The compatabilist scholar treats faith and field as applying to two differing areas of life; thus, they have little or no conflict. The same scholar decides now that the scriptures do not really speak to anything like physical anthropology.

"Delimitation," he argues, goes further by actually artificially limiting the scope of faith and field to achieve a similar lack of tension. The scholar, faced with biblical passages that would seem to mandate something like an immaterial, disembodied existence, reworks them as metaphoric language, while insisting that findings in brain chemistry are also only a language describing electrical impulses--a language of measurement rather than human existential meaning .

Any of these methods at times may be a legitimate response to the conflict. For example, the Christian may legitimately come to interpret a biblical passage differently given new findings in science. Delimitation may be justified at some level, and the perceived tension is the means to force us to see that. However, Wolterstorff worries that too often Christian scholars want cognitive relief without doing the hard work of disciplinary engagement. We do not closely examine the field's claims long enough to propose a new research model that outpaces the current ones.

What both Hasker and Wolterstroff want to show is that the relationship between Christian faith and learning and academic fields made up of many non-Christians and some Christians is a complex one. No one size fits all.

Individual and Community in Potok's My Name Is Asher Lev

My Name Is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok is a novel that I have read seven or eight times, each time to my lasting benefit. More than the fiction of Saul Bellow, the memoirs of Elie Wiesel, or the short stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Potok's story taught me to understand why many Jews dread and fear Christianity. It was from Potok that I first learned of the shameful pogroms and of the suffering of the Jews in "Christian" cultures. It was also a window into the Hassidic culture of New York, giving me a view of its education, its worship, and its ethics. I can truly say the book has been a gift to me.

Reading it again this summer against the background of other Jewish literature, My Name Is Asher Lev has yet again given me a gift. It has helped me enter more deeply and sympathetically into the dilemma of the individual and the community. The book explores a profound and intriguing scenario: what if a visual artist of powerful and undeniable talent, like that of Marc Chagall, Chaim Soutine, or Amedeo Modigliani, was born into a Brooklyn Hassidic community? The character of Asher Lev is who he is because he has been born with a painter's eye. Asher is also who he is because he is a religious Jew and an only child whose father often must travel abroad for the community's Rebbe and whose mother, having suffered the loss of her brother, battles with debilitating fear that she will lose her husband or her son. Asher's painting will eventually wound his parents, as well as his small religious community, deeply.

He is torn between two traditions--that of the art world and that of Hassidic Judaism. The wounding comes not just because many Hassidic Jews distrust painting, or think it a frivolous activity at best, but because Asher must turn to the painting of nudes if he is to truly absorb the tradition of Western art, and worse, he must turn to the painting of crucifixions if he is to find a form of ultimate suffering to embody in his personal vision his mother's pain. This last act is one of utterly bewildering betrayal that ends the novel and the artist's coming of age.

Potok labels this experience "core-core culture confrontation," that is when the values of one's community come into conflict with those of the larger general culture. Both the uniqueness of the individual and the particularity of the community are woven into their "sense of identity":

(1) You learn early on in your life the stable values of your particular community.
(2) You learn early on in your life that your life makes sense; that it's important, it counts.
(3) You learn that human actions are meaningful. They resonate. One cannot act without in one way or another affecting.
(4) You learn early on in your life that action and value ought to be in harmony. You cannot have a viable sense of self worth if you value one thing and act contrary to what it is that you value. When this happens, a dichotomy or split in the self is established.
Finally it seems to me that fundamental to an awareness of the nature of a core of both a tradition and an individual in that tradition is (5) that the individual be made aware of what is right and what is wrong, as far as the community is concerned, and that the individual be able to choose between the two.

In My Name Is Asher Lev, Asher experiences confrontation in his identity because the art world would hold that individual expression and personal honesty are essential to art's greatness, while in Asher's community, one learns to channel one's self into given roles. But it is not just that Asher's community has no real place for his vocation, it is that the worldview underlying it cuts against their deepest values. The struggle for the young artist is in seeking a way between these rival polities.

