Graduation

I promised when I started this blog that I did not intend to write a whole lot of personal self-therapy stuff but wanted to focus on ideas. But now I'm writing my second personal reflection in a row. Must be the season or something. Thanks for tolerating this.

This weekend I graduate from college...for the sixth time. Yes, this is where I make all of the self-deprecating comments about being a slow learner and needing more time to learn what others learn more quickly, etc. etc. And, Lord knows, there's some truth in that. It's also true that I'm an inveterate academic type who's quite comfortable with school. So I kept on going. And going. And, of course, when being a student wasn't enough, I simply moved to the other side of the lectern and became a prof. And, more recently, an administrator. I guess it's in the blood.

This, however, is my last graduation. One should never say "never" but I think I'm past the stage of my life in which formal education will be one of my primary learning mechanisms. So I'm a tad retrospective on this one. The good news is that this program has been the most useful, in terms of life transformation, of all the ones I've done. I didn't do it for the resume enhancement and it's likely to mean nothing for my career. I went back to school because I knew that I needed to learn some things. And in the process I learned more and differently than I expected. And did so in the company of some of the most interesting, intelligent, funny, and spiritual people I've ever had the privilege to know. And you just can't beat that.

If anyone's looking for a Doctor of Ministry or a doctorate in leadership, try the D.Min. in Leadership in the Emerging Culture at George Fox University. It's nontraditional in delivery, format, and content. Leonard Sweet is the program guru. But be prepared to learn to think cross-culturally, to have ideas challenged and shattered, and to put on a new set of glasses from which to view the world and the church. At least that's what happened to me. And this weekend I will celebrate that experience with my fellow students.

Can't beat that.

Jenni's Gone

My apologies to those who have checked this site in vain these past two months or so. I've been very busy and, quite frankly, really haven't had anything burning inside of me to say. I do today.

This morning my cousin Jenni died. Let me tell you about Jenni. I have 40+ first cousins on my dad's side of the family, ranging in age from early 60s to early 30s. I have only six cousins on my mom's side of the family, ranging in age from early 30s to early 20s. For the most part I know these better, the family being smaller. Of my cousins, Jenni might have been the most like me, which is maybe why we always connected so well. Of course, she was smarter, beautiful, articulate, giving--just a delight to be with.

She was 10 years younger, so I missed a big portion of her college and early adult years, but we reconnected in a significant way two years ago when she asked me to perform the wedding ceremony for her and David. That was a special time. We spent several long days together doing "premarital counseling," which, yes, included some counseling but also included long conversations on this and that and the opportunity to reconnect as famiy. She was a very beautiful bride one Saturday in July in 2004.

Jenni wanted to be a wife and a mother. God granted both requests. Her daughter, Catharine Grace, was born three weeks ago and she's as cute as they come. One week later, Jenni had a massive heart attack while holding the baby in the kitchen. She survived the heart attack, but she was without blood and oxygen to her brain for nearly 10 minutes until she was revived and suffered irreparable brain damage. On Friday her family her family made the hardest, bravest, lovingest decision possible and pulled her life support. She hung on through the weekend.

I visited Jenni in Pittsburgh this weekend and said goodbye. It broke my heart. But she really left us two weeks ago; what I was visiting was a body with lungs laboring to breathe and a damaged heart still beating, but Jenni was long gone. Whether her soul moved on two weeks ago or lingered until today--or whether even my traditional notions of soul and body are even accurate--I don't know. The truth is that she's gone, and on Friday we'll say nice things about her and put her body in the ground.

All of this is terribly, tragically sad, of course. And it opens up fresh some of those significant questions that are much more easily answered when life is good. Things like:

1. Why her and not me? She was a vegetarian. She jogged 5 miles a way. If someone in our family is going to have a heart attack, why not the older, fatter cousin?
2. Why one week after the birth of the baby? She barely got to know her daughter and little Catherine is going to grow up without knowing her mommy.
3. Did God do this? I assert that He did not--that we live in a lousy world in which young mothers die and He grieves with us. Other Christians disagree. God seems pretty impotent in my version of it, doesn't He?
4. Where is Jenni? I don't know the state of her soul. I had baptized her as a teen but she had wandered a bit while in college. She had connected with a church. I hope she had also connected with God.
5. What do we say to those who loved her most right now? There's going to be a lot of foolishness because people don't like sadness. They want to make the hurt go away. I don't think her parents or husband want the hurt to go away...at least for now.

Please pray for Jenni, her father (for whom she was the great love of his life), her mother, her sister, her husband, and her daughter. They are devestated. And we know all too well why.

Intelligent Design: An Appreciation

The Dover Area School Board controversy over Intelligent Design has generated an awful lot of written comments....some of them less stupid than the others. The following probably falls into the latter category...but here I go.

I believe in Intelligent Design. I assume all Christians do. We believe that the physical world was designed, in the sense that it was made with intentionality, by our Creator God, and we believe that both He and His design were intelligent--that is, that they had purpose. I assume (and hope) that nothing here is controversial or objectionable to the believer.

