August Landmesser

Photo from http://www.fasena.de/courage/, accessed Feb 6, 2012. Please visit this site to learn more.

The photo shows a crowd of Germans in a 1938 shipyard giving a “Hitler-Gruss” or the “Heile Hitler” salute during the launching of a new ship. The highlighted gentleman is not. August Landmesser had married a woman the Nazi’s considered a Jew and the laws forbidding their marriage and persecuting them had turned this man against Hitler’s regime. His daughter many decades later saw this picture somewhere and recognized him. This inspired her to write a book about her family, which is available bilingually in German and English at the above link.

It took courage for Herr Landmesser to show his opposition through this civil disobedience. He did suffer at the hands of his government for his various choices. It also took wisdom to recognize what causes were worth the stand.

As educators, are we conditioning our students to be part of the crowd, or are we inspiring them to think critically, discern truth, and have the courage to stand for it, even alone?

SDG

Teaching With Fear and Trembling

A topic I’ve revisited a number of times arises again. How do we balance the need to inspire and motivate students with the need to critique and even rebuke them at times? Christ doesn’t call us to be ‘nice,’ but loving. They are quite different.

But then I run into a verse in church like Galatians 6:1.

The RSV states “Brethren, if a man is overtaken in any trespass, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Look to yourself, lest you too be tempted.”

This isn’t too terribly hard to accept. But if you read it in Eugene Peterson’s “The Message,” he gives it a much different spin:

                “Live creatively, friends. If someone falls into sin, forgivingly restore him, saving your critical comments for yourself. You might be needing forgiveness before the day's out.”

Missional Community: Chemistry

One of the relatively new buzzwords in American Christendom is “missional community.” It is one’s sphere of daily influence. For academicians, it is often their department. The MC ‘movement’ seeks to help believers recognize the people around them everyday as their mission field, and to approach those circles as an embedded missionary.

Just as a missionary to a remote African village seeks to become part of the community first, to learn the language and customs, then integrate the Gospel into it, so should each of us. The advantage we have is that we are already part of that community. We are tied by threads of commonality, whether it is by vocation, hobby, family status, neighborhood, carpool, or whatever binds our various circles together.

Parking Holiness

Not the sign that got me, but a typical example.

One of the complaints people level against God is the strict arbitrariness of His law—one strike and you’re punished for eternity. There is a modern day equivalent…of the stereotype.

Right outside my office window is a service drive, with several signs predicting Armageddon if you park there. I do from time to time if I simply have to run to my office and pick up or drop off something, and no more. This past Saturday afternoon, I needed to get my laptop on my way out of town for a family birthday. While in my office, nature called on the red phone, and in fear and trembling I hurried to the little chemist’s room. Sure enough, when I returned to my vehicle, the service drive was flowing with the blood of the damned, a $75 parking citation. On campus!

In my opinion, the Uni’s Parking and Transportation Services (PTS) is aptly named, if you understand “service” in the context of a farmer servicing his bull and herd. The rules are without mercy, and if you are caught, the penalty is severe. They are completely self-funded—based on citation revenue, $500 annual parking permits, plus other fees and costs recovery. Thus, it is in their best interest to fine first and laugh at appeals. Yes, I am bitter and frustrated, not the most Biblical of attitudes.

Yet, it captures the way many people view God and His holiness:  arbitrary, on a power trip, a killjoy, no mercy, delighting in the pain, suffering and frustration of basically good people. Many are embittered and frustrated, believing God can’t be a God of love if He’ll punish people all out of proportion when the smallest toe creeps the narrowest nanometer over a line even thinner and maybe in motion.

Except…

Voice Crying Out in the Wilderness

Tonight, I received the following email (name and school withheld for security reasons):

Hi Dr. Wilson,

  I am about a year from graduating with a PhD in virology.  Over the past year I have been questioning whether I want to stay in academic sciences post-graduation.  One major deterrent is being around so many people with strong anti-Christian world views.  After getting in contact with Dr. Patricia Fanning from Reasons.org she directed me to your blog.  I can't tell you how encouraged I was by your blog posts.   I just wanted to say thank you for your encouraging words.

While this email definitely encouraged me, I was also disappointed for this graduate student. I would be truly surprised if there was not at least one Christian faculty member somewhere on his campus. Yet in the years of his graduate program, it appears that he hasn’t met them.