Asher, after all, cannot entirely jettison his community. They are at the core of his art--its subject matter, its mythic power, and its raw emotion. And Potok the novelist is sure to offer us a vision of his community that is human and multi-dimensional. They try to listen, to understand his art, to account for him, and to find a place for him: "Everyone is listening," his mother tells him in response to his complaints, "There would be no problem if no one were listening to you, Asher" (111). Yet this vision of the young's artist's individuality must still wrestle with counter-vision of secular modernity. When Asher later explains that he is accountable to his community because "All Jews are responsible one for the other," his teacher Jacob Kahn responds, "As an artist you are responsible to no one and to nothing, except to yourself and to the truth as you see it. Do you understand? An artist is responsible to his art. Anything else is propaganda" (218).

Is Kahn entirely correct, however? As a Christian, I would contend that there may be a third way forward. Jacques Maritain thinks that art comes from an internalized habit of work and reflection. The artist is a maker of art objects. The subjectivity, the imagination, and the act of confession in the true artist are all subsumed to the act of making the beautiful work. Much like people as moral beings learn a kind of ethical prudence, an inner sense of what a given situation calls for, so artists over time develop certain habits of seeing and working. A poet, for example, has to put in the time and work with language, metaphor, observation, etc. in order to develop a poetic craft. The poet’s subjectivity is meant to serve the work and not the reverse. Maritain stresses that the Christian who would make art should focus on the task at hand:

If you want to make a Christian work, then be Christian and simply try to make a beautiful work, into which your heart will pass; do not try to "make Christian." [. . .] The entire soul of the artist reaches and rules his work, but it must reach and rule it only through the artistic habitus. Art tolerates no division here. It will not allow any foreign element, juxtaposing itself to it, to mingle, in the production of the work, its regulation with art’s own. Tame it, and it will do all that you want it to do. Use violence, and it will accomplish nothing.

The artist can only make what she has learned over time to practice. It has its own demands, concerns, and rules. These are only right and natural and should be respected. Indeed, trying to bypass these in the name of religion is only bound to failure. The same can be said of the other arts, too. Poet Rod Jellema would warn us against using the label "Christian poet" too lightly: "It invites a poet who is a Christian into a frame of mind in which, proud of his humility, he can knock the tough commitment to art as merely arty, shrug off the world’s expected indifference to his work as the price he must pay for his martyrdom, and isolate himself in mutual-admiration groups of like-minded poets."

The artist as maker is a humbler definition of vocation than that of the prophet or truth-creator, and I would contend that it is more Christian, and yes, more Jewish. Such a vision does not deny the talent or the genuine inspiration of the artistic process, but it reminds us that the artist in serving a tradition of art is nevertheless still serving the truth, and a truth found in more than an individual

Pedagogy and Friendship

John Henry Newman understood only too well that professors influence students; the question is not if influence will take place but what kind of influence. He held that a pedagogy without the friendship of professor and student can only expect an environment of distrust and hostility: "An academic system without the personal influence of teachers upon pupils is an arctic winter; it will create an ice-bound, petrified, cast-iron University and nothing else."

Strangely, this is a result that many in the modern university not only accept as normal but practice as a virtue. The pedagogical practices inherent in Alasdair MacIntyre's encyclopedic method and the genealogical critiques may not know it, but they exist in ethical practices, though ones gone terribly array. Their methods of objective distance and power distrust have been made more believable by being offered in an ethical and pedagogical environment that reinforces their claims-- its very structure, at once supposedly objective yet lacking in anything like a curricular common vision.

Mark Schewn places much of the blame for this at the heart of the nineteenth-century German research institution, as well as the Weberian distrust of emotion and relationship in university education. Phillia, Weber holds, always pollutes the objectivity necessary for true research. But is this really the case?

Michel Polanyi observed that research is more intuitive in nature than is mostly admitted, and it is often passed along in non-verbalized ways to its new initiates. He called this "conviviality," the communication of true knowledge on the inarticulate level. Such knowledge involves a fair level of trust between teacher and student, and is therefore, essentially a-critical in nature. As such it is a tacit knowing: "We must now recognize belief once more as the source of all knowledge. Tacit assent and intellectual passions, the sharing of an idiom and of cultural heritage . . . No intelligence, however critical or original, can operate outside such a fiduciary framework."

