My yearly royalty statement from Wadsworth/Thompson Learning reveals that On Pascal (2003) sold eight copies in 2006. It is part of the Wadsworth Philosophers Series. (I also wrote on Jesus, which sold a 404 copies during the same time.) At least it is still in print. It has sold a little over 1,000 in five years. The grasshopper drags himself along...
All modesty and self-restraint aside, I believe it is a far better book than that. It is readable, but well-documented, and it raises many interesting themes related to his life story, philosophy of science, the nature of Pensees, ethics, views of human nature, the infamous wager (which I defend in a modified version), and his views of Jesus Christ.
So, given the vast and influential audience of The Constructive Curmudgeon, let us try to increase sales by:
1. Buying a copy yourself (and not a used one!).
2. Giving one to a friend, Christian or non-Christian.
3. Consider using it for a text in the classroom (apologetics, history of modern philosophy, adult ed in the church, etc.)
4. Write up a review of it on your own blog.
5. Starting a "The Pascal-Driven Life" series in your church and require church attendees to buy it. Create T-shirts, mugs, and action figures as well.
This is not a plan to make money. The contract reeked; I wrote it for spreading the ideas, not lining my pockets. My pockets are lined with gum wrappers and tissues. This is a rallying cry to get the word out about a little book that celebrates a profound and timely thinker: Blaise Pascal.
If you get a copy, let me know and tell me what you think of it.
My next book will be: On the Sublime Perils of Writing Obscure Books Which Fall Still-Born from the Presses.
Saturday, March 31, 2007
Jean Baudrillard is Dead: Reflections
Jean Baudrillard, the often incomprehensible, but sometimes oracular, French sociologist is dead at age 77. I first encountered his work in 1994 when I happened upon The Transparency of Evil, which, at times, was thrilling in its insights into the vicissitudes and perplexities of media culture. This thoughts on hyperrealities are arresting and useful for media analysis. These are roughly images with no concrete references. Think of video game characters. I quoted him a few times in Truth Decay, to good effect, I hope.
Through the years, I read several of this books, but recently decided to read no more. The signal to noise ratio was not high enough on the side of signal. The noise could be deafening. As a recent and merciless obituary in The Chronicle of Higher Education by Carlin Romano put it, Baudrillard was a member of the French "Master of Thought" school, where opacity is taken for profundity, thus excusing all manner of esoteric bombast. Derrida was a more celebrated, but equally obfuscating, member.
As an analytic philosopher (of sorts), I typically have little patience for such stultifying stunts, but with Baudrillard, the pearls amidst swine were sometimes worth the hunt through BS (in Harry Frankfurt's sense of the term). I often quote his line from America, "In America, the laugh track is always running" Quite so. We laugh when we should blush or weep or sit silently.
Baudrillard was called (by some) the French McLuhan. Perhaps at times that would fit, but McLuhan, even at his most obscure, was more clear that Baudrillard at his most clear. Nevertheless, reading McLuhan's Media: The Extensions of Man and Baudrillard's, The Transparency of Evil is recommended for those who desire some insights into the culture of electronic media. They will not give you a Christian critique. Baudrillard was a nihilist; McLuhan was a Catholic who tried to keep his theology out of his theorizing, but not entirely successfully (to our benefit in some cases). But they provide fodder for reflection in developing an understanding to the thought forms and cultural matrix in which we live.
Through the years, I read several of this books, but recently decided to read no more. The signal to noise ratio was not high enough on the side of signal. The noise could be deafening. As a recent and merciless obituary in The Chronicle of Higher Education by Carlin Romano put it, Baudrillard was a member of the French "Master of Thought" school, where opacity is taken for profundity, thus excusing all manner of esoteric bombast. Derrida was a more celebrated, but equally obfuscating, member.
As an analytic philosopher (of sorts), I typically have little patience for such stultifying stunts, but with Baudrillard, the pearls amidst swine were sometimes worth the hunt through BS (in Harry Frankfurt's sense of the term). I often quote his line from America, "In America, the laugh track is always running" Quite so. We laugh when we should blush or weep or sit silently.
Baudrillard was called (by some) the French McLuhan. Perhaps at times that would fit, but McLuhan, even at his most obscure, was more clear that Baudrillard at his most clear. Nevertheless, reading McLuhan's Media: The Extensions of Man and Baudrillard's, The Transparency of Evil is recommended for those who desire some insights into the culture of electronic media. They will not give you a Christian critique. Baudrillard was a nihilist; McLuhan was a Catholic who tried to keep his theology out of his theorizing, but not entirely successfully (to our benefit in some cases). But they provide fodder for reflection in developing an understanding to the thought forms and cultural matrix in which we live.
Thursday, March 29, 2007
That's It! Enough!
I've had it with AOL. In the last few weeks I've seen photos of a woman grabbing another woman's breasts on TV and just now of two celebrity women kissing each other. (I was looking for the weather both times.) What is an alternative service that does not have this kind of idiotic obscenity?
Truly, too many Americans have lost the ability to blush--a prelude to judgment if not repented of. Read Francis Schaeffer's Death in the City on the judgment of God against the West and what this means for Christians. We need more weeping prophets (like Jeremiah adn Schaeffer), not wimpy puppets. See Jeremiah 20:9.
Truly, too many Americans have lost the ability to blush--a prelude to judgment if not repented of. Read Francis Schaeffer's Death in the City on the judgment of God against the West and what this means for Christians. We need more weeping prophets (like Jeremiah adn Schaeffer), not wimpy puppets. See Jeremiah 20:9.
Public Lecture by Doug Groothuis at Denver Seminary
"What Philosophers Wish That Biblical Scholars and Theologians Knew About Philosophy."
Hear Dr. Doug Groothuis speak and engage in Q&A on this provocative topic at the next Christian Thought Colloquium -- Thursday, April 5, 12:00-12:50pm, Executive Board Room at Denver Seminary, 6399 S. Santa Fe Drive, Litteton, CO. Bring your lunch, a friend and your comments and questions.
Hear Dr. Doug Groothuis speak and engage in Q&A on this provocative topic at the next Christian Thought Colloquium -- Thursday, April 5, 12:00-12:50pm, Executive Board Room at Denver Seminary, 6399 S. Santa Fe Drive, Litteton, CO. Bring your lunch, a friend and your comments and questions.
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
The Philosophers Guide to Easy Money
All the books out on making money simply, naturally, supernaturally impress me. Everyone has an angle on the mighty art of capital accumulation. Everyone has their own secret for manifesting material bounty. Why not philosophers?
Easy Money the philosophical way:
1. Read big, difficult, much-known, but little read books--like The Critique of Pure Reason and The Meditations. People will throw money at you out of respect and awe and fear.
2. Teach philosophy at a medium size Christian college. That means teaching four to five classes per term at very low pay. You will probably not be able to write much either, since you will be helping students to differentiate their syllogisms from their aphorisms and Transcendental Idealism from Transcendental Meditation. But one of your students may become rich--after changing their major from philosophy to business--and end up hurling money at you out of deepest gratitude. It could happen.
3. Start a philosophy blog and include a link to a wish list on www.Amazon.com. Just wait for the goodies--philosophy books, of course, but also protein powder, Farberware, and jazz CDs--to arrive by the truckload in the mail.
4. Ask friends and relatives difficult philosophical questions, such as, "How do you know that this state of affair is, in fact, the case?" or "Did you know that your postulate is based on a particularist epistemology?" or "What do you think of the Gettier problem after all these years?" These juicy chops are sure to win you a free dinner or glass or wine quite often.
5. Build a philosophical T-Shirt business. There isn't very much competition. Put philosophical one-liners on the front and/or back of the T-Shirts such as, "Nothing, nothings"--Heidegger. "What is, is"--Parmenides. "Nothing is more to me than myself"--Max Stirner. "I pose, therefore I am"--Bono. "I believe everything--just a little bit"--Marilyn Monroe. And so on. It has to work.
After using these guaranteed, sure-fire, have-never-failed principles, be sure to launch some cash in my direction, because I'm just a poor philosopher to seeks to find truth through reason for the purpose of benefiting existence.
Easy Money the philosophical way:
1. Read big, difficult, much-known, but little read books--like The Critique of Pure Reason and The Meditations. People will throw money at you out of respect and awe and fear.
2. Teach philosophy at a medium size Christian college. That means teaching four to five classes per term at very low pay. You will probably not be able to write much either, since you will be helping students to differentiate their syllogisms from their aphorisms and Transcendental Idealism from Transcendental Meditation. But one of your students may become rich--after changing their major from philosophy to business--and end up hurling money at you out of deepest gratitude. It could happen.
3. Start a philosophy blog and include a link to a wish list on www.Amazon.com. Just wait for the goodies--philosophy books, of course, but also protein powder, Farberware, and jazz CDs--to arrive by the truckload in the mail.
4. Ask friends and relatives difficult philosophical questions, such as, "How do you know that this state of affair is, in fact, the case?" or "Did you know that your postulate is based on a particularist epistemology?" or "What do you think of the Gettier problem after all these years?" These juicy chops are sure to win you a free dinner or glass or wine quite often.
5. Build a philosophical T-Shirt business. There isn't very much competition. Put philosophical one-liners on the front and/or back of the T-Shirts such as, "Nothing, nothings"--Heidegger. "What is, is"--Parmenides. "Nothing is more to me than myself"--Max Stirner. "I pose, therefore I am"--Bono. "I believe everything--just a little bit"--Marilyn Monroe. And so on. It has to work.
After using these guaranteed, sure-fire, have-never-failed principles, be sure to launch some cash in my direction, because I'm just a poor philosopher to seeks to find truth through reason for the purpose of benefiting existence.
Kant's Transcendental Idealism
After many years, I have gotten a short essay on Kant's transcendental idealism into electronic form, thanks to a secretary at Denver Seminary. This was done to prepare for my comprehensive exams for the doctorate in philosophy at the University of Oregon in 1990. (I passed, by the way.) It is not publishable material, since it lacks full documentation and doesn't break any new ground. However, my students have found it helpful in getting some kind of a grip on Kant's difficult philosophy. If you would like a copy, please email me at DRGroothuis@aol.com.
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Big Gift, Big Read
My friend, Tony Weedor, gave me a copy of the Durants' The Story of Civilization! This set was in terrific condition, even retaining the original dust jackets. Tony found it wonderfully underpriced at a garage sale. (Thank God for some kinds of ignorance.) He already had two sets, and he has read the entire set twice.
This brings to mind the idea of actually reading multi-volume sets. Who does this anymore? If I read 5-10 pages a day, I might be able to finish it in a few years--assuming I live that long. The specifics of timing require calculations not yet made. (The book mark is on page 31 of volume one for now.)
How many of you read or have read large sets of books? What do you you make of the idea? I read the first four volumes of Carl Henry's God, Revelation, and Authority in the summer of 1981. That was the last big conquest.
This brings to mind the idea of actually reading multi-volume sets. Who does this anymore? If I read 5-10 pages a day, I might be able to finish it in a few years--assuming I live that long. The specifics of timing require calculations not yet made. (The book mark is on page 31 of volume one for now.)
How many of you read or have read large sets of books? What do you you make of the idea? I read the first four volumes of Carl Henry's God, Revelation, and Authority in the summer of 1981. That was the last big conquest.
Friday, March 23, 2007
A Refreshing Conversation in a Renovated Bookstore
While roaming about Denver today (it's spring break, which is all-too-quickly ending), I went into an old bookstore I have visited many times since living here. It used to be called Ichabod's--a strange name, since that means "God forsaken." The store had changed radically. There was a new name (which I forgot, but the address is 2 S. Broadway in Denver). It was more open, cleaner, and had old albums organized alphabetically at the front of the store. This was all good. The old store was claustrophobic and as musty as it could get.
So, I talked to the friendly owner, Jack, about the changes. He explained that he wanted to broaded the appeal of the store by increasing visibility, cleaning up the stock (some books had been stuck to the walls by mold), and displaying local art that could be purchased on the spot. He also spoke of "listening to the community" concerning what the store should be like. That seemed good to me. I spent some time inspecting the paintings on the walls, which were done by local artists. Most of them seemed hopelessly opaque and/or ugly, but some were not so bad. (Admittedly, I'm not an art critic, but still...).