This statement of faith has nothing to do with the mechanism by which the design was transformed into physical reality. Scripture tells us that the mechanism was the very voice of God--He spoke the worlds into being. Matter ex nihilo. Vox de Deum. Whether the voice include the explosion of a quantum singularity popularized as the "big bang" or whether the rules of natural selection guided the biological development of terrestrial creatures is beside the point. Personally, I suspect that both of those theories have significant explanatory power, at least for now. Yet, as a sort of scientific agnostic, I cannot with any authority or confidence declare that God's voice precludes the possibility of a young earth, literal six-day creative activity. My personal opinion is rather simple: Whatever.

The Dover School Board (and some intelligent design proponents) got themselves into trouble (appropriately so) by confusing the issue as one of religion vs. science. One cannot win these days if the argument is framed as such, for scientists are our society's most valued priesthood and religious arguments will fall on deaf ears. Judge Jones, who ruled in the case and was lauded by popular scientific publications (I subscribe to such publications, so I know what I'm saying here) unfortunately fell into the same confusion. He, too, saw the issue as one of science vs. religion. He simply chose the other side.

The issue is not religion vs. science. The issue is materialistic naturalism (or naturalistic materialism) vs. supernaturalism. As a tentative postmodern, I am uneasy presenting this as a dichotomy between philosophical systems, as I am inclined to believe that neither dichotomies nor philosophical systems exist as real entities. Nevertheless, for our purposes here we will simplify the argument and use these terms. Philip Johnson, the best-known proponent of Intelligent Design, writes intelligently designed books setting forth this argument with clarity and I refer you to him.

Thus, the argument is one of philosophy, of assumptions that one brings to the task of science, not an argument of science itself....unless (and this is a very big "unless") one believes that the methods of science are inherently and irretrievably linked to naturalism.

No such linkage has been assumed until recently. Newton and Pascal and Copernicus and Galileo and even Einstein and other twentieth century scientists did not make such an assumption. Unfortunately, the heavy hitters of populist science in our era do or did. Richard Dawkins ("Darwin's pit bull"), the late Stephen Jay Gould, the late Carl Sagan, and Stephen Hawking all committed this mistake. And so science as an enterprise seems about to commit the original sin of all academic disciplines--it is about to declare a particular limiting philosophy as orthodoxy for practice within the discipline. We historians call that Scholasticism. It stifles debate and inquiry and closes paths that could lead to truth.

So here's a call for Intelligent Design to be permitted to enter the marketplace of ideas on a free and equal footing. If its proponents blow it by confusing their own message, so be it. If they make their case with intelligence and wisdom, so much the better. We are all served by open-minded inquiry than by the bromides and inflammatory rhetoric of idealogues on either side. Will someone out there create an intelligent design for an intelligent debate?

Personal Mission

"God has committed some work to me which has not been committed to another. I have my mission--I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told of it in the next."

--John Henry Cardinal Newman, Meditations and Devotions, 1893

On the Lighter Side

Knock, knock.
Who's there?
Dwayne.
Dwayne who?
Dwayne the bathtub. I'm dwowning.
Thave me!

This particular piece of sidesplitting humor has been contributed by my youngest daughter...who really is rather cute when she tells it. :)

The Vice President and Aaron Burr

A word of warning: I expect to be accused of being politically partisan by some readers of this post. Maybe so. But I'm an equal-opportunity basher when it comes to stupid political statements, as my earlier denunications of Pat Robertson illustrate. And if you think Pat Roberton's an easy target, wait to you see who I'm picking on this time. :)

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Dick Cheney gave a scare to an elderly lawyer last weekend and lots of chuckles to the rest of us with his hunting accident. My favorite: "Last Saturday Vice President Dick Cheney shot a lawyer. His approval ratings are now at 92%."

There have been, of course, the inevitable comparisons with Aaron Burr, the only other sitting VP to shoot a man. But it was what Burr did after murdering Alexander Hamilton that provides the most striking comparison right now. And the comparison is not with Cheney but with his predecessor.

Burr's reputation was already pretty low in 1804. In 1800 he had attempted to steal the election away from Thomas Jefferson using a loophole in the election laws. He did not succeed. In the process his integrity took a hit with both Jefferson's Republicans and Hamilton's Federalists. In 1804, Jefferson was up for re-election and Burr was not desired on the ticket of either party. In frustration and spite, he attempted to do harm to his native country by encouraging foreign parties (the British and the Spanish) to take military advantage of the weakness of the Western frontier. They were all too eager to do so. Burr's dealings were eventually revealed, he was charged with treason and dragged into court, and only the intervention of Chief Justice John Marshall, who was always eager to embarrass Jefferson, saved Burr's skin.

Fast forward to 2006. Last weekend former Vice President Al Gore, who had attempted to circumvent Florida election laws in order to overturn the 2000 election and who was so unpopular with his own party in 2004 that he was not able to raise enough money to even launch a campaign, traveled to Saudi Arabia on a big-money speaking trip. There the apparently still-bitter former veep informed his Arab audience that their relatives in the United States were being "indiscriminately rounded up" and held in confinement in "circumstances that are unforgivable."