The modern university by its overt distrust of friendship creates a world where encyclopedia and genealogy tragically seem true, though at the most human level they must continue to teach and research despite this, living off the cultural capital of intellectual honesty, collegiality, freedom of conscience, trust in rational discourse, scholarly discipline, a dependence on continuity with the past, even the desire for mentorship between student and teacher--all ethical practices which must be taken on faith, as Polanyi observes, even when honored in the breach.

Note how in Henry James' story, "The Figure in the Carpet" that once the narrator experiences knowledge as utility and as mastery, it soon replaces joy and delight in the love of learning:

[W]hat now occurred was simply that my new intelligence and vain preoccupation damaged my liking. I not only failed to run a general intention to earth, I found myself missing the subordinate intentions I had formerly enjoyed. His books didn't even remain the charming things they had been for me; the exasperation of my search put me out of conceit of them. Instead of being a pleasure the more they became a resource the less; for from the moment I was unable to follow up the author's hint I of course felt it a point of honour not to make use professionally of my knowledge of them. I had no knowledge - nobody had any. It was humiliating, but I could bear it - they only annoyed me now. At last they even bored me, and I accounted for my confusion - perversely, I allow - by the idea that Vereker had made a fool of me. The buried treasure was a bad joke, the general intention a monstrous pose (293).

Treating your education in a purely instrumental way is to succumb to the encyclopedia project of which MacIntyre warned, which only too quickly leads to the distrust and suspicion of genealogy. Such a disposition of mind and heart can occur in any educational environment, but the modern ethical chaos of individualism only lends it a deeper epistemic credulity. We have literally created academic structures that make the modern and post-modern assertions feel true, even as our humanity must struggle against them. As such, these structures are traditions who have hidden from themselves their former purpose for existence, living in a practice that once had the higher end of the love of knowledge from a dedication to the truth as the gift of God.

This current state of things suggests that Christian institutions of higher learning need to be cognizant and intentional about friendships between faculty and students. Learning is not just factual but intuitive and initiatory. Mentoring is often a two-way street because education is founded on the practice of submission, initiation, cultivation, and eventual contribution and clarification. As Jaroslav Pelikan reminds us,

The moment of truth comes . . . [as] the student begins to arrive at conclusions different from those of the master, as the largely unilateral power relationship of apprenticeship gradually yields, or should yield, in a healthy relationship--to authentic community and a deepening collegiality between teacher and student . . . it is a rite of passage filled with joy and fulfillment for all concerned, as well as with moments of deep anxiety.

What renders this "moment of truth" and "rite of passage" meaningful is a shared commitment to something like the academic ideal, a belief in freedom of inquiry as an essential aspect of our true humanness. As such, it demands of us personal virtues, fiduciary skills of trust and time, and they can exist for a season in systems of thought that mitigate against themselves.

Yet the cultures of encyclopedia and genealogy are finally pedagogically incoherent. These virtues cannot stand by themselves for very long. What they need is the larger theistic framework of the purpose of knowledge and of intellectual service to humanity to render their academic ideal an ultimately meaningful practice. Faithfulness in this context means an investment in others; it requires a certain speed--a slow listening and speaking that "hears" the tacit dimension in the other person. We all have favorite teachers in our lives, and those of us in higher education can each recall very significant professors who shaped our future callings, answered our questions, guided our thinking, assuaged our doubts, and disturbed our complacency.

In a Christian context, we need the hypergood, the telos, or final end we are pursuing set before us always, what the Westminster Confession so lovingly made proverbially:

Question 1: What is the chief and highest end of man?
Answer: Man's chief and highest end is to glorify God, and fully to enjoy him forever.

Our Fragile Selves & Unction

Lauren Winner recently coined the phrase "aromatheology" to describe Susan Ashbrook Harvey's Scenting Salvation, an account of Patristic worship and theology as being multi-sensory. What I like about the term is that it reminds us that our senses, made by our Creator, belong to our Creator. The pedagogical emphases on multi-media education need to transcend the pragmatic, as well as practice a careful discernment. The shape of a medium is its message, as Marshall MacLuhan used to warn us. The changes that each new technology brings to the human person are not de facto worthy of being embodied nor do they all guarantee good learning. Instead, they often contain a curriculum and a means of formation hidden in what they offer. Sound and sight, touch and taste, smell and our sense of gravity are another way our embodied existence must be understood for truly effective pedagogy And yet not just by using differing media for a media-glutted generation; rather, what is called for is a renewal of what our sensory faculty are actually for--the divine presence as meditated through the transcendentals of truth, goodness, and beauty. Can we consider a pedagogy of scent and touch?

