An All-Consuming Parable

There was a society that was extraordinarily gifted in making things. Most people created what they needed themselves. Some of them developed the ability to make certain things much better than others could make the same items. Over time, they not only could make them better, but also could make them faster and cheaper, even at scale.

While this was quite the accomplishment, the problem was that these producers began to have their warehouses filled with their goods. Creative members of this group found ways to tell large number of people about their wares, and how if folks would buy their products instead of making the items themselves, they would save time and have better products.

All of these ideas caught on. The people began to specialize in what they produced best, and sold them to each other in order to buy others’ products. Life got easier.

As people grew to enjoy consuming each others’ products, a dynamic equilibrium was approached between production and consumption. However, as people learned to consume ready-made items, they became interested in newer and more types of products, which increased demand for new producers. So growth occurred instead of reaching equilibrium. This was good.

An Educational Version of IJM

Over the holidays, Andy Crouch of Christianity Today posted an op-ed honoring the International Justice Mission (IJM) for its faithful and amazingly successful work in combating various kinds of slavery around the world. He progressed to suggesting the need for a Christian organization to form around reforming the American education system, which he cited as being broken as much, if not more than those of other nations. I waited several weeks to discuss it here so that school would be back in session and perhaps more folks would be able to join in the conversation.

I have a mixed reaction to him comparing our educational system, even obliquely, to the social justice systems of nations that allow for sex slavery and other abominations to occur under their noses.

Does our education system contain injustices? Yes. We also need to address them. I am confident that Andy (whom I’ve met and like personally) was trying to highlight the dynamic creativity, multilateral expertise and profound effectiveness of IJM, and wanting to build that kind of a team to address domestic education. In that, I heartily agree. As an educator, and a Christian one at that, it did rankle a bit to have my profession/industry even incidentally be compared to Third World pimps. I know that wasn’t what he was trying to say, so I’ll move on to what he was trying to address.

Intellectual Crisis

Only someone returning from a Vanwinklian nap would not be aware of the incredible and brittle factiousness permeating our culture. Nearly everyone you talk to will shake their head with sorrow at the cracks throughout Western society, and then just as quick point to this or that group as the ones primarily responsible. In a NYTimes review of a new book, The Anointed, the divisive debates roiling in Christendom are brought to fore from the apparent perspective of someone from a more secular worldview to an audience largely outside of the Christian worldview.

The review describes much of the intellectual conflict in evangelicalism, particularly in the States. Old earth versus theistic evolution, whether the Founders were Christian or Deist (or pre-Darwinian humanists, as some now affirm, with credible arguments), the relative value of academic credentials versus a strictly common-sense/sola scriptura based faith are some of the issues, even asking the fundamental and completely academic question of whether or not the Enlightenment was a good thing.

State versus Christ: More Thoughts

It occurs to me as a state employee that to interact with the State, you have to follow procedures, deal with policy, and wait for red tape, all the while looking for ways to bypass it in order to accomplish your job that the very same State is paying you to do. The State doesn’t handle exceptions well, and views me as a resource to further its mission.

As a Christian, I have a relationship with Christ. I can go directly to Him, my job is to follow where He leads and He will be responsible for the outcome. He knows, not just my name, but He also knows me, and desires to bring me into His image for my benefit. He loves me and created me unique in the first place and celebrates it.

Which of these is it again that we want in charge of our society?

SDG

Manliness

What characteristics, positive and negative, come to mind when you think of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’? How does the culture view/define them? How have those changed over time? What is a Biblical description of those terms, and how do they compare to your pictures and those of the culture?

While it seems to me that both masculinity and femininity have been radically redefined in the last 50 years, I’m tempted strongly to evaluate the changes to the concept of manhood as the most negative and damaging. It is as if equality for women was improved at least partly at the expense of men. Rather than lifting both up, women were lifted up and men brought lower.

To put it bluntly, women have become, not just better women, but more masculine, and men have been made more feminine and less masculine, to their detriment.

Creating Society

My grandmother recently closed her greenhouse nursery after nearly 50 years of business, and gave me one last chance to go through her remaining inventory, so I drove two hours down and back. I needed to gas up partway back, just outside San Antonio.

While inspecting the plants on how well the plants were travelling, the man at the next pump commented on the need to keep them covered with a tarp (which they were). He inquired how far I had to go and whistled, but commented he knew that area because a friend’s horse was stabled near there. As he told where, I laughed—it was less than a mile from my house and I have to pass it every day.

He then commented that he used to work in Austin, and in fact had been in Austin last year on the day that a disgruntled man flew his private plane into an IRS office there. Not only that, but his job was to work on an AC unit on the roof across the highway from the building and he saw the whole thing happen, and showed me pictures he took with his phone. I commented that I saw the smoke from my house near the stables, halfway across the county, minutes after it happened.

From there we progressed to those we knew who were impacted directly by 9/11, or whom we nearly lost there.

This man and I never exchanged names. Our conversation was only about 10 minutes long, but we parted as comrades of a sort. We discovered commonality, and the deeper we went, the more commonality we had.

Common experiences, common tragedies, common living. These things bound us together. In a real, though tiny sense, it strengthened our society at large. When we talk with each other we reaffirm that which holds us together, and strengthens that bond. We may be a nation that, in a sense, worships the individual, but we must still remain interdependent as human beings and as a society. It is sort of like that series of commercials where someone helps someone in a small but needed way and is observed by a third person, who proceeds to aid another and so on until in an Escher-like fashion we return to the original scene. There are subtle but real threads that we have a hand in weaving or ripping.

Isolation destroys society because it causes us to forget that we are interdependent and that we are a society, culture, tribe, tongue, nation, world, etc. We forget commonality, and assume difference, leading to suspicion and/or apathy. Reaching out and interacting reminds us that the other person is part of our ‘tribe’ and therefore we are part of theirs. Even short, shallow interactions like my gas station conversation serve to remind us of these things.

There are many examples of this throughout history. One of my favorites is from WWII. The Germans and Allies honored truces on Christmas Day. On one battlefield, the Allied troops in their foxholes began to sing Christmas carols. After a time, they heard the Germans join in from their foxholes. For a few, all too brief hours, they shared in their humanity and their faith.

As faculty in today’s universities, it is far too easy to become isolated in our offices or labs, interacting only to teach a class impersonally or direct our research group or go to a dreaded meeting, then back to our cave.

Ask yourself, what is your society? How vibrant is it? How can you heal or strengthen it?

SDG