I purchased an old Jim Hall album along with a Charlie Parker recording, each for $3. (I still have my 1973 turntable connected to an old stereo system.) I found a hardback edition of Francis Schaeffer's How Should We Then Live in the stock. If it is there next time I go in, if it is still there, I think I'll commend it to the owner, given his interest in art--something Schaeffer was especially concerned with. (See also his Art and the Bible, which has been recently reissued by InterVarsity Press.)
What struck me about all this was the emphasis on local culture: listening to the community (South Broadway) and providing a place for artistic work. It wasn't a chain; it wasn't a box store. They played KUVO, the stellar jazz station of Denver. But rest room was "out of order," so I didn't stay as long as I wanted.
So, I talked to the friendly owner, Jack, about the changes. He explained that he wanted to broaded the appeal of the store by increasing visibility, cleaning up the stock (some books had been stuck to the walls by mold), and displaying local art that could be purchased on the spot. He also spoke of "listening to the community" concerning what the store should be like. That seemed good to me. I spent some time inspecting the paintings on the walls, which were done by local artists. Most of them seemed hopelessly opaque and/or ugly, but some were not so bad. (Admittedly, I'm not an art critic, but still...).
I purchased an old Jim Hall album along with a Charlie Parker recording, each for $3. (I still have my 1973 turntable connected to an old stereo system.) I found a hardback edition of Francis Schaeffer's How Should We Then Live in the stock. If it is there next time I go in, if it is still there, I think I'll commend it to the owner, given his interest in art--something Schaeffer was especially concerned with. (See also his Art and the Bible, which has been recently reissued by InterVarsity Press.)
What struck me about all this was the emphasis on local culture: listening to the community (South Broadway) and providing a place for artistic work. It wasn't a chain; it wasn't a box store. They played KUVO, the stellar jazz station of Denver. But rest room was "out of order," so I didn't stay as long as I wanted.
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
Preaching: Soft and Hard
Pastor John MacArthur was preaching on what makes a good church on his radio program this morning and came up with this: "Soft preaching makes hard hearts. Hard preaching makes soft hearts."
He is on to something. If a preacher (male or female; MacArthur doesn't believe in female pastors and preachers, sadly) preaches the deep and difficult things of Holy Scripture, even the painful things, people may, through the Holy Spirit, repent and embrace those things and do mightly exploits for God. I recently heard one of our senior preachers, Kiara Jorgensen, do just that in chapel at Denver Seminary. She carefully unpacked a text that taught that God's people must reach out to the unlovely, the outcast. It was hard, good, challenging, and right.
Contrariwise, when preachers (or, better, pulpiteers) preach an easy word, give a soft and comfortable message, the congregation is not challenged to the root of their being to be holy as God is holy. They then become hard, complacent, comfortable. This, tragically, is most of North American preaching.
Jerram Barrs reflects on the preaching of Francis Schaeffer (1912-1984) this way:
I will never forget some of the sermons I heard him preach. The fact that his voice was high and often would crack as he emphasized a point, the reality that no-one could describe him as ‘charismatic’ or ‘strikingly handsome’ in appearance - these things were completely unimportant. I would listen to a message, often for well over an hour, and be captivated by the truth from God’s Word that was communicated with such clarity and power and with such relevance to our own moment of history and such immediate application to my life. One sermon on Rahab often comes back to me: ‘we are all harlots’ Francis declared, ‘we have all prostituted ourselves constantly to other gods.’ There are many others of his sermons that have left this same indelible impression on my mind.
That was hard preaching.
Oh, Christians! Expect more from your preachers. Don't settle for "the pillow prophets" (as David Wilkerson puts it). Don't heed those who cry, "Peace, peace when there is no peace," those who purport to "heal the wounds of God's people lightly." Expect more. Pray for more. Demand more.
O preachers! Forsake all pulpiteering, people-pleasing, culture-aping, dumbed down and entertaining "messages." Whose message is it? Not your own, but God's. As Paul said:
10 Am I now trying to win human approval, or God's approval? Or am I trying to please people? If I were still trying to please people, I would not be a servant of Christ. --Galatians 1:10.
He is on to something. If a preacher (male or female; MacArthur doesn't believe in female pastors and preachers, sadly) preaches the deep and difficult things of Holy Scripture, even the painful things, people may, through the Holy Spirit, repent and embrace those things and do mightly exploits for God. I recently heard one of our senior preachers, Kiara Jorgensen, do just that in chapel at Denver Seminary. She carefully unpacked a text that taught that God's people must reach out to the unlovely, the outcast. It was hard, good, challenging, and right.
Contrariwise, when preachers (or, better, pulpiteers) preach an easy word, give a soft and comfortable message, the congregation is not challenged to the root of their being to be holy as God is holy. They then become hard, complacent, comfortable. This, tragically, is most of North American preaching.
Jerram Barrs reflects on the preaching of Francis Schaeffer (1912-1984) this way:
I will never forget some of the sermons I heard him preach. The fact that his voice was high and often would crack as he emphasized a point, the reality that no-one could describe him as ‘charismatic’ or ‘strikingly handsome’ in appearance - these things were completely unimportant. I would listen to a message, often for well over an hour, and be captivated by the truth from God’s Word that was communicated with such clarity and power and with such relevance to our own moment of history and such immediate application to my life. One sermon on Rahab often comes back to me: ‘we are all harlots’ Francis declared, ‘we have all prostituted ourselves constantly to other gods.’ There are many others of his sermons that have left this same indelible impression on my mind.
That was hard preaching.
Oh, Christians! Expect more from your preachers. Don't settle for "the pillow prophets" (as David Wilkerson puts it). Don't heed those who cry, "Peace, peace when there is no peace," those who purport to "heal the wounds of God's people lightly." Expect more. Pray for more. Demand more.
O preachers! Forsake all pulpiteering, people-pleasing, culture-aping, dumbed down and entertaining "messages." Whose message is it? Not your own, but God's. As Paul said:
10 Am I now trying to win human approval, or God's approval? Or am I trying to please people? If I were still trying to please people, I would not be a servant of Christ. --Galatians 1:10.
Fine article on Francis Schaeffer
Here is an excellent overview of the life and work of Francis A. Schaeffer b Jerram Barrs, "Francis Schaeffer: The Man and His Message." Barrs teaches at the Francis Schaeffer Institute and worked with the Schaeffers. He is co-author of Being Human.
Monday, March 19, 2007
Fischer on Schaeffer
John Fischer, musician and author, has written a piece on Francis Schaeffer for Christianity Today. I have mixed reactions to it, and may comment more later. Nevertheless, it is worth reading for its basic thesis: Schaeffer had compassion for lost people and a lost culture. Do we?
More on reading
1. Here are two solid books on reading books:
A. Mortimer Adler, How to Read a Book.
B. James W. Sire, How to Read Slowly (InterVarsity Press, 1980). I'm not sure if this is still in print, but it is a wise read on how to read, especially related to discerning the worldview of the writer of any book.
2. Seek God as to what books you should purchase and read. Ask God to give you wisdom as you read to sort out the true from the false and to remember what is important for God's Kingdom work. See Colossians 3:17; 1 Corinthians 10:31; Matthew 6:33.
3. For the discipline of reading and study consider the conjunction of these two verses:
A. 24 Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize. 25 Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last; but we do it to get a crown that will last forever. 26 Therefore I do not run like someone running aimlessly; I do not fight like a boxer beating the air. 27 No, I strike a blow to my body and make it my slave so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified for the prize. --1 Corinthians 9:24-27.
B. 11 The words of the wise are like goads, their collected sayings like firmly embedded nails—given by one shepherd. 12 Be warned, my son, of anything in addition to them. Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body. --Ecclesiastes 12:11-12.
Those called to study must discipline their bodies to that end--for the glory of God.
A. Mortimer Adler, How to Read a Book.
B. James W. Sire, How to Read Slowly (InterVarsity Press, 1980). I'm not sure if this is still in print, but it is a wise read on how to read, especially related to discerning the worldview of the writer of any book.
2. Seek God as to what books you should purchase and read. Ask God to give you wisdom as you read to sort out the true from the false and to remember what is important for God's Kingdom work. See Colossians 3:17; 1 Corinthians 10:31; Matthew 6:33.
3. For the discipline of reading and study consider the conjunction of these two verses:
A. 24 Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize. 25 Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last; but we do it to get a crown that will last forever. 26 Therefore I do not run like someone running aimlessly; I do not fight like a boxer beating the air. 27 No, I strike a blow to my body and make it my slave so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified for the prize. --1 Corinthians 9:24-27.
B. 11 The words of the wise are like goads, their collected sayings like firmly embedded nails—given by one shepherd. 12 Be warned, my son, of anything in addition to them. Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body. --Ecclesiastes 12:11-12.
Those called to study must discipline their bodies to that end--for the glory of God.
Saturday, March 17, 2007
Reading
Here are eleven short principles for how to read a book. I just gave these to someone who asked me by email about how to read.
1. Read often, giving adequate time for the nature of the work.
2. Stop watching TV (if you do). It tends to rot the mind. Read the appendix to Truth Decay on that as well as the contemporary classic, Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman (1985).
3. Mark up your books, underlining key ideas and jotting ideas in the margins. Keep an index in the front of the book of the most important ideas. If the book is especially profound, take detailed notes on it.
4. Try to use the ideas from good books in letters, essays, teachings, and conversations. Form a book club. Keep the ideas alive. Aspire to write a book yourself, if it is needed and you are the person to write it.
5. Reread important books. This is a mark of the literary person, as CS Lewis notes in An Experiment in Criticism. I have been rereading much of Francis Schaeffer recently, a man I first read nearly 30 years ago as a young Christian. It is well worth it.
6. Never get rid of a book you have read. I have thousands of books, but lament that have I let go of some I have read (and some I didn't).
7. Read and reread old books. Don't be taken captive by fashion. Savor the classics.
8. Ask smart people what their favorite books are and why. Then read them.
9. Read in silence. Carve out a private place if need be.
10. Always look up and learn unfamiliar words you find in your reading. From 1976-1994 or so, I filled a blank book of over a 100 pages with such words. Use such words in conversation, even if the person you are conversing with may not know them.
11. Spend time in books stores, new and old. Get a sense and feel for what is out there.
12. When in doubt, buy a book.
1. Read often, giving adequate time for the nature of the work.
2. Stop watching TV (if you do). It tends to rot the mind. Read the appendix to Truth Decay on that as well as the contemporary classic, Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman (1985).
3. Mark up your books, underlining key ideas and jotting ideas in the margins. Keep an index in the front of the book of the most important ideas. If the book is especially profound, take detailed notes on it.
4. Try to use the ideas from good books in letters, essays, teachings, and conversations. Form a book club. Keep the ideas alive. Aspire to write a book yourself, if it is needed and you are the person to write it.
5. Reread important books. This is a mark of the literary person, as CS Lewis notes in An Experiment in Criticism. I have been rereading much of Francis Schaeffer recently, a man I first read nearly 30 years ago as a young Christian. It is well worth it.
6. Never get rid of a book you have read. I have thousands of books, but lament that have I let go of some I have read (and some I didn't).
7. Read and reread old books. Don't be taken captive by fashion. Savor the classics.
8. Ask smart people what their favorite books are and why. Then read them.
9. Read in silence. Carve out a private place if need be.
10. Always look up and learn unfamiliar words you find in your reading. From 1976-1994 or so, I filled a blank book of over a 100 pages with such words. Use such words in conversation, even if the person you are conversing with may not know them.
11. Spend time in books stores, new and old. Get a sense and feel for what is out there.
12. When in doubt, buy a book.
Friday, March 16, 2007
A good chop from one of my students
In a paper for my class Christian Ethics and Modern Culture, an adroit student wrote, "Christians should humbly try to be the smartest people on the planet."
Teaching does have its rewards.
Teaching does have its rewards.
Thursday, March 15, 2007
The Quiet Passing of Kurios Coffee
Kurios coffee: 2003-2007.
A song of ascents. Of David.
1 How good and pleasant it is when God's people live together in unity!
2 It is like precious oil poured on the head, running down on the beard, running down on Aaron's beard, down on the collar of his robe.
3 It is as if the dew of Hermon were falling on Mount Zion. For there the LORD bestows his blessing, even life forevermore.
Why must small, but good things die?
Kurios Coffee is an independent coffee shop set up by Joel Newton (a seminary student) at Denver Seminary. Sadly, Friday, March 16, will be its last day of service. Joel could not keep up financially, given the lack of patronage. This says several things about our culture.