For example, imagining our deaths and imagining our healing is what unction is about. The oil of anointing is a reminder of our dependence and our fragility. We are like smoke or the flowers of the field. To be anointed for healing is to engage in a meditation on our inutility. We cannot heal ourselves. We are even led to ponder our deaths. This contemplation of the dust of mortality is not Liebestot, the love of death and macabre culture. Instead, it is being before doing. This is an insight we need to return to on occasion in Christian education.

We exist first and foremost for the primary calling of Christ to himself. As Os Guinness puts it, "Calling is the truth that God calls us to himself so decisively that everything we are, everything we do, and everything we have is invested with a special devotion, dynamism, and direction lived out as a response to his summons and service." While I am not, of course, suggesting that every class begin with the physical anointing of our students' foreheads with oil (or ash)--amusing as that might be. I am suggesting that the physical, embodied nature of worship sacramentally prepares us for better encounters with the media of our classrooms, just as a worship that focuses solely on the inward experience of our students courts gnosticism and media deception, mistaking bells and whistles, sexy effects and sounds, for true transformative learning. We need to be sensitive to whether the aroma of our teaching is indeed a pleasing sacrifice to the nostrils of God.

This is as good a place as any to reflect on the place of prayer in learning--classroom, lab, in private, etcetera. Prayer is not a disavowal of the bodily life or the life of action, for contemplation and action are intimately tired together. A sacramental ethos of learning always stresses the participation and presence of learning, so our prayers in the classroom ought to be tied to the actual practice of teaching and learning we plan to undertake. They should not be vague, pious offerings that treat the spiritual life as somehow functionally divorced from learning. They should be recognitions of our utter dependence upon Christ the Logos for any real learning.

Lenten Pedagogy -- part 4

As Christ's faithful bride, as his priests for this world, we are called to extend hands of mercy to those in need. This is a high calling wherever it is practiced. I have often toyed with the idea of introducing a speaker by talking about his or her character qualities, by calling attention to what God has done in a person’s life despite himself, or by calling attention to the testimony of love from those nearest her. Of course, such doesn’t easily fit the genre of introductions, and it could come across as too precious.

Likewise, there are certain virtues in showing gratitude to someone for their accomplishments, yet how do we work within an academic hierarchy of honors, awards, and padded vitas while remembering that the Man of Sorrows had no place to rest his head? John Mogabgab has written,

Far from removing us from the messiness of the world, spiritual formation plunges us into the middle of the world's rage and suffering. It was to this place of pain and bewilderment that Jesus Christ was sent as a visible image of the invisible God . . . Through us love is extended to the furthest recesses of human sorrow and need. God's love for the world--in us because we are in Jesus Christ--becomes a sign of hope and a source of transformation in the world.

This to me seems a profound statement of what Christian education in general, and honors education in particular, should seek to accomplish. Service learning cannot truly be effective without formation in the spiritual disciplines that form our capacities. If we wish to serve as the imago dei, we must embrace the sacramental nature of our confession and discipline. Service learning to be truly sacramental must grow out of baptism and communion, vocation and the nuptial meaning of our bodies, and it must be the product, as well as the instrument, of repentance.

Lenten Pedagogy -- part 3

Consecration is an important element of Christian education, especially when we are tempted to look for greener pastures during the stressful times of grading and writing that every semester brings. Gerald May puts it this way:

Consecration means dedication to God. It occurs when we claim our deepest desire for God, beneath, above, and beyond all other things. We may not understand the full meaning of consecration: the ups and downs, the joys and agonies of the journey that must follow. And certainly we will be unable to grasp the overarching cosmic meaning of our small assent, the joy it gives to God, the deepening love it will bring to humanity, the . . . covenant it has enriched. But our yes comes from some bare recollection of all these things. In a tiny space our hearts can say yes.