Now, even if this were true, it's not the kind of thing one would say in the Middle East at the moment. Things are tense enough right now, wouldn't you think? People are being killed because thousands of militant Muslims are upset over a cartoon depicting their founder as a militant Muslim. Wouldn't one expect a former veep to be a tad more responsible than to stoke the fires? We wish.

What makes this worse is that Al Gore was struggling with the "truth thing" yet again. No, large numbers of Arabs are not being indiscriminately rounded up. Gore explained that he was referring here to those here without green cards or those whose visas had expired or those who had entered the country illegally. That's not "indiscriminate." That's the INS doing its job, a job that most in the U.S. consider very important after the mess-ups prior to 9/11. And what the heck does he mean by "unforgivable circumstances?" No cable TV in the county jail? More importantly, how would Arabs in the Middle East interpret "unforgivable?" What images does that word convey to them? And what will some choose to do about it?

This is not empty rhetoric. Words have consequences and Al Gore's words will bring almost certainly bring harm eventually upon one or more of his countrymen. So why, Al? Maybe he's adopted the Jimmy Carter strategy. (President Carter's increasingly bizarre bouts of nastiness are worth a post all their own.) Or, maybe Gore's adopted the Burr strategy. Feeling rejected and doomed to irrelevance, he tried to inflate his own reputation abroad by pandering to its enemies. He may want to remember that that plan didn't work out real well for our third V.P.

Take away Dick Cheney's hunting rifle and a couple of hunting companions may be a bit safer. Take away Al Gore's microphone and maybe we'll all be a bit safer.

Rap as Congregational Worship?

Does anyone out there know of churches that are using rap music for congregational worship?

Through the centuries the church has appropriated just about every form of music for worship. And that's not just spectator music, but actual congregational worship. I've been trying to think if there are exceptions. One possibility is jazz. Because of its inherent improvisational character, it would be very difficult to sing jazz in a congregational setting. However, I have heard jazz rhythms being used by instrumentalists to accompany congregational singing and therefore have concluded that it has been appropriated, at least to some degree.

But has rap? Yes, I know that there are a number of Christian rappers and have even been told that one or two might actually be good at it. I know they give concerts. I can imagine that some of these individuals have brought their rap into the sanctuary and performed live in worship settings. But has anyone heard of a congregation using it? Imagine if you will...after the invocation, the words of a Christian rap song are projected on a screen in the front of a small urban sanctuary. The music starts. And then the congregation--old men and women, somber businessmen, giddy teenagers, housewives, and small children--break into song together, rapping unto Jesus the worship of their hearts.

That vision is just a bit weird, I believe. But also just a bit cool. I wouldn't mind being a fairly quiet, invisible, non-rapping presence at such an event.

Olympics

Been watching the Winter Olympics a bit and am bothered once again by the utter subjectivity of most of the events. Should something be regarded as a sport if it requires subjective judging in order to establish a winner? Is it not art in that case? And should not art be evaluated some place other than in an athletic contest?

If we made that a rule, we'd keep speed skating but lose figure skating. We'd keep downhill skiiing but lose the moguls. We'd lose gymnastics entirely, as well as synchronized swimming and diving. And we'd probably lose college football...since the national championship is still determined by the subjective judgment of the sportwriters, not by a contest on the field.

Since even the more "objective" athletic contests rely on officials to make subjective calls, we will never be entirely free of subjectivity in athletics. Does that mean we should give up the fight? Does any physical event in which individuals or teams can compete against one another now qualify as a sport? "Gee, that mail carrier delivers the mails with more grace than the others. I give her a 6.8 and the gold medal in the 'Women's Mail Carrier Delivery Competition.'"

Way to Go, Steelers!

One cannot say enough...

Another Good, Controversial Book

I just finished reading Michael Crichton's latest novel, State of Fear, about an ecoterrorist group that tries to artificially create a number of natural disasters in order to garner public support against global warming.

It's probably his worst book, from a literary point of view. The characters are not well-developed, the plot veers from boringly predictable to absurdly unbelievable, the story ends abruptly, and a number of loose ends are never tied. However, it appears that he was not trying very hard on this stuff anyway. The narrative is merely a loose structure created to hold his arguments against much of the media hype about global warming.

This is where Crichton the scholar shows up. He includes footnotes to scholarly literature. Yes, in a novel. And he has his characters give long-winded arguments so Crichton has the opportunity to say his peace. That's okay. There's some good stuff in there. Enough to make one rub one's head and think. Maybe everything we assume to be true about global warming is not necessary true. At the very least, these are good questions to ask and now he's got me thinking. That makes it a good book.

Probably the best part, however, is when one of the minor characters, an actor who is a combination of Martin Sheen and Tom Cruise, gets eaten alive by cannibals. You just gotta love that. :)

Go Steelers!

'Nuf said.

Muhammed

So I'm watching the news and I'm wondering...A Danish newspaper publishes a cartoon of Muhammed that implies that he supported violence. In protest against this sacrilege, Muslims in countries around the world engage in acts of violence. Am I missing something here?