Atheistic Sectarianism and Problems with Religion Developing Evolutionarily

Several weeks ago, I wrote a blog about the TED talk by Alain de Botton on Atheism 2.0. I have an update that almost sounds like it’s ripped from the front page of The Onion, but is a serious article from the LA Times. In “Atheist writers clash over how to not worship a nonexistent God,” de Botton and Dawkins criticize each other on how to practice their atheism.

De Botton is raising $1.5 million to build a temple to atheism, where folks can contemplate 300 million years of life’s existence on Earth and think good thoughts. Dawkins argues it is rubbish and the money should go to funding nicely atheistic schools.

At first glance, it is crazy, and one is likely to side with Dawkins on this one.

The Digital Age

Last week, the Chronicle of Higher Education posted a blog called, “The Challenges of Digital Scholarship,” that discussed the changing reality of online scholarship and even “pre-peer review” online before submission to a journal or publication of a book. The idea is to enhance collaboration and refine work before it gets into the literature rather than waiting until after.

Although the post doesn’t mention this, it may be a way to combat the rising rate of retractions in the literature because more eyes see it before ‘official’ publication. One source in the article even quipped that “blind peer review is dead. It just doesn’t know it yet.”

Seven In [Two] Blows

This paraphrase from the Disney’s “Brave Little Tailor” (which of course comes from an older tale) is indicative of two articles this week that support at least seven of the twenty-five issues I raised two days ago in “An Educational Version of IJM” in brainstorming as many as I could think up on my own.

Wealth and Education

Yesterday, I gave a laundry list of issues affecting the justice of our education system as a whole. Some of them surprisingly are paradoxical. But the first one I gave was probably the most controversial, especially these days. I suggested that “money is the key resource that enables action in this world system. It is the most logical thing that more money should have the best opportunity for the best education, at least partly because the wealthy have the freedom of time and other resources to search out the best education for themselves or their children.”

Our culture has taken the Christian idea of charity and in many ways, perverted it. What is Biblically meant to be a duty of love toward God in voluntarily sharing one’s abundance with others has been twisted and yanked away from the giver. Now the recipient demands it on their terms and has partnered with the power of the State to enforce charity without accountability, even to the point of attempting to make those with means feel guilt for the fruits of their hard work and/or blessings.

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.

Choosing Lecture Humour Carefully

In my introductory lecture to all of my labs every semester, I try to put one-liners and other bits of humor in to keep the students engaged. One of the quips I used to do with some regularity when talking about selecting lab partners was something along the lines of, “Any partnerships lasting longer than the semester just go to show the lasting and central power of chemistry in our lives.”

Over the years, I’ve gotten several emails from students (usually female) to inform me that they remembered my joking about that and were now marrying their lab partner from my course.

Things like these are the hidden gems of teaching.

SDG

A Simple Reminder to Banish Fear

"If I could hear Christ praying for me in the next room, I would not fear a million enemies. Yet distance makes no difference. He is in the next room praying for me." - Anthony Coniaris

SDG

Feelin' Groovy

In 1966, Simon & Garfunkel released an album entitled “Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme.” One of the most famous songs on the album was “The 59^th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy).”

The first line of the song is “Slow down, you move too fast.” Amen.

It is distressing watching how fast our lives have become, expecting emails to be answered immediately, pushing forward in our haste to stay ahead of the cascading dominoes of deadlines and expectations, each one pushing us to push everyone around us either faster or out of our way, leading to trampled toes and sometimes trampled lives. How often do we wish, “stop the world, I want to get off!?”

Into the maelstrom of our busyness soothes the Saviour,

Media Franca

The term “lingua franca” effectively means the tongue of trade. In Jesus’ day, it was a form of Greek. Today it is English—the official language for international communications. It is reasonable then to consider the ‘media franca’ the mode for communicating in an era.

For much of human history, the media franca was oral tradition. With the evolution of the printing press, it became books, though the oral tradition continued strongly through theatre. In the 20^th century, it became a four-horse race between books, radio, film and TV. Now it is all of the above through the true media franca of the Internet.

Atheism 2.0

There seems to be a new kid on the atheism block. First we had the Enlightenment atheists, then the Darwinian atheists, and the Communist atheists. Most recently, we saw the rise of the aptly named “New Atheists.” Until now.

Alain de Botton has presented “Atheism 2.0,” which now rightfully claims the title of the “Newest Atheists.” It seems, at least in terms of this list, that he has misnamed his programme, which should be “Atheism 5.0.” But that is the advantage of his naming scheme—he can version the previous incarnations any way he chooses, so the Communist atheists might be more properly dubbed “Atheism 1.9.17, build Oktobre” or somesuch.