Not enough students felt loyal to their own coffee shop. Servers told me of seeing many students with their Starbucks cups in the student center. The problem is not that students or faculty don't drink coffee, but where they buy it. In our mobile and in-transit society, the idea of loyalty to a place, to a locality, is rare. It is all functionality: get the coffee, quickly, and take it with you. McWorld strikes again, to the detriment of local, small-scale culture.
Another problem is likely that few students take the student center to be a place to regularly convene and converse. They are perpetually on the move. Years ago, one of my African students told me how surprised he was that students didn't remain after class to talk over the lectures. They did this for hours in Africa while he was in Bible school. Here, we are too busy, too frenetic, too much in-transit. Time is money, you know.
Now I'll have to remember to stop at Starbucks on the way to work--unless I ever get off the evil-wonderful brew. But thanks to Kurios Coffee for four years of caffenation and hospitality, despite its impending expiration. McWorld wins yet another round.
What is the answer to the octopus of McWorld? It is not socialism. It is not governmental regulation. It is conviviality.
A song of ascents. Of David.
1 How good and pleasant it is when God's people live together in unity!
2 It is like precious oil poured on the head, running down on the beard, running down on Aaron's beard, down on the collar of his robe.
3 It is as if the dew of Hermon were falling on Mount Zion. For there the LORD bestows his blessing, even life forevermore.
Why must small, but good things die?
Kurios Coffee is an independent coffee shop set up by Joel Newton (a seminary student) at Denver Seminary. Sadly, Friday, March 16, will be its last day of service. Joel could not keep up financially, given the lack of patronage. This says several things about our culture.
Not enough students felt loyal to their own coffee shop. Servers told me of seeing many students with their Starbucks cups in the student center. The problem is not that students or faculty don't drink coffee, but where they buy it. In our mobile and in-transit society, the idea of loyalty to a place, to a locality, is rare. It is all functionality: get the coffee, quickly, and take it with you. McWorld strikes again, to the detriment of local, small-scale culture.
Another problem is likely that few students take the student center to be a place to regularly convene and converse. They are perpetually on the move. Years ago, one of my African students told me how surprised he was that students didn't remain after class to talk over the lectures. They did this for hours in Africa while he was in Bible school. Here, we are too busy, too frenetic, too much in-transit. Time is money, you know.
Now I'll have to remember to stop at Starbucks on the way to work--unless I ever get off the evil-wonderful brew. But thanks to Kurios Coffee for four years of caffenation and hospitality, despite its impending expiration. McWorld wins yet another round.
What is the answer to the octopus of McWorld? It is not socialism. It is not governmental regulation. It is conviviality.
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
A Courageous and Important African Woman: Aynna Hirsi Ali
[Like the case of the late Oriana Fallaci, I cannot agree with Ali's atheism, but I do respect her courage and forthrightness. How I wish I could talk to her about the truth, rationality, and pertience of the Chrstian message. May God lead someone to do so. Atheism cannot stand up to Islam in the long run.]
From The Wall Street Journal
THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW
Free Radical
Ayaan Hirsi Ali infuriates Muslims and discomfits liberals.
BY JOSEPH RAGO
Saturday, March 10, 2007 12:01 a.m.
NEW YORK--Ayaan Hirsi Ali is untrammeled and unrepentant: "I am supposed to apologize for saying the prophet is a pervert and a tyrant," she declares. "But that is apologizing for the truth."
Statements such as these have brought Ms. Hirsi Ali to world-wide attention. Though she recently left her adopted country, Holland--where her friend and intellectual collaborator Theo van Gogh was murdered by a Muslim extremist in 2004--she is still accompanied by armed guards wherever she travels.
Ms. Hirsi Ali was born in 1969 in Mogadishu--into, as she puts it, "the Islamic civilization, as far as you can call it a civilization." In 1992, at age 22, her family gave her hand to a distant relative; had the marriage ensued, she says, it would have been "an arranged rape." But as she was shipped to the appointment via Europe, she fled, obtaining asylum in Holland. There, "through observation, through experience, through reading," she acquainted herself with a different world. "The culture that I came to and I live in now is not perfect," Ms. Hirsi Ali says. "But this culture, the West, the product of the Enlightenment, is the best humanity has ever achieved."
Unease over Muslim immigration had been rising in the Low Countries for some time. For instance, when the gay right-wing politician Pim Fortuyn--"I am in favor of a cold war with Islam," he said, and believed the borders should be closed to Muslims--was gunned down in 2002, it was widely assumed his killer was an Islamist. There was a strange sense of relief when he turned out to be a mere animal-rights activist. Ms. Hirsi Ali brought integration issues to further attention, exposing domestic abuse and even honor killings in the Dutch-Muslim "dish cities."
In 2003, she won a seat in the parliament as a member of the center-right VVD Party, for People's Party for Freedom and Democracy. The next year, she wrote the script for a short film called "Submission." It investigated passages from the Quran that Ms. Hirsi Ali contends authorize violence against women, and did so by projecting those passages onto naked female bodies. In retrospect, she deeply regrets the outcome: "I don't think the film was worth the human life."
The life in question was that of Van Gogh, a prominent controversialist and the film's director. At the end of 2004, an Islamist named Mohammed Buyeri shot him as he was bicycling to work in downtown Amsterdam, then almost decapitated him with a curved sword. He left a manifesto impaled to the body: "I know for sure that you, Oh Hirsi Ali, will go down," was its incantation. "I know for sure that you, Oh unbelieving fundamentalist, will go down."
The shock was palpable. Holland--which has the second largest per capita population of Muslims in the EU, after France--had always prided itself on its pluralism, in which all groups would be tolerated but not integrated. The killing made clear just how apart its groups were.
"Immediately after the murder," Ms. Hirsi Ali says, "we learned Theo's killer had access to education, he had learned the language, he had taken welfare. He made it very clear he knew what democracy meant, he knew what liberalism was, and he consciously rejected it. . . . He said, 'I have an alternative framework. It's Islam. It's the Quran.' "
At his sentencing, Mohammed Buyeri said he would have killed his own brother, had he made "Submission" or otherwise insulted the One True Faith. "And why?" Ms. Hirsi Ali asks. "Because he said his god ordered him to do it. . . . We need to see," she continues, "that this isn't something that's caused by special offense, the right, Jews, poverty. It's religion."
Ms. Hirsi Ali was forced into living underground; a hard-line VVD minister named Rita Verdonk, cracking down on immigration, canceled her citizenship for misstatements made on her asylum application--which Ms. Hirsi Ali had admitted years before and justified as a means to win quicker admission at a time of great personal vulnerability. The resulting controversy led to the collapse of Holland's coalition government. Ms. Hirsi Ali has since decamped for America--in effect a political refugee from Western Europe--to take up a position with the American Enterprise Institute. But the crisis, she says, is "still simmering underneath and it might erupt--somewhere, anywhere."
That partly explains why Ms. Hirsi Ali's new autobiography, "Infidel," is already a best seller. It may also have something to do with the way she scrambles our expectations. In person, she is modest, graceful, enthralling. Intellectually, she is fierce, even predatory: "We know exactly what it is about but we don't have the guts to say it out loud," she says. "We are too weak to take up our role. The West is falling apart. The open society is coming undone."
Many liberals loathe her for disrupting an imagined "diversity" consensus: It is absurd, she argues, to pretend that cultures are all equal, or all equally desirable. But conservatives, and others, might be reasonably unnerved by her dim view of religion. She does not believe that Islam has been "hijacked" by fanatics, but that fanaticism is intrinsic in Islam itself: "Islam, even Islam in its nonviolent form, is dangerous."
The Muslim faith has many variations, but Ms. Hirsi Ali contends that the unities are of greater significance. "Islam has a very consistent doctrine," she says, "and I define Islam as I was taught to define it: submission to the will of Allah. His will is written in the Quran, and in the hadith and Sunna. What we are all taught is that when you want to make a distinction between right and wrong, you follow the prophet. Muhammad is the model guide for every Muslim through time, throughout history."
This supposition justifies, in her view, a withering critique of Islam's most holy human messenger. "You start by scrutinizing the morality of the prophet," and then ask: "Are you prepared to follow the morality of the prophet in a society such as this one?" She draws a connection between Mohammed's taking of child brides and modern sexual oppressions--what she calls "this imprisonment of women." She decries the murder of adulteresses and rape victims, the wearing of the veil, arranged marriages, domestic violence, genital mutilation and other contraventions of "the most basic freedoms."
These sufferings, she maintains, are traceable to theological imperatives. "People say it is a bad strategy," Ms. Hirsi Ali says forcefully. "I think it is the best strategy. . . . Muslims must choose to follow their rational capacities as humans and to follow reason instead of Quranic commands. At that point Islam will be reformed."
This worldview has led certain critics to dismiss Ms. Hirsi Ali as a secular extremist. "I have my ideas and my views," she says, "and I want to argue them. It is our obligation to look at things critically." As to the charges that she is an "Enlightenment fundamentalist," she points out, rightly, that people who live in democratic societies are not supposed to settle their disagreements by killing one another.
And yet contemporary democracies, she says, accommodate the incitement of such behavior: "The multiculturalism theology, like all theologies, is cruel, is wrongheaded, and is unarguable because it is an utter dogmatism. . . . Minorities are exempted from the obligations of the rest of society, so they don't improve. . . . With this theory you limit them, you freeze their culture, you keep them in place."
The most grievous failing of the West is self-congratulatory passivity: We face "an external enemy that to a degree has become an internal enemy, that has infiltrated the system and wants to destroy it." She believes a more drastic reaction is required: "It's easy," she says, "to weigh liberties against the damage that can be done to society and decide to deny liberties. As it should be. A free society should be prepared to recognize the patterns in front of it, and do something about them."
She says the West must begin to think long term about its relationship with Islam--because the Islamists are. Ms. Hirsi Ali notes Muslim birth rates are vastly outstripping those elsewhere (particularly in Western Europe) and believes this is a conscious attempt to extend the faith. Muslims, she says, treat women as "these baby-machines, these son-factories. . . . We need to compete with this," she goes on. "It is a totalitarian method. The Nazis tried it using women as incubators, literally to give birth to soldiers. Islam is now doing it. . . . It is a very effective and very frightening way of dealing with human beings."
All of this is profoundly politically incorrect. But for this remarkable woman, ideas are not abstractions. She forces us back to first principles, and she punctures complacencies. These ought to be seen as virtues, even by those who find some of Ms. Hirsi Ali's ideas disturbing or objectionable. Society, after all, sometimes needs to be roused from its slumbers by agitators who go too far so that others will go far enough.
Mr. Rago is an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal.
From The Wall Street Journal
THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW
Free Radical
Ayaan Hirsi Ali infuriates Muslims and discomfits liberals.
BY JOSEPH RAGO
Saturday, March 10, 2007 12:01 a.m.
NEW YORK--Ayaan Hirsi Ali is untrammeled and unrepentant: "I am supposed to apologize for saying the prophet is a pervert and a tyrant," she declares. "But that is apologizing for the truth."
Statements such as these have brought Ms. Hirsi Ali to world-wide attention. Though she recently left her adopted country, Holland--where her friend and intellectual collaborator Theo van Gogh was murdered by a Muslim extremist in 2004--she is still accompanied by armed guards wherever she travels.
Ms. Hirsi Ali was born in 1969 in Mogadishu--into, as she puts it, "the Islamic civilization, as far as you can call it a civilization." In 1992, at age 22, her family gave her hand to a distant relative; had the marriage ensued, she says, it would have been "an arranged rape." But as she was shipped to the appointment via Europe, she fled, obtaining asylum in Holland. There, "through observation, through experience, through reading," she acquainted herself with a different world. "The culture that I came to and I live in now is not perfect," Ms. Hirsi Ali says. "But this culture, the West, the product of the Enlightenment, is the best humanity has ever achieved."
Unease over Muslim immigration had been rising in the Low Countries for some time. For instance, when the gay right-wing politician Pim Fortuyn--"I am in favor of a cold war with Islam," he said, and believed the borders should be closed to Muslims--was gunned down in 2002, it was widely assumed his killer was an Islamist. There was a strange sense of relief when he turned out to be a mere animal-rights activist. Ms. Hirsi Ali brought integration issues to further attention, exposing domestic abuse and even honor killings in the Dutch-Muslim "dish cities."