Confession and spiritual mortification call us to self-examination that we may forget ourselves and to alms-giving that we may gain great blessings. Monks often take a vow of stability, pledging to stay in the place their life has been planted. While I am certainly not arguing that professors or students should never change universities, I do think we need to acknowledge that certain aspects of our growth require the suffering of endurance and the humility of choosing perhaps the lesser of places, at least in some academics' estimation. Calvin sees a similar kind of stability in the very vocations we are called to by God:

The last thing to be observed is, that the Lord enjoins every one of us, in all the actions of life, to have respect to our own calling. He knows the boiling restlessness of the human mind, the fickleness with which it is borne hither and thither, its eagerness to hold opposites at one time in its grasp, its ambition.

Therefore, lest all things should be thrown into confusion by our folly and rashness, he has assigned distinct duties to each in the different modes of life. And that no one may presume to overstep his proper limits, he has distinguished the different modes of life by the name of callings. Every man's mode of life, therefore, is a kind of station assigned him by the Lord that he may not be always driven about at random. (Institutes 3.10.6)

While Calvin’s model is perhaps more static than our lives necessitate, there is a real truth to this; namely, we are tempted by selfish motives that drive, even infect, our noble callings. This native presumption of the fallen mind can only too easily be attested to in education, so the gift of stability has much to pedagogically commend it. When we train in God’s kingdom, we are not training for ourselves alone, but for the needs of a hurting world, and this is true of the end and purpose of our teaching and the Christian educational project as a whole.

This training includes a counter-cultural approach to success. We need, I need, a self-check each time I blanch before those teaching at Yale, Princeton, or Oxford.

Lenten Pedagogy -- part 2

Having authority carries with it its own spiritual dangers. Leading carries the temptation to forget our dependence on others. As a teacher, one can easily become accustomed to students doing what you say or agreeing with you because you control the grade.

We need a practice of self-confrontation. We need to confess our sins, remember who we are, and most importantly renew our dependence on the larger work of the kingdom of God. The classic disciplines of the Church—fasting, prayer, study, corporate worship, silence, service, and so on--when we engage in them, we do so not to punish ourselves in unhealthy ways, but so that we might better conform to the person of Jesus. Such practices are a call to holy exercise. As Paul says, “I discipline my body like an athlete, training it to do what it should. Otherwise, I fear that after preaching to others I myself might be disqualified.” There are, of course, good ways and bad ways to exercise.

Richard Swinburne has noted that in the Christian faith a Lenten principle is deeply pervasive. Human beings have trouble rightly ordering their desires; we take things that are good and turn them into idols. We hold on to what is simply ours to steward. We take too much of what should be shared. We hoard when only a little is needed. This is why scripture teaches that Christians must fast, give to those in need, and learn to suffer the little irritants of life. This is also why we at times may be called to endure the death of some of our most cherished dreams and desires. We must at times intentionally frustrate those desires because they influence us more than they should.

Even those things that are otherwise good can not always be indulged. We must enter the desert of the spirit so that we may receive the wellsprings of life. This is certainly true of the kind of discipline and decision-making that are necessary for effective study and scholarship. We limit part of ourselves, that is we consecrate ourselves in order to be changed by God, so that we may truly partake of all that is his.

Lenten Pedagogy -- part 1

Humility in education is not just being open to other viewpoints, nor is it just having a measure of tentative assertion to one's own beliefs, it is also an awareness that God's truth is a gift we must bear with responsibility and a gift we must be faithful to with our whole selves. Pedagogically, this means we must balance fidelity to the current truth with openness to the new truth, hospitality with house-cleaning, so to speak.

Mark Schewn observes that "[m]uch of what passes for laziness or the proverbial "lack of motivation" among today's students really involves a lack of humility, stemming in part from a lack of piety or respect for that aspect of God's ongoing creation that manifests itself in works of genius." This is one reason a regular practice of the confession of our academic sins is worth considering as part of our public collegiate worship. Lent and learning are closely tied. Repentance, in all its forms and its formational nature, calls us to change not only in what we hold to be true, but also what we are that prevents the full-bodied nature of learning to take place. Public (and private) confessions of sin are more than acts of lament; they also involve the placing of ourselves within the estrangement, loss, forgiveness, and restoration of the gospel. This is what makes them sacramental.