This also reveals the embarrassing scenario Dawkins is facing when his New Atheism becomes the “Old Atheism,” or the “Newly Chronologically-Disadvantaged Atheism.” I’m sure Mr. Hitchens, were he still present, would have a sagely satirical witticism over his newfound obsolescence.

Response to Secular Theocracy, Pt 2

{Format update: My apologies for disappearing for the weekend. More than usual is going on for semester prep this term. Also, I will be moving to a weekday publishing schedule from seven days a week.}

Back in December, David J. Theroux, of The Independent Institute asked me to read and offer comment on his essay, “Secular Theocracy, Part 1.” To summarize, Theroux made the argument with supporting extended quotes from C. S. Lewis, Rodney Stark, Alexis de Tocqueville and William Cavanuagh that the rise of secularism in the West has reached a point that service and loyalty to the secular nation-state has reached the point of religious devotion, and even is demanded as a form of coerced worship, effectively creating what he calls a “secular theocracy.”

Last week, Theroux published the second half of this essay, and again at his invitation, I offer my thoughts. (Both parts of his essay, with footnotes, can be found as a single webpage.)

One of the primary characteristics of the civic religion, according to Theroux, is the replacing of ‘religious violence’ with ‘secular violence’, which the State views as necessary to counteract and put down the religious violence. After that ‘corrupting influence’ is put down, the secularist argues, there should be no need for any violence, as humanity will thrive in the utopia of common devotion to the state. Reading quotes from several secularists and an analysis by Cavanuagh, it brings to eerie recall books assigned in high school English classes, “1984” and “Brave New World.”

What I find interesting in this resurgence of a secular utopianism is in trying to understand why it is resurging.

The Glow

Tonight as I drove home, I saw an extraordinarily bright orange-yellow glow right on the eastern horizon, over the town of Bastrop, Texas, which suffered from such severe wildfires this summer. It was, of course, an unusually large, bright moonrise through a veil of clouds that magnified and dispersed the haunting light.

Yet for several miles down the road, over and down hills, hidden by trees and the ever teasing cloud it was very hard to tell for sure whether the glow brought beauty or disaster.

Speaking about the Vibrant Dance Symposium

This Saturday morning (January 14, 2012), I will be the speaker at the monthly meeting of the Austin Chapter of Reasons to Believe. I will be giving an overview and answering questions about October’s Vibrant Dance Symposium on theological views of Creation. Please come and join us!

The details:

Date: Saturday morning January 14, 2012

Place: Hill Country Bible Church (near the UT Campus)

405 W. 22nd Street

Corner of San Antonio and W. 22nd

Agenda:

9:30 Fellowship and coffee

10:00 Announcements

10:20 Presentation

PARKING:  The parking lot one block over is a paid lot on Saturdays.  The toll is $1.50 for 3 hours or $2.00 for 4 hours at an unmanned kiosk.  However, a half block further west is a lot at 22nd and Nueces which is directly adjacent to Hill House Austin (Greg Grooms, Director).

SDG

Consistency

We humans are remarkable creatures in many ways, not all of them good. In particular, we have an amazing capacity to rationalize our morality, seeing others' shortcomings and ignoring our own. It is difficult to “judge rightly,” as the Bible calls it. (John 7:24)

Well targeted was Christ’s command to pull the log out of our own eyes so that we can see clearly the speck in our brother’s. We even judge each other on judging. We quote, “Judge not, lest ye be judged,” but fail to remember the rest of the quote that says we will be judged by the standard we use to judge others.

A Better Word for Tragedy

When we hear of a natural disaster with hundreds or thousands dead, or a suicide, or other cause of ‘unnatural' death, destruction, or mayhem, we label it a tragedy. But what do we call it when it strikes closer to home, directly affecting us or someone we know personally and are watching go through the hell of unexpected grief, dealing with the aftermath, and trying to regain one’s bearings?

Honestly, I can’t think of any word to call it then. It is too raw and real to even put it to words.

We read about Job and all of the evils that befell him and call it a tragedy. But it wasn’t a tragedy to him. It was far, far worse.

Words for his situation were so insufficient, that when his friends joined him, they said nothing…for seven days. In fact, the first words at the end of that week were his intonations of a curse upon his own birth.

There are times in life that are beyond the reach of any words, and we do well to let silence have its eloquence.

SDG