In 2003, she won a seat in the parliament as a member of the center-right VVD Party, for People's Party for Freedom and Democracy. The next year, she wrote the script for a short film called "Submission." It investigated passages from the Quran that Ms. Hirsi Ali contends authorize violence against women, and did so by projecting those passages onto naked female bodies. In retrospect, she deeply regrets the outcome: "I don't think the film was worth the human life."
The life in question was that of Van Gogh, a prominent controversialist and the film's director. At the end of 2004, an Islamist named Mohammed Buyeri shot him as he was bicycling to work in downtown Amsterdam, then almost decapitated him with a curved sword. He left a manifesto impaled to the body: "I know for sure that you, Oh Hirsi Ali, will go down," was its incantation. "I know for sure that you, Oh unbelieving fundamentalist, will go down."
The shock was palpable. Holland--which has the second largest per capita population of Muslims in the EU, after France--had always prided itself on its pluralism, in which all groups would be tolerated but not integrated. The killing made clear just how apart its groups were.
"Immediately after the murder," Ms. Hirsi Ali says, "we learned Theo's killer had access to education, he had learned the language, he had taken welfare. He made it very clear he knew what democracy meant, he knew what liberalism was, and he consciously rejected it. . . . He said, 'I have an alternative framework. It's Islam. It's the Quran.' "
At his sentencing, Mohammed Buyeri said he would have killed his own brother, had he made "Submission" or otherwise insulted the One True Faith. "And why?" Ms. Hirsi Ali asks. "Because he said his god ordered him to do it. . . . We need to see," she continues, "that this isn't something that's caused by special offense, the right, Jews, poverty. It's religion."
Ms. Hirsi Ali was forced into living underground; a hard-line VVD minister named Rita Verdonk, cracking down on immigration, canceled her citizenship for misstatements made on her asylum application--which Ms. Hirsi Ali had admitted years before and justified as a means to win quicker admission at a time of great personal vulnerability. The resulting controversy led to the collapse of Holland's coalition government. Ms. Hirsi Ali has since decamped for America--in effect a political refugee from Western Europe--to take up a position with the American Enterprise Institute. But the crisis, she says, is "still simmering underneath and it might erupt--somewhere, anywhere."
That partly explains why Ms. Hirsi Ali's new autobiography, "Infidel," is already a best seller. It may also have something to do with the way she scrambles our expectations. In person, she is modest, graceful, enthralling. Intellectually, she is fierce, even predatory: "We know exactly what it is about but we don't have the guts to say it out loud," she says. "We are too weak to take up our role. The West is falling apart. The open society is coming undone."
Many liberals loathe her for disrupting an imagined "diversity" consensus: It is absurd, she argues, to pretend that cultures are all equal, or all equally desirable. But conservatives, and others, might be reasonably unnerved by her dim view of religion. She does not believe that Islam has been "hijacked" by fanatics, but that fanaticism is intrinsic in Islam itself: "Islam, even Islam in its nonviolent form, is dangerous."
The Muslim faith has many variations, but Ms. Hirsi Ali contends that the unities are of greater significance. "Islam has a very consistent doctrine," she says, "and I define Islam as I was taught to define it: submission to the will of Allah. His will is written in the Quran, and in the hadith and Sunna. What we are all taught is that when you want to make a distinction between right and wrong, you follow the prophet. Muhammad is the model guide for every Muslim through time, throughout history."
This supposition justifies, in her view, a withering critique of Islam's most holy human messenger. "You start by scrutinizing the morality of the prophet," and then ask: "Are you prepared to follow the morality of the prophet in a society such as this one?" She draws a connection between Mohammed's taking of child brides and modern sexual oppressions--what she calls "this imprisonment of women." She decries the murder of adulteresses and rape victims, the wearing of the veil, arranged marriages, domestic violence, genital mutilation and other contraventions of "the most basic freedoms."
These sufferings, she maintains, are traceable to theological imperatives. "People say it is a bad strategy," Ms. Hirsi Ali says forcefully. "I think it is the best strategy. . . . Muslims must choose to follow their rational capacities as humans and to follow reason instead of Quranic commands. At that point Islam will be reformed."
This worldview has led certain critics to dismiss Ms. Hirsi Ali as a secular extremist. "I have my ideas and my views," she says, "and I want to argue them. It is our obligation to look at things critically." As to the charges that she is an "Enlightenment fundamentalist," she points out, rightly, that people who live in democratic societies are not supposed to settle their disagreements by killing one another.
And yet contemporary democracies, she says, accommodate the incitement of such behavior: "The multiculturalism theology, like all theologies, is cruel, is wrongheaded, and is unarguable because it is an utter dogmatism. . . . Minorities are exempted from the obligations of the rest of society, so they don't improve. . . . With this theory you limit them, you freeze their culture, you keep them in place."
The most grievous failing of the West is self-congratulatory passivity: We face "an external enemy that to a degree has become an internal enemy, that has infiltrated the system and wants to destroy it." She believes a more drastic reaction is required: "It's easy," she says, "to weigh liberties against the damage that can be done to society and decide to deny liberties. As it should be. A free society should be prepared to recognize the patterns in front of it, and do something about them."
She says the West must begin to think long term about its relationship with Islam--because the Islamists are. Ms. Hirsi Ali notes Muslim birth rates are vastly outstripping those elsewhere (particularly in Western Europe) and believes this is a conscious attempt to extend the faith. Muslims, she says, treat women as "these baby-machines, these son-factories. . . . We need to compete with this," she goes on. "It is a totalitarian method. The Nazis tried it using women as incubators, literally to give birth to soldiers. Islam is now doing it. . . . It is a very effective and very frightening way of dealing with human beings."
All of this is profoundly politically incorrect. But for this remarkable woman, ideas are not abstractions. She forces us back to first principles, and she punctures complacencies. These ought to be seen as virtues, even by those who find some of Ms. Hirsi Ali's ideas disturbing or objectionable. Society, after all, sometimes needs to be roused from its slumbers by agitators who go too far so that others will go far enough.
Mr. Rago is an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal.
Monday, March 12, 2007
No Gnostics Here: Rebecca Merrill Groothuis's Response to "Crosstalk" Radio Program
[On March 8, 2007, the "Crosstalk" radio program interviewed two women who said false things about Rebecca Merrill Groothuis and myself in their supposed expose of "Evangelical Feminism." They accused us of being sympathetic to goddess worship and to Gnosticism, believe it or not. Below is Rebecca's email to the host of the program, which includes an earlier response to Jill Ritsche.]
Dear Ingrid Schlueter:
I have been informed of the substance of Jill Ritsche's and Dwayna Litz's allegations aired recently on your radio program. Since Jill and Dwayna were quite inaccurate in their portrayal of my position and beliefs, I thought you might be interested in reading my 2/16/07 email to Jill (copied below), which I sent her in response to her repeated request for my email address and her query regarding my association with Christians for Biblical Equality. In the email to Jill, I also included a short essay that I had written, which clearly delineates my beliefs on the subject of God as Father. The essay is attached here as a file, and I have also provided a link to it, where it is posted on the Christians For Biblical Equality web page. Everything in this essay is based soundly and directly on Scripture. A cool head and a sound mind will readily perceive from this essay that I absolutely do not advocate worshipping God as Mother. Any charge that my views on this matter are "questionable" is without any warrant.
Dwayna and Jill also claimed that I believe Adam was originally androgynous. That, too, is false. In my book Good News for Women I present this briefly as the view of some, but state clearly that "we cannot know these things with certainty" (p. 125). I do not affirm this view; I merely offer an unbiased discussion of it. In any case, this has no bearing on the nature of God. Nor does this idea affirm or even suggest androgyny as any kind of ideal for humanity in general.
Further, in my book Women Caught in the Conflict (chapter 12), I thoroughly address the error and illogic of associating evangelical egalitarianism with androgyny and Gnosticism. There is no biblical, logical, or theological basis for the claim that biblical gender equality entails, derives from, or leads to androgyny and/or Gnosticism.
Time does not permit a response to the other falsehoods aired on this show. But I trust that the few remarks I have offered here will be helpful to you in properly assessing the merits of Dwayna's and Jill's claims.
Sincerely,
Rebecca Merrill Groothuis
2/16/07
Dear Jill Ritsche:
You now have my email address, although it is available for one and all on my website, which also offers essays I’ve written critiquing goddess religions. Those essays—as well as both my books—make clear that I do not have any sympathy with goddess worship, which posits a divine feminine element present in every woman and throughout the universe (pantheism). This is certainly not compatible with biblical theology. Nor is it compatible with any of the teaching propounded by leaders in Christians for Biblical Equality. CBE does not advocate the worship of a mother God. That charge has no logical or factual basis. Recognizing that God is neither male nor female and that Scripture speaks of God in metaphorical imagery that is feminine and motherly is NOT tantamount to worshiping a mother God.
I would also like to clarify that I am on the Board of Reference for CBE; I am not on the governing board. I do not have, nor have I ever had any governing authority over CBE. The books and resources that they choose to offer, as well as their own publications, are not subject to my review. There are doubtless some books, resources and articles in their publications with which I would not be in entire agreement. I am not responsible for CBE’s public comments or publications or marketing decisions. However, I am on the Board of Reference because I stand behind CBE’s doctrinal statement, and their “Men, Women and Biblical Equality” statement, and their mission to build up the church by releasing all believers to serve God according to the gifting of the Holy Spirit without restrictions based solely on gender. CBE and I are in agreement that a true and proper understanding of Scripture requires that gender, in and of itself, will neither privilege nor curtail a believer’s opportunity to serve the Lord in ministry.
I have included my own understanding of God as Father in the short essay below.
http://www.cbeinternational.org/new/free_articles/Egal.%20Interp..shtml
I trust that the above material is helpful for you.
Rebecca Merrill Groothuis
Dear Ingrid Schlueter:
I have been informed of the substance of Jill Ritsche's and Dwayna Litz's allegations aired recently on your radio program. Since Jill and Dwayna were quite inaccurate in their portrayal of my position and beliefs, I thought you might be interested in reading my 2/16/07 email to Jill (copied below), which I sent her in response to her repeated request for my email address and her query regarding my association with Christians for Biblical Equality. In the email to Jill, I also included a short essay that I had written, which clearly delineates my beliefs on the subject of God as Father. The essay is attached here as a file, and I have also provided a link to it, where it is posted on the Christians For Biblical Equality web page. Everything in this essay is based soundly and directly on Scripture. A cool head and a sound mind will readily perceive from this essay that I absolutely do not advocate worshipping God as Mother. Any charge that my views on this matter are "questionable" is without any warrant.
Dwayna and Jill also claimed that I believe Adam was originally androgynous. That, too, is false. In my book Good News for Women I present this briefly as the view of some, but state clearly that "we cannot know these things with certainty" (p. 125). I do not affirm this view; I merely offer an unbiased discussion of it. In any case, this has no bearing on the nature of God. Nor does this idea affirm or even suggest androgyny as any kind of ideal for humanity in general.
Further, in my book Women Caught in the Conflict (chapter 12), I thoroughly address the error and illogic of associating evangelical egalitarianism with androgyny and Gnosticism. There is no biblical, logical, or theological basis for the claim that biblical gender equality entails, derives from, or leads to androgyny and/or Gnosticism.
Time does not permit a response to the other falsehoods aired on this show. But I trust that the few remarks I have offered here will be helpful to you in properly assessing the merits of Dwayna's and Jill's claims.
Sincerely,
Rebecca Merrill Groothuis
2/16/07
Dear Jill Ritsche:
You now have my email address, although it is available for one and all on my website, which also offers essays I’ve written critiquing goddess religions. Those essays—as well as both my books—make clear that I do not have any sympathy with goddess worship, which posits a divine feminine element present in every woman and throughout the universe (pantheism). This is certainly not compatible with biblical theology. Nor is it compatible with any of the teaching propounded by leaders in Christians for Biblical Equality. CBE does not advocate the worship of a mother God. That charge has no logical or factual basis. Recognizing that God is neither male nor female and that Scripture speaks of God in metaphorical imagery that is feminine and motherly is NOT tantamount to worshiping a mother God.