We often do not give much thought to how our own character impacts the nature of teaching. As a professor, I must admit that I need Lent because, frankly, I am tempted by the position of being a Christian instructor of others. This job is my joy, but the joy of doing good also carries with it a secret worm in the delicious fruit. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote,

The [self-]awareness on which Jesus insists is intended to prevent us from reflecting on our extraordinary position. We have to take heed [in order] that we do not take heed of our own righteousness. Otherwise, the 'extraordinary' which we achieve will not be that which comes from following Christ, but that which spring from our own will and desire.

Vocational Desire

Are there other ways to talk about desire and learning? It may seem strange to think of there being a connubial quality to being a professor of a subject, but I would suggest that there is. Profession is not a knowledge-free telos, not a presuppositionless learning or teaching; it is a commitment, a marriage of ourselves to a subject that we treat with anything other than dignity and respect at our own peril.

Nicholas Wolterstorff has spoken of "eirenic learning," that is learning that promotes peace, ala' shalom. What are the covenantal qualities of vocation, then? Can there be, for example, an erotics of vocation, that is a study of how our gender and our desires shape us through the passionate drama of distance, proximity, embrace, and consummation as they apply in our teaching, research, and evaluation? Our gendered, bodily identities play roles outside our marriage, including in the extended ways that we practice fatherhood and motherhood. Even those who are gifted with singleness—themselves signs of the kingdom to come, bring their nurturing selves into their vocations. This is certainly true of the work of teaching, This is not only the case with the legal and ethical parameters of in loco parentis, but also with the more general way in which we inhabit a parental meaning in our friendships with students, as well as in mentorships and in general teaching.

Can one also speak of a desire within the aesthetics of education?

Animal, plant, flower, tree, spice, water, oil, honey--all such symbols imply the physicality of our desires and lovemaking, yet these very metaphors employed by Song of Songs also suggest a quality beyond this--a psychological and moral and aesthetic flowering. Similarly, Christian desire is in both separation and in fulfillment, not in continual separation as the heretical medieval notion of romance implies. The Christian love story of Christ for his Church provides a narrative for our own love stories to tell themselves by. The allegorical readings of Canticles as a story of God and Israel, Christ and the Church, or God and the soul are not entirely misplaced. They imply something important about the way we romance God via our studies. I will speak more on this below; for the moment, let me draw attention to George Herbert's lovely sonnet on this exchange of divine desire and worth:

Immortal Heat, O let thy greater flame
Attract the lesser to it: Let those fires,
Which shall consume the world, first make it tame;
And kindle in our hearts such true desires,

As may consume our lusts, and make thee way.
Then shall our hearts pant thee; then shall our brain
All her invention on thine Altar lay,
And there in hymns send back thy fire again:

Our eyes shall see thee, which before saw dust;
Dust blown by wit, till that they both were blind:
Thou shalt recover all thy goods in kind,
Who wert disseized by usurping lust:

All knees shall bow to thee; all wits shall rise,
And praise him who did make and mend our eyes.

Our desires, wherever they may be located are not controlled per se by suppressing them--though there is a time and place for this, as well--but more often they are subsumed in the greater fire. "Usurping lust" is consumed in the great passion of the Trinity. While there is no marriage in heaven, our loves there are absorbed into the heavenly resurrection, and this end of our nuptial, bodily selves is worth remembering in an academic world that is finally so very subject to the temptation of disembodiment. Our journey into the love of a field of knowledge, with its parallels to marriage, also includes love's comic aspects.

Love’s comedy always renders us vulnerable and, thus, keeps us humble.

Spousal Love and the Nuptial Body

Last year, I had the privilege of performing the wedding of two DBU students that I had taught in several of my classes. I found myself moved with deep gratitude for playing a part in their lives, as well as remembering again the deep commitment of my own marriage. The opportunity also gave me a chance to reflect more on the nature of marriage, and I believe there are connections to be drawn between this aspect of sacramental life and education.