I would also like to clarify that I am on the Board of Reference for CBE; I am not on the governing board. I do not have, nor have I ever had any governing authority over CBE. The books and resources that they choose to offer, as well as their own publications, are not subject to my review. There are doubtless some books, resources and articles in their publications with which I would not be in entire agreement. I am not responsible for CBE’s public comments or publications or marketing decisions. However, I am on the Board of Reference because I stand behind CBE’s doctrinal statement, and their “Men, Women and Biblical Equality” statement, and their mission to build up the church by releasing all believers to serve God according to the gifting of the Holy Spirit without restrictions based solely on gender. CBE and I are in agreement that a true and proper understanding of Scripture requires that gender, in and of itself, will neither privilege nor curtail a believer’s opportunity to serve the Lord in ministry.
I have included my own understanding of God as Father in the short essay below.
http://www.cbeinternational.org/new/free_articles/Egal.%20Interp..shtml
I trust that the above material is helpful for you.
Rebecca Merrill Groothuis
Saturday, March 10, 2007
Nietzsche's Epigram and Ramm's Rebuke
A word for apologists:
“The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.” --Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, section 191.
Another word from Bernard Ramm's neglected classic:
"What is the devil’s due Evangelicals can glean from Nietzsche? It is the willingness to be driven like Nietzsche. It is the willingness to spare no pains in the search for truth. It is the willingness. . . .to work into the late hours of the night or to start in the earliest hours of the day; to pick up a new project as soon as we have finished an older one; to grow weary and exhausted in our quest for truth; to have...our eyes watery from too much reading, and our bodies bent over from long, weary hours at the study desk.
No Evangelical whose reading habits are a disgrace to the seriousness of the Christian ministry, or who spends more time before a television set than he does in serious reading in his study has the right to damn Nietzsche from the pulpit to some gruesome place in the Inferno."
--Bernard Ramm, The Devil, Seven Wormwoods, and God (Waco, TX: Word Books, 1977), 61-62.
“The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.” --Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, section 191.
Another word from Bernard Ramm's neglected classic:
"What is the devil’s due Evangelicals can glean from Nietzsche? It is the willingness to be driven like Nietzsche. It is the willingness to spare no pains in the search for truth. It is the willingness. . . .to work into the late hours of the night or to start in the earliest hours of the day; to pick up a new project as soon as we have finished an older one; to grow weary and exhausted in our quest for truth; to have...our eyes watery from too much reading, and our bodies bent over from long, weary hours at the study desk.
No Evangelical whose reading habits are a disgrace to the seriousness of the Christian ministry, or who spends more time before a television set than he does in serious reading in his study has the right to damn Nietzsche from the pulpit to some gruesome place in the Inferno."
--Bernard Ramm, The Devil, Seven Wormwoods, and God (Waco, TX: Word Books, 1977), 61-62.
Friday, March 09, 2007
"The Secret" and O!
Oprah has been promoting an egregious New Age piece of bunkum called The Secret. Salon has published a hard-hitting expose. I have written nearly 1000 pages against this worldview since the 1980s (but not that much in recent years; enough is enough). Sadly, it is still with us. It is still deceiving millions. It is still making millions for its more savvy promoters. The serpent in the garden was the very first promoter (Genesis 3:6).
And many think Oprah is a wonderful Christian woman. "You will know them by their fruits," Jesus said, including the fruit of their worldview.
And many think Oprah is a wonderful Christian woman. "You will know them by their fruits," Jesus said, including the fruit of their worldview.
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
Celebrities and Charity: Do the Math (You, too, Bono)
Advertizing Age
Costly Red Campaign Reaps Meager $18 Million
Bono & Co. Spend up to $100 Million on Marketing, Incur Watchdogs' Wrath
By Mya Frazier
Published: March 05, 2007 COLUMBUS, Ohio (AdAge.com)
-- It's been a year since the first Red T-shirts hit Gap shelves in London, and a parade of celebrity-splashed events has followed: Steven Spielberg smiling down from billboards in San Francisco; Christy Turlington striking a yoga pose in a New Yorker ad; Bono cruising Chicago's Michigan Avenue with Oprah Winfrey, eagerly snapping up Red products; Chris Rock appearing in Motorola TV spots ("Use Red, nobody's dead"); and the Red room at the Grammy Awards. So you'd expect the money raised to be, well, big, right? Maybe $50 million, or even $100 million.
Try again: The tally raised worldwide is $18 million.
The disproportionate ratio between the marketing outlay and the money raised is drawing concern among nonprofit watchdogs, cause-marketing experts and even executives in the ad business. It threatens to spur a backlash, not just against the Red campaign -- which ambitiously set out to change the cause-marketing model by allowing partners to profit from charity -- but also for the brands involved.
Enormous outlay
By any measure, the buzz has been extraordinary and the collective marketing outlay by Gap, Apple and Motorola has been enormous, with some estimates as high as $100 million. Gap alone spent $7.8 million of its $58 million outlay on Red during last year's fourth quarter, according to Nielsen Media Research's Nielsen Adviews.
But contributions don't seem to be living up to the hype. Richard Feachem, executive director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, the recipient of money raised by Red, told The Boston Globe in December, "We may be over the $100 million mark by the end of Christmas."
Rajesh Anandan, the Global Fund's head of private-sector partnerships, said Mr. Feachem was misquoted, and defended the efforts by Red to increase the Global Fund's private-sector donations, which totaled just $5 million from 2002 to 2005. (The U.S. Congress just approved a $724 million pledge to the Global Fund, on top of $1.9 billion already given and $650 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.)
'Hugely frontloaded'
"Red has done as much as we could have hoped for in the short time it has been up and running," he said, adding: "The launch cost of this kind of campaign is going to be hugely frontloaded. It's a very costly exercise."
Julie Cordua, VP-marketing at Red and a former Motorola marketing exec and director-buzz marketing at Helio, said the outlay by the program's partners must be understood within the context of the campaign's goal: sustainability. "It's not a charity program of them writing a one-time check. It has to make good business sense for the company so the money will continue to flow to the Global Fund over time." She added that since many of Red's partners haven't closed their books yet on 2006, more funds likely will be added to the $18 million. But is the rise of philanthropic fashionistas decked out in Red T-shirts and iPods really the best way to save a child dying of AIDS in Africa?
Parody mocks Bono
The campaign's inherent appeal to conspicuous consumption has spurred a parody by a group of San Francisco designers and artists, who take issue with Bono's rallying cry. "Shopping is not a solution. Buy less. Give more," is the message at buylesscrap.org, which encourages people to give directly to the Global Fund.
"The Red campaign proposes consumption as the cure to the world's evils," said Ben Davis, creative director at Word Pictures Ideas, co-creator of the site. "Can't we just focus on the real solution -- giving money?"
Trent Stamp, president of Charity Navigator, which rates the spending practices of 5,000 nonprofits, said he's concerned about the campaign's impact on the next generation. "The Red campaign can be a good start or it can be a colossal waste of money, and it all depends on whether this edgy, innovative campaign inspires young people to be better citizens or just gives them an excuse to feel good about themselves while they buy an overpriced item they don't really need."
Fears of nonprofits
Mark Rosenman, a longtime activist in the nonprofit sector and a public-service professor at the Union Institute & University in Cincinnati, said the disparity between the marketing outlay and the money raised by Red is illustrative of some of the biggest fears of nonprofits in the U.S.
"There is a broadening concern that business is taking on the patina of philanthropy and crowding out philanthropic activity and even substituting for it," he said. "It benefits the for-profit partners much more than the charitable causes."
Costly Red Campaign Reaps Meager $18 Million
Bono & Co. Spend up to $100 Million on Marketing, Incur Watchdogs' Wrath
By Mya Frazier
Published: March 05, 2007 COLUMBUS, Ohio (AdAge.com)
-- It's been a year since the first Red T-shirts hit Gap shelves in London, and a parade of celebrity-splashed events has followed: Steven Spielberg smiling down from billboards in San Francisco; Christy Turlington striking a yoga pose in a New Yorker ad; Bono cruising Chicago's Michigan Avenue with Oprah Winfrey, eagerly snapping up Red products; Chris Rock appearing in Motorola TV spots ("Use Red, nobody's dead"); and the Red room at the Grammy Awards. So you'd expect the money raised to be, well, big, right? Maybe $50 million, or even $100 million.
Try again: The tally raised worldwide is $18 million.
The disproportionate ratio between the marketing outlay and the money raised is drawing concern among nonprofit watchdogs, cause-marketing experts and even executives in the ad business. It threatens to spur a backlash, not just against the Red campaign -- which ambitiously set out to change the cause-marketing model by allowing partners to profit from charity -- but also for the brands involved.
Enormous outlay
By any measure, the buzz has been extraordinary and the collective marketing outlay by Gap, Apple and Motorola has been enormous, with some estimates as high as $100 million. Gap alone spent $7.8 million of its $58 million outlay on Red during last year's fourth quarter, according to Nielsen Media Research's Nielsen Adviews.
But contributions don't seem to be living up to the hype. Richard Feachem, executive director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, the recipient of money raised by Red, told The Boston Globe in December, "We may be over the $100 million mark by the end of Christmas."
Rajesh Anandan, the Global Fund's head of private-sector partnerships, said Mr. Feachem was misquoted, and defended the efforts by Red to increase the Global Fund's private-sector donations, which totaled just $5 million from 2002 to 2005. (The U.S. Congress just approved a $724 million pledge to the Global Fund, on top of $1.9 billion already given and $650 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.)
'Hugely frontloaded'
"Red has done as much as we could have hoped for in the short time it has been up and running," he said, adding: "The launch cost of this kind of campaign is going to be hugely frontloaded. It's a very costly exercise."
Julie Cordua, VP-marketing at Red and a former Motorola marketing exec and director-buzz marketing at Helio, said the outlay by the program's partners must be understood within the context of the campaign's goal: sustainability. "It's not a charity program of them writing a one-time check. It has to make good business sense for the company so the money will continue to flow to the Global Fund over time." She added that since many of Red's partners haven't closed their books yet on 2006, more funds likely will be added to the $18 million. But is the rise of philanthropic fashionistas decked out in Red T-shirts and iPods really the best way to save a child dying of AIDS in Africa?
Parody mocks Bono
The campaign's inherent appeal to conspicuous consumption has spurred a parody by a group of San Francisco designers and artists, who take issue with Bono's rallying cry. "Shopping is not a solution. Buy less. Give more," is the message at buylesscrap.org, which encourages people to give directly to the Global Fund.
"The Red campaign proposes consumption as the cure to the world's evils," said Ben Davis, creative director at Word Pictures Ideas, co-creator of the site. "Can't we just focus on the real solution -- giving money?"
Trent Stamp, president of Charity Navigator, which rates the spending practices of 5,000 nonprofits, said he's concerned about the campaign's impact on the next generation. "The Red campaign can be a good start or it can be a colossal waste of money, and it all depends on whether this edgy, innovative campaign inspires young people to be better citizens or just gives them an excuse to feel good about themselves while they buy an overpriced item they don't really need."
Fears of nonprofits
Mark Rosenman, a longtime activist in the nonprofit sector and a public-service professor at the Union Institute & University in Cincinnati, said the disparity between the marketing outlay and the money raised by Red is illustrative of some of the biggest fears of nonprofits in the U.S.
"There is a broadening concern that business is taking on the patina of philanthropy and crowding out philanthropic activity and even substituting for it," he said. "It benefits the for-profit partners much more than the charitable causes."
"The Great Evangelical Disaster"
In 1984 Franky Schaeffer (Francis Schaeffer's son) produced an animated film called, "The Great Evangelical Disaster" to go along with a book of that title by the senior Schaeffer (which was his last; he died a few months after it was released). I am interested to know if this film (which I somehow never saw) is available on DVD or video cassette. Does anyone know about this? Amazon has nothing.
Monday, March 05, 2007
God as Father
Rebecca Merrill Groothuis has written a short essay on the meaning of God as Father on the web site of Christians for Biblical Equality. An earlier version of this essay first appeared on The Constructive Curmudgeon. I commend it to you for an insightful and nuanced understanding of God with respect to gender.
Saturday, March 03, 2007
Professor Ben Witherington from The Wall Street Journal
HOUSES OF WORSHIP
Tomb of the (Still) Unknown Ancients
More Jesus hype of the "Da Vinci Code" type.
BY BEN WITHERINGTON III
Wall Street Journal. Friday, March 2, 2007 12:01 a.m.
Year after year in spring, a new crop of religious dandelions pop up in our post-Christian culture. Like the real ones growing in my yard, they make a colorful splash that briefly captures our attention, until we realize that they are only shallow-rooted weeds, not beautiful flowers planted long ago in the deep rich soil of the past, such as Easter lilies.
Last year, it was the Gnostic nonsense of the "Da Vinci Code." We've had the "Gospel of Judas Iscariot," written centuries after the eyewitnesses were dead. This year it's a variation on the "Da Vinci" theme. We are not only being told that there was a Mrs. Jesus (a k a Mary Magdalene). We are also informed that her tomb and that of Jesus have been found in Jerusalem; that DNA testing has proved that they are not related and so must have been married (how exactly does it prove that?) and that an ossuary or small casket of at least one of their offspring has been found as well. News at 11! Or, in this case, on the Discovery Channel's documentary "The Lost Tomb of Jesus," scheduled for Sunday night.
In a surreal moment on "Larry King Live" earlier this week, the film's producer, James Cameron (of "Titanic" fame), told us with a straight face that we should all be thankful that we now have tangible evidence that Jesus existed. Actually, no serious historian of biblical antiquity has ever doubted that there was a historical Jesus. Yet it tells us a lot about the state of our culture that Mr. Cameron's remark, backed by pseudo-science, could be seriously made on national television and that the film's companion book has already shot up to No. 5 on Amazon's rankings. We are a Jesus-haunted culture that is so historically illiterate that anything can now pass for knowledge of Jesus.
No doubt there are those who welcome "evidence" that undermines the foundation of Christianity. Many people, though, are simply beguiled by the "obsolescence factor" in our technologically driven society--the "newer" must be "truer" and "better." This outlook, when applied to a subject like the historical Jesus, attracts all sorts of unbridled speculation, and worse.
How momentous is the latest Jesus-as-you-never-knew-him story? Not very. It is simply not true, as Mr. Cameron's claims in his preface to Simcha Jacobovici's book, "The Jesus Family Tomb," that we have had no hard evidence for Jesus' existence before now except in the Bible. That ignores mentions in ancient Roman and Jewish historians such Tacitus, Suetonius and Josephus.
The "Jesus tomb" explorers trot out statistics on ancient Hebrew names, claiming that the ones in the tomb sound too much like known Jesus family members for the similarity to be a coincidence. But since we've only excavated a minority of archaeological and tomb sites even in Jerusalem, most ancient names are still buried in the earth, making meaningful statistical analysis difficult. What we can say for certain is that most of the names found in the Talpiot tomb on the outskirts of Jerusalem have been seen in many places elsewhere--in texts, on potsherds, in inscriptions, in the Bible itself. They are not rare even by the standards of the limited evidence we do have.
Any good scientific theory must account for all the evidence--in this case, all the names we find in the Talpiot tomb and not just the ones that match the holy-family theory. For instance, we have a Matthew in the tomb, but Jesus had no brothers named Matthew. And where are brothers like Simon, or the sisters mentioned in Mark 6, and where especially is brother James? We actually know that James was buried within sight of the Temple Mount, and Talpiot is miles from there. Eusebius, the fourth-century church historian, saw the tomb and the standing inscribed slab in front of it.
You also have to ask yourself: Why would most of the holy family from Galilee be buried in a middle-class tomb several miles outside of Jerusalem in some sheep pasture? They were, in fact, poor and could not afford an ornamental tomb like this one. This family was from Nazareth, too, with connections in Bethlehem. Why wouldn't its members be buried in one of those places?
We also know that crucifixion was considered the most shameful and hideous way to die, a blow from which one's family honor did not soon recover, if ever. So shamefully did Jesus die that his first followers and even most of his family abandoned him: He was not buried by family members or by the Galilean disciples. He was put in a tomb near the old city that did not belong to any of them.
Of course, the main implicit contention of the documentary and book is that the Resurrection is demonstrably a fraud--and thus, we must assume, people like Peter and James, the brother of Jesus, were prepared to be martyred in grisly ways to perpetrate a fraud. Resurrection had only one meaning for early Jews--a miracle that happens to a person's body so that they are raised from the dead.
To skeptics, no amount of counterargument will matter. Yet it wouldn't hurt for the rest of us to exercise a bit of skepticism when listening to each year's new theories about Jesus and the "true" history behind the biblical narrative. Amos Kloner, the archaeologist who supervised work at the tomb when it was first discovered in 1980, has called the documentary's claims "impossible" and "nonsense." As a New Testament scholar, I will trust serious scholars like him. Make no bones about it--they have not found Jesus' tomb.
Mr. Witherington is professor of New Testament Interpretation at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Ky., and the author of "What Have They Done With Jesus?"
Tomb of the (Still) Unknown Ancients
More Jesus hype of the "Da Vinci Code" type.
BY BEN WITHERINGTON III
Wall Street Journal. Friday, March 2, 2007 12:01 a.m.
Year after year in spring, a new crop of religious dandelions pop up in our post-Christian culture. Like the real ones growing in my yard, they make a colorful splash that briefly captures our attention, until we realize that they are only shallow-rooted weeds, not beautiful flowers planted long ago in the deep rich soil of the past, such as Easter lilies.
Last year, it was the Gnostic nonsense of the "Da Vinci Code." We've had the "Gospel of Judas Iscariot," written centuries after the eyewitnesses were dead. This year it's a variation on the "Da Vinci" theme. We are not only being told that there was a Mrs. Jesus (a k a Mary Magdalene). We are also informed that her tomb and that of Jesus have been found in Jerusalem; that DNA testing has proved that they are not related and so must have been married (how exactly does it prove that?) and that an ossuary or small casket of at least one of their offspring has been found as well. News at 11! Or, in this case, on the Discovery Channel's documentary "The Lost Tomb of Jesus," scheduled for Sunday night.
In a surreal moment on "Larry King Live" earlier this week, the film's producer, James Cameron (of "Titanic" fame), told us with a straight face that we should all be thankful that we now have tangible evidence that Jesus existed. Actually, no serious historian of biblical antiquity has ever doubted that there was a historical Jesus. Yet it tells us a lot about the state of our culture that Mr. Cameron's remark, backed by pseudo-science, could be seriously made on national television and that the film's companion book has already shot up to No. 5 on Amazon's rankings. We are a Jesus-haunted culture that is so historically illiterate that anything can now pass for knowledge of Jesus.
No doubt there are those who welcome "evidence" that undermines the foundation of Christianity. Many people, though, are simply beguiled by the "obsolescence factor" in our technologically driven society--the "newer" must be "truer" and "better." This outlook, when applied to a subject like the historical Jesus, attracts all sorts of unbridled speculation, and worse.
How momentous is the latest Jesus-as-you-never-knew-him story? Not very. It is simply not true, as Mr. Cameron's claims in his preface to Simcha Jacobovici's book, "The Jesus Family Tomb," that we have had no hard evidence for Jesus' existence before now except in the Bible. That ignores mentions in ancient Roman and Jewish historians such Tacitus, Suetonius and Josephus.
The "Jesus tomb" explorers trot out statistics on ancient Hebrew names, claiming that the ones in the tomb sound too much like known Jesus family members for the similarity to be a coincidence. But since we've only excavated a minority of archaeological and tomb sites even in Jerusalem, most ancient names are still buried in the earth, making meaningful statistical analysis difficult. What we can say for certain is that most of the names found in the Talpiot tomb on the outskirts of Jerusalem have been seen in many places elsewhere--in texts, on potsherds, in inscriptions, in the Bible itself. They are not rare even by the standards of the limited evidence we do have.
Any good scientific theory must account for all the evidence--in this case, all the names we find in the Talpiot tomb and not just the ones that match the holy-family theory. For instance, we have a Matthew in the tomb, but Jesus had no brothers named Matthew. And where are brothers like Simon, or the sisters mentioned in Mark 6, and where especially is brother James? We actually know that James was buried within sight of the Temple Mount, and Talpiot is miles from there. Eusebius, the fourth-century church historian, saw the tomb and the standing inscribed slab in front of it.
You also have to ask yourself: Why would most of the holy family from Galilee be buried in a middle-class tomb several miles outside of Jerusalem in some sheep pasture? They were, in fact, poor and could not afford an ornamental tomb like this one. This family was from Nazareth, too, with connections in Bethlehem. Why wouldn't its members be buried in one of those places?
We also know that crucifixion was considered the most shameful and hideous way to die, a blow from which one's family honor did not soon recover, if ever. So shamefully did Jesus die that his first followers and even most of his family abandoned him: He was not buried by family members or by the Galilean disciples. He was put in a tomb near the old city that did not belong to any of them.
Of course, the main implicit contention of the documentary and book is that the Resurrection is demonstrably a fraud--and thus, we must assume, people like Peter and James, the brother of Jesus, were prepared to be martyred in grisly ways to perpetrate a fraud. Resurrection had only one meaning for early Jews--a miracle that happens to a person's body so that they are raised from the dead.
To skeptics, no amount of counterargument will matter. Yet it wouldn't hurt for the rest of us to exercise a bit of skepticism when listening to each year's new theories about Jesus and the "true" history behind the biblical narrative. Amos Kloner, the archaeologist who supervised work at the tomb when it was first discovered in 1980, has called the documentary's claims "impossible" and "nonsense." As a New Testament scholar, I will trust serious scholars like him. Make no bones about it--they have not found Jesus' tomb.
Mr. Witherington is professor of New Testament Interpretation at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Ky., and the author of "What Have They Done With Jesus?"
A Test Case for Moral Relativism
There is, it seems, a verb in classical Japanese which means “to try out one’s new sword on a chance wayfarer.” (The word is tsujigiri, literally “crossroads-cut.”) A samurai sword had to be tried out because, if it was to work properly, it had t slice through someone at a single blow, from the shoulder to the opposite flank. Otherwise, the warrior bungled his stroke. This could injure his honour, offend his ancestors, and even let down his emperor. So tests were needed, and wayfarers had to be expended. Any wayfarer would do—provided, of course, that he was not another Samurai.
—Mary Midgley, “Trying Out One’s New Sword,” in Christina Sommers and Fred Sommers, eds. Vice and Virtue in Everyday Life, 2nd ed. (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1989), 163.
—Mary Midgley, “Trying Out One’s New Sword,” in Christina Sommers and Fred Sommers, eds. Vice and Virtue in Everyday Life, 2nd ed. (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1989), 163.
Thursday, March 01, 2007
Dr. Craig Blomberg on the Bones of Jesus Controversy
[My colleague at Denver Seminary, Craig Blomberg, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor of New Testament, just published this response to the "bones of Jesus" controversy. This was first published on the Denver Seminary web page. Please spread the word.]
Did They Really Find Jesus’ Bones?
What will they think of next? Dan Brown writes a novel (The DaVinci Code) that fictitiously garbles Christian history and millions of people believe it is based on fact. The end-of-the-second-century Gospel of Judas is unearthed and the normally scholarly National Geographic Society produces a documentary so biased than even skeptics like Bart Ehrman have to debunk it.
Now various news sources and websites, accompanying a Discovery Channel documentary, tout the possibility of scholars having discovered Jesus’ family tomb. Ossuaries (small bone boxes into which people were re-buried after their corpses had rotted and their skeletal remains were exhumed) in a Jerusalem tomb allegedly contain the Hebrew names for Joseph, Mary, Matthew, Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and Judah son of Jesus, with space for perhaps one more mini-coffin. DNA tests now demonstrate that the second Mary does not share any DNA with the remains found in the Jesus ossuary. Given the frequency of burying extended families together, it makes sense to think of this person as a wife of one of the other men, and given the location of her ossuary next to the one of Jesus, perhaps she was his husband.
One writer declares, “We’ve disproved the resurrection.” Another boasts, “At last, the first indisputable evidence that Jesus of Nazareth actually lived.” A third announces, “See, Jesus was married to Mary and they had a son named Judah.” Mighty wishful thinking on all three counts! Consider the following observations that also emerge as one reads the stories carefully.
(1) There is doubt about what some of the letters in the names’ inscriptions really say, particularly the name supposedly corresponding to Jesus. (2) The tomb (in the Talpiot neighborhood) is nowhere near the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, a highly likely candidate for the original site of Jesus’ death. Given ancient Jewish burial practices, the likelihood of Jesus having been buried anywhere other than close to where he was crucified is small. (3) Dan Brown’s fiction notwithstanding, there is not a shred of historical evidence to suggest that Jesus was married and much that says he was single. (4) The second Mary’s name isn’t Magdalene; it is actually three Greek (!) words that could be translated Mary the Master. But that is not a known title or form of address for the Magdalene anywhere else in antiquity.
(5) Normally when the information from tombs doesn’t match existing literary information about ancient people, the assumption is made that we haven’t found their tombs. For the sake of argument, let’s say that this tomb does contain the remains of a Joshua (the actual Hebrew) and a Miriam who had a son named Judah. That information alone virtually disproves that this tomb had anything to do with the “Holy Family,” since the Bible and serious Christian tradition unanimously agrees Jesus was unmarried and celibate.
(6) Speaking of reading carefully, most of the reports acknowledge that this tomb and all these ossuaries and their inscriptions were first discovered in 1980. And the information was made public then; there was no cover-up. So if there was any likelihood that these ossuaries had anything to do with Jesus of Nazareth, one would expect to find all kinds of hoopla in the scholarly literature and popular news releases from that day. In fact there was none. People in 1980 realized that the evidence didn’t add up.
Ah, but now we have two new pieces of scientific data, we are told. Besides the “Jesus” and “Mary” DNA being tested and found unrelated, some patina (a fancy word for the encrustation of junk built up on the surface of an object made of wood or metal over the centuries) from the ossuaries appears to match that found on the famous James ossuary that came to light just a few years ago and that was at first highly touted as belonging to “James, son of Joseph, the brother of Jesus.” That is, until it was pointed out that the inscription adding “brother of Jesus” appeared to be in a different form of handwriting and to have come from a later date. So if the James ossuary did come from this “Jesus family tomb,” that would probably be one more reason (7) for not believing it had anything to do with the famous characters by those names.
For the coup de grace, however, the sensationalizers trot out statisticians who compute some astronomically miniscule likelihood of all these names being found together in one place and having them all correspond to the biblical names associated with Jesus’ family. Of course, nothing is said about (8) the missing brothers and sisters of Jesus from this tomb. Nor does (9) any plausible explanation emerge for why one (and only one) disciple, Matthew, unrelated to this family, would show up in their tomb. Be all that as it may, unless you know something about (10) the frequency of ancient Hebrew names in Israel during the centuries surrounding the birth of Christianity, to have Joseph, Mary, Jesus, another Mary, Matthew and maybe James all crop up in one place seems just too unlikely to be coincidental.
It’s time to do some real historical research. In 2002, the Israeli scholar Tal Ilan wrote the book that will never be a bestseller (at $220 even through Best Buy) but becomes an invaluable resource in debates like this: Lexicon of Jewish Names in Late Antiquity, Part I: Palestine 330 BCE—200 CE (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck). Richard Bauckham’s outstanding 2006 volume, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans)—which is affordable and which I have reviewed in the Denver Journal, accessible from the seminary’s homepage—provides the excerpts most relevant for New Testament studies.
For example, Bauckham reproduces the 99 most popular male names among Jews in Israel throughout this period from every known inscriptional and documentary source preserved or recovered. Here’s the list of the top eleven, in order, beginning with the most frequent: Simon, Joseph, Eleazar (Lazarus), Judah, Yohanan (John), Joshua (Jesus), Hananiah (Ananias), Jonathan, Mattathias/Matthias (Matthew), Menahem (Manaen), and Jacob (James). The names in parentheses are the English equivalents of the Greek versions of the Hebrew names that precede them. Notice anything interesting? Indeed, every male ossuary name from the Talpiot tomb is on the list, in positions 2, 4, 6 and 9, respectively, and, if James belonged there, too, he is number 11. Or, to use raw numerical data, we know of 218 Josephs from this period, 164 Judahs, 99 Joshuas, 62 Matthews and 40 Jacobs. And, of course, only the tiniest fraction of ancient evidence has survived the centuries.
What about the women you ask? Mary is number one! Then come Salome, Shelamzion, Martha, Joanna, Shiphra (Sapphira), Berenice, Imma and Mara. So two Marys in an extended family calls for about as many raised eyebrows as a modern Hispanic family with two MarÃas. For that matter, would anyone bat an eye if that same family had a José (Joseph) and a Jesús as well? Would this prove that such a family included the long lost descendants of Jesus himself?
Or take a more chronologically relevant example. Scholars have long known about (and tourists can still visit) the tomb in Bethany where inscriptions were discovered referring to Mary, Martha and Lazarus (and others). But every scholar worth his or her salt, no matter how conservative, acknowledges that those names were just so common that even to find them together in one tomb in the very town that the Bible says the three New Testament characters by those names lived proves statistically insignificant. It’s entirely possible that it happened completely by chance. There may easily have been a whole bunch families in Bethany with lots of children, including three with those names, in an age when parents had as many children as they could in hopes that a few might survive to care for them, if necessary, in their old age,
The same approach must be taken with the cluster of names in the Talpiot tomb. In fact, Bauckham’s tables extracted from Ilan’s monumental reference work add one very interesting footnote. The Hebrew woman’s name listed as ninth most common (actually tied for eighth with Imma) was Mara, like the form announced to have been found with the second Mary in the Talpiot tomb. Not only does Mara not mean Magdalene but, although it could be the Grecized feminine equivalent to the Aramaic masculine mar or “master,” it actually appears on one ossuary, discovered elsewhere in Israel much longer ago, as an alternate form of the name Martha. And the feminine form of “master,” in a highly patriarchal culture, was not used nearly as often as the masculine form. So the “Mary” that may have been a spouse to this Joshua/Jesus more likely was named Mary Martha, not Mary Magdalene, and not Mary the Master.
One of the best kept secrets in the last quarter of a century from those who try to learn history exclusively from the popular media is the massive amount of evidence that has come to light or been more accessibly compiled supporting the accuracy of the New Testament documents. For details just on the Gospels themselves, see the first book I ever wrote, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels (Downers Grove: IVP, 1987), which will be appearing this year in substantially revised form for a twentieth-anniversary edition. Recent works by Darrell Bock, Craig Evans, Ben Witherington, Tom Wright, and a host of others all rely on solid, sober scholarship of a kind Dan Brown, National Geographic and the Discovery Channel will apparently never care to publicize. Bolstering conventional belief about anything has never made much money and that’s all it’s really about in these endeavors. (Lest you think I’m being too cynical, Darrell Bock has shared stories with me of what representatives of the major networks told him face to face he’d have to raise in millions of dollars before they’d ever consider doing it.). In a postmodern world, post-Communist world truth gives way to fiction to fuel capitalism. It is tragically reminiscent of the comment Russians used to make during their Communist era when their two major news organs were Pravda (meaning “Truth”) and Izvestia (meaning “News”): “there is no pravda in izvestia and there is no izvestia in pravda!” My, how far things have deteriorated in this country in the seventeen years since the fall of the Soviet regime!
Craig L. Blomberg
Distinguished Professor of New Testament
Denver Seminary
Littleton, CO
March 2007
What will they think of next? Dan Brown writes a novel (The DaVinci Code) that fictitiously garbles Christian history and millions of people believe it is based on fact. The end-of-the-second-century Gospel of Judas is unearthed and the normally scholarly National Geographic Society produces a documentary so biased than even skeptics like Bart Ehrman have to debunk it.
Now various news sources and websites, accompanying a Discovery Channel documentary, tout the possibility of scholars having discovered Jesus’ family tomb. Ossuaries (small bone boxes into which people were re-buried after their corpses had rotted and their skeletal remains were exhumed) in a Jerusalem tomb allegedly contain the Hebrew names for Joseph, Mary, Matthew, Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and Judah son of Jesus, with space for perhaps one more mini-coffin. DNA tests now demonstrate that the second Mary does not share any DNA with the remains found in the Jesus ossuary. Given the frequency of burying extended families together, it makes sense to think of this person as a wife of one of the other men, and given the location of her ossuary next to the one of Jesus, perhaps she was his husband.
One writer declares, “We’ve disproved the resurrection.” Another boasts, “At last, the first indisputable evidence that Jesus of Nazareth actually lived.” A third announces, “See, Jesus was married to Mary and they had a son named Judah.” Mighty wishful thinking on all three counts! Consider the following observations that also emerge as one reads the stories carefully.
(1) There is doubt about what some of the letters in the names’ inscriptions really say, particularly the name supposedly corresponding to Jesus. (2) The tomb (in the Talpiot neighborhood) is nowhere near the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, a highly likely candidate for the original site of Jesus’ death. Given ancient Jewish burial practices, the likelihood of Jesus having been buried anywhere other than close to where he was crucified is small. (3) Dan Brown’s fiction notwithstanding, there is not a shred of historical evidence to suggest that Jesus was married and much that says he was single. (4) The second Mary’s name isn’t Magdalene; it is actually three Greek (!) words that could be translated Mary the Master. But that is not a known title or form of address for the Magdalene anywhere else in antiquity.
(5) Normally when the information from tombs doesn’t match existing literary information about ancient people, the assumption is made that we haven’t found their tombs. For the sake of argument, let’s say that this tomb does contain the remains of a Joshua (the actual Hebrew) and a Miriam who had a son named Judah. That information alone virtually disproves that this tomb had anything to do with the “Holy Family,” since the Bible and serious Christian tradition unanimously agrees Jesus was unmarried and celibate.
(6) Speaking of reading carefully, most of the reports acknowledge that this tomb and all these ossuaries and their inscriptions were first discovered in 1980. And the information was made public then; there was no cover-up. So if there was any likelihood that these ossuaries had anything to do with Jesus of Nazareth, one would expect to find all kinds of hoopla in the scholarly literature and popular news releases from that day. In fact there was none. People in 1980 realized that the evidence didn’t add up.
Ah, but now we have two new pieces of scientific data, we are told. Besides the “Jesus” and “Mary” DNA being tested and found unrelated, some patina (a fancy word for the encrustation of junk built up on the surface of an object made of wood or metal over the centuries) from the ossuaries appears to match that found on the famous James ossuary that came to light just a few years ago and that was at first highly touted as belonging to “James, son of Joseph, the brother of Jesus.” That is, until it was pointed out that the inscription adding “brother of Jesus” appeared to be in a different form of handwriting and to have come from a later date. So if the James ossuary did come from this “Jesus family tomb,” that would probably be one more reason (7) for not believing it had anything to do with the famous characters by those names.
For the coup de grace, however, the sensationalizers trot out statisticians who compute some astronomically miniscule likelihood of all these names being found together in one place and having them all correspond to the biblical names associated with Jesus’ family. Of course, nothing is said about (8) the missing brothers and sisters of Jesus from this tomb. Nor does (9) any plausible explanation emerge for why one (and only one) disciple, Matthew, unrelated to this family, would show up in their tomb. Be all that as it may, unless you know something about (10) the frequency of ancient Hebrew names in Israel during the centuries surrounding the birth of Christianity, to have Joseph, Mary, Jesus, another Mary, Matthew and maybe James all crop up in one place seems just too unlikely to be coincidental.
It’s time to do some real historical research. In 2002, the Israeli scholar Tal Ilan wrote the book that will never be a bestseller (at $220 even through Best Buy) but becomes an invaluable resource in debates like this: Lexicon of Jewish Names in Late Antiquity, Part I: Palestine 330 BCE—200 CE (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck). Richard Bauckham’s outstanding 2006 volume, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans)—which is affordable and which I have reviewed in the Denver Journal, accessible from the seminary’s homepage—provides the excerpts most relevant for New Testament studies.
For example, Bauckham reproduces the 99 most popular male names among Jews in Israel throughout this period from every known inscriptional and documentary source preserved or recovered. Here’s the list of the top eleven, in order, beginning with the most frequent: Simon, Joseph, Eleazar (Lazarus), Judah, Yohanan (John), Joshua (Jesus), Hananiah (Ananias), Jonathan, Mattathias/Matthias (Matthew), Menahem (Manaen), and Jacob (James). The names in parentheses are the English equivalents of the Greek versions of the Hebrew names that precede them. Notice anything interesting? Indeed, every male ossuary name from the Talpiot tomb is on the list, in positions 2, 4, 6 and 9, respectively, and, if James belonged there, too, he is number 11. Or, to use raw numerical data, we know of 218 Josephs from this period, 164 Judahs, 99 Joshuas, 62 Matthews and 40 Jacobs. And, of course, only the tiniest fraction of ancient evidence has survived the centuries.
What about the women you ask? Mary is number one! Then come Salome, Shelamzion, Martha, Joanna, Shiphra (Sapphira), Berenice, Imma and Mara. So two Marys in an extended family calls for about as many raised eyebrows as a modern Hispanic family with two MarÃas. For that matter, would anyone bat an eye if that same family had a José (Joseph) and a Jesús as well? Would this prove that such a family included the long lost descendants of Jesus himself?
Or take a more chronologically relevant example. Scholars have long known about (and tourists can still visit) the tomb in Bethany where inscriptions were discovered referring to Mary, Martha and Lazarus (and others). But every scholar worth his or her salt, no matter how conservative, acknowledges that those names were just so common that even to find them together in one tomb in the very town that the Bible says the three New Testament characters by those names lived proves statistically insignificant. It’s entirely possible that it happened completely by chance. There may easily have been a whole bunch families in Bethany with lots of children, including three with those names, in an age when parents had as many children as they could in hopes that a few might survive to care for them, if necessary, in their old age,
The same approach must be taken with the cluster of names in the Talpiot tomb. In fact, Bauckham’s tables extracted from Ilan’s monumental reference work add one very interesting footnote. The Hebrew woman’s name listed as ninth most common (actually tied for eighth with Imma) was Mara, like the form announced to have been found with the second Mary in the Talpiot tomb. Not only does Mara not mean Magdalene but, although it could be the Grecized feminine equivalent to the Aramaic masculine mar or “master,” it actually appears on one ossuary, discovered elsewhere in Israel much longer ago, as an alternate form of the name Martha. And the feminine form of “master,” in a highly patriarchal culture, was not used nearly as often as the masculine form. So the “Mary” that may have been a spouse to this Joshua/Jesus more likely was named Mary Martha, not Mary Magdalene, and not Mary the Master.
One of the best kept secrets in the last quarter of a century from those who try to learn history exclusively from the popular media is the massive amount of evidence that has come to light or been more accessibly compiled supporting the accuracy of the New Testament documents. For details just on the Gospels themselves, see the first book I ever wrote, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels (Downers Grove: IVP, 1987), which will be appearing this year in substantially revised form for a twentieth-anniversary edition. Recent works by Darrell Bock, Craig Evans, Ben Witherington, Tom Wright, and a host of others all rely on solid, sober scholarship of a kind Dan Brown, National Geographic and the Discovery Channel will apparently never care to publicize. Bolstering conventional belief about anything has never made much money and that’s all it’s really about in these endeavors. (Lest you think I’m being too cynical, Darrell Bock has shared stories with me of what representatives of the major networks told him face to face he’d have to raise in millions of dollars before they’d ever consider doing it.). In a postmodern world, post-Communist world truth gives way to fiction to fuel capitalism. It is tragically reminiscent of the comment Russians used to make during their Communist era when their two major news organs were Pravda (meaning “Truth”) and Izvestia (meaning “News”): “there is no pravda in izvestia and there is no izvestia in pravda!” My, how far things have deteriorated in this country in the seventeen years since the fall of the Soviet regime!
Craig L. Blomberg
Distinguished Professor of New Testament
Denver Seminary
Littleton, CO
March 2007
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
The Bogus Bones of Jesus
[Here is an essay by Kerby Anderson on the flap over the new documentary claiming that the bones of Jesus Christ have been discovered. I haven't seen too much analysis of this yet, but stay tuned.]
Tales From the Crypt: Do we have the bones of Jesus?
Written by Kerby Anderson
The last week in February started out with an incredible announcement. James Cameron (director of the film “Titanic”) and Simcha Jacobovici announced that they have found the bones of Jesus! At their news conference, they promoted their Discovery Channel special “The Lost Tomb of Jesus” that will air on March 4th and also promoted the book by Simcha Jacobovici and Charles Pellegrino entitled The Jesus Family Tomb: The Discovery, the Investigation, and the Evidence That Could Change History released by Harper-Collins.
If proved reliable, these findings would call into question the very cornerstone of Christianity: the resurrection of Jesus. But are they true?
The foundational claim is that they have discovered the family tomb of Jesus Christ. But is this really the tomb of Jesus or his family? There are many good reasons to believe this tomb has no relationship at all to Jesus and his family. Many are asking what to think about these claims. Therefore, I put together a quick two-page summary of some of the criticisms and concerns that surfaced in the first few hours after the announcement. Before we look at those criticisms, let’s first review the history of this tomb.
We have known about this tomb since it was discovered in 1980. Back then, Israeli construction workers were digging the foundation for a new building in a Jerusalem suburb. Their digging revealed a cave with ten limestone ossuaries. Archeologists removed the limestone caskets for examination.
When they were able to decipher the names on the ten ossuaries, they found: Jesua, son of Joseph, Mary, Mary, Mathew, Jofa and Judah, son of Jesua. At the time, one of Israel’s most prominent archeologists (Professor Amos Kloner) didn’t associate the crypt with Jesus. He rightly argued that the father of Jesus was a humble carpenter who couldn’t afford a luxury crypt for his family. Moreover, the names on the crypt were common Jewish names.
All of this hasn’t stopped Cameron and Jacobovici from promoting the tomb as the family tomb of Jesus. They claim to have evidence (through DNA tests, archeological evidence, and Biblical studies) to prove that the ten ossuaries belong to Jesus and his family. They also argue that Jesus and Mary Magdalene might have produced a son named Judah. However, a number of biblical scholars say this is a really just an old story now being recycled in an effort to create a media phenomenon that will sell books and guarantee a large audience for the television special.
First, does it really make sense that this wouldbe the family tomb of Jesus? Remember that Jesus was in Jerusalem as a pilgrim and was not a resident of the city. How would his family be able to buy this tomb? As we already mentioned, Joseph (who probably was not alive and died in Galilee) and his family did not have the funds to buy such an elaborate burial site. Moreover, they were from out of town and would need time to find this tomb location. To accept this theory, one has to believe they stole the body of Jesus and moved it to this tomb in a suburb of Jerusalem all within about a day’s time.
Second, if this is the family tomb of Jesus and his family, why is Jesus referred to as the “son of Joseph?” As far as we can determine from history, the earliest followers of Jesus never called Jesus the “son of Joseph.” The record of history is that it was only outsiders who mistakenly called him that.
Third, if this is the family tomb of Jesus, why do we have the name of Matthew listed with the rest of the family? If this is the Matthew that traveled with Jesus, then he certainly was not a family member. And you would have to wonder why James (who remained in Jerusalem) would allow these inscriptions as well as allow the family to move the body from Jerusalem to this tomb and perpetrate a hoax that Jesus bodily rose from the grave. Also, the fourth-century church historian Eusebius writes that the body of James (the half-brother of Jesus) was buried alone near the temple mount and that his tomb was visited in the early centuries.
Fourth, there is the problem with the common names on the tombs. Researchers have cataloged the most common names at the time. The ten most common were: Simon/Simeon, Joseph, Eleazar, Judah, John/Yohanan, Jesus, Hananiah, Jonathan, Matthew, and Manaen/Menahem. These are some of the names found on the ossuaries and thus suggest that the tomb belonged to someone other than Jesus of Nazareth and his family. In fact, the name Jesus appears in 98 other tombs and on 21 other ossuaries.
Finally there is the question of the DNA testing. Apparently there is evidence that shows that the DNA from the woman (in what they say is the Mary Magdalene ossuary) and the DNA from the so-called Jesus ossuary does not match. So they argue that they were not relatives and thus must have been married.
But does the DNA evidence really prove that? It does not prove she is his wife. In fact, we really don’t even know who in the ossuaries are related to the other. Moreover, we do not have an independent DNA control sample to compare these findings with. At best, the DNA evidence shows that some of these people are related and some are not.
All of this looks like sensationalism from Simcha Jacobovici (who has a reputation as an Indiana-Jones type) and James Cameron (the director of the highly fictionalized “Titanic”). The publicity s certain to sell books and draw a television audience, but it is not good history or archaeology.
© 2007 Probe Ministries
Tales From the Crypt: Do we have the bones of Jesus?
Written by Kerby Anderson
The last week in February started out with an incredible announcement. James Cameron (director of the film “Titanic”) and Simcha Jacobovici announced that they have found the bones of Jesus! At their news conference, they promoted their Discovery Channel special “The Lost Tomb of Jesus” that will air on March 4th and also promoted the book by Simcha Jacobovici and Charles Pellegrino entitled The Jesus Family Tomb: The Discovery, the Investigation, and the Evidence That Could Change History released by Harper-Collins.
If proved reliable, these findings would call into question the very cornerstone of Christianity: the resurrection of Jesus. But are they true?
The foundational claim is that they have discovered the family tomb of Jesus Christ. But is this really the tomb of Jesus or his family? There are many good reasons to believe this tomb has no relationship at all to Jesus and his family. Many are asking what to think about these claims. Therefore, I put together a quick two-page summary of some of the criticisms and concerns that surfaced in the first few hours after the announcement. Before we look at those criticisms, let’s first review the history of this tomb.
We have known about this tomb since it was discovered in 1980. Back then, Israeli construction workers were digging the foundation for a new building in a Jerusalem suburb. Their digging revealed a cave with ten limestone ossuaries. Archeologists removed the limestone caskets for examination.
When they were able to decipher the names on the ten ossuaries, they found: Jesua, son of Joseph, Mary, Mary, Mathew, Jofa and Judah, son of Jesua. At the time, one of Israel’s most prominent archeologists (Professor Amos Kloner) didn’t associate the crypt with Jesus. He rightly argued that the father of Jesus was a humble carpenter who couldn’t afford a luxury crypt for his family. Moreover, the names on the crypt were common Jewish names.
All of this hasn’t stopped Cameron and Jacobovici from promoting the tomb as the family tomb of Jesus. They claim to have evidence (through DNA tests, archeological evidence, and Biblical studies) to prove that the ten ossuaries belong to Jesus and his family. They also argue that Jesus and Mary Magdalene might have produced a son named Judah. However, a number of biblical scholars say this is a really just an old story now being recycled in an effort to create a media phenomenon that will sell books and guarantee a large audience for the television special.
First, does it really make sense that this wouldbe the family tomb of Jesus? Remember that Jesus was in Jerusalem as a pilgrim and was not a resident of the city. How would his family be able to buy this tomb? As we already mentioned, Joseph (who probably was not alive and died in Galilee) and his family did not have the funds to buy such an elaborate burial site. Moreover, they were from out of town and would need time to find this tomb location. To accept this theory, one has to believe they stole the body of Jesus and moved it to this tomb in a suburb of Jerusalem all within about a day’s time.
Second, if this is the family tomb of Jesus and his family, why is Jesus referred to as the “son of Joseph?” As far as we can determine from history, the earliest followers of Jesus never called Jesus the “son of Joseph.” The record of history is that it was only outsiders who mistakenly called him that.
Third, if this is the family tomb of Jesus, why do we have the name of Matthew listed with the rest of the family? If this is the Matthew that traveled with Jesus, then he certainly was not a family member. And you would have to wonder why James (who remained in Jerusalem) would allow these inscriptions as well as allow the family to move the body from Jerusalem to this tomb and perpetrate a hoax that Jesus bodily rose from the grave. Also, the fourth-century church historian Eusebius writes that the body of James (the half-brother of Jesus) was buried alone near the temple mount and that his tomb was visited in the early centuries.
Fourth, there is the problem with the common names on the tombs. Researchers have cataloged the most common names at the time. The ten most common were: Simon/Simeon, Joseph, Eleazar, Judah, John/Yohanan, Jesus, Hananiah, Jonathan, Matthew, and Manaen/Menahem. These are some of the names found on the ossuaries and thus suggest that the tomb belonged to someone other than Jesus of Nazareth and his family. In fact, the name Jesus appears in 98 other tombs and on 21 other ossuaries.
Finally there is the question of the DNA testing. Apparently there is evidence that shows that the DNA from the woman (in what they say is the Mary Magdalene ossuary) and the DNA from the so-called Jesus ossuary does not match. So they argue that they were not relatives and thus must have been married.
But does the DNA evidence really prove that? It does not prove she is his wife. In fact, we really don’t even know who in the ossuaries are related to the other. Moreover, we do not have an independent DNA control sample to compare these findings with. At best, the DNA evidence shows that some of these people are related and some are not.
All of this looks like sensationalism from Simcha Jacobovici (who