This is what Jesus said of marriage: "[F]rom the beginning of creation, “God made them male and female.” “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate."(Mark 10:6-9). Jesus taught that marriage forms something new. Two people from different families become one flesh, and what God has brought into existence, no human court of justice has the right to unravel. When Jesus reminded his culture of this truth, he had in mind the model of Genesis. If humanity is the crown of creation, marriage is the jewel on that crown.

"Flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone," Adam tells Eve. The nuptial meaning of the body is part of ourselves; we image God together male and female and are always the image of God in communion by helping one another, through mutual support and mutual definition. Our bodies literally point to the mutual dependence and community we were created for. Our contingent being is good; we have a sense of our finite dependency before the fall of humanity. "Ens et bonum convertuntur (being and the good are convertible)" as John Paul II observes (29).

These are important truths to remember in college-level education. The sexuality of ourselves and our students is part and parcel of who we are. Here, I am not necessarily trying to engage certain norms or stereotypes of gendered behavior, though I think there is some truth to these matters. Instead, I am trying to reflect on how we cannot treat intellectual and ethical formation in isolation from the nuptial aspects of ourselves.

In Genesis, humans are separated out from other animals; we may be bodies among other bodies, but we are far more. We are given our bodies to till and subdue creation, to be stewards of a world, wards of the king chosen to care for his prized estates. Our bodies are ethical, sacramental, aesthetic, social, and erotic. They present ourselves to the world and the world to us. Our bodies were created to aid in the fullness of shalom and the complete multi-faceted communication of being to being, but that bodily gift has been marred in our fallenness. We were created to express love, and our freedom was given to make true love of God and God's creatures possible. To be a body is to be a living soul, not a slave of our physical desires. We were, thus, originally free from the constraint of overpowering instinct.

That this is now too often the reverse is something we must keep in mind in the educational process, though it is hardly something we must address openly in most courses. Tom Wolfe's recent novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, is only one sobering account of the culture of pornocracy on many campuses. Charlotte’s journey into an academic and residential culture of relativism and fornication should give us all pause, whether we teach in a state or private institution.

God promises us cleansing, for we are each Christ's bride (Eph 5:26-27). We are called to learn to lay aside shame and return to the right gift of our bodies in marriage. We are also called to relearn that our nuptial meaning is a pledge of respecting the bodies of others. This the meaning of pledging wedding vows before witnesses. In mutuality we learn "the reciprocity of the donation" (JP II). The gifts of ourselves, our gendered, nuptial bodies, are tied to a new purifying of our motives and in marriage a new vulnerability in our lovemaking.

The culture of "hooking up," of nearly anonymous sex leads to a loss of ourselves; we lose part of who we actually are. Lust desacralizes the body's sacramental sign. It also reduces the meaning of our erotic actions to a far less complex communication. Being human, it can still be quite complex, but once something less than reductive enters, it begins to be something else, with all the human brokenness our culture tries to hide from itself. We need to struggle with this dimension to education, even if it makes us quite uncomfortable. As professors, we need not be surprised when this part of existence enters our students' academic struggles.

Sex is not to be separated from love, family, and our responsibility to our community. Strong marriages and strong families make strong neighborhoods and town. Marriage is one of life's original blessings--prosperity, comfort, joy, long life, In the scriptures, marriage is a picture of giving and gratitude and mutual dependence, for "a marriage with conditions is no true marriage" (John Colwell). In this sense, the marriages of faculty, staff, and administration--not to mention those of students--ought to be signs of the true uses of our humanity. Christian marriage is a work of restoration, and this makes it profoundly counter-cultural. We are meant to model for all people what Christ intends for his Church as his Bride. This means we must learn to fully and truly accept each other, receiving each other for who we are in our brokenness and in our health. We were created for the experience of giving and receiving in the blessedness of trust and wholeness. When we truly live for the other person we help them along the way to a full possession of who they were meant to be.

Democracy in Action

Pretty interesting story happening in Albany, New York. Two Democratic state senators have switched their allegiance to the GOP. This swings majority status to the Republicans.

Disgraced former Governor Eliot Spitzer chimes in on the benefits of the coup. The New York Times adds a story with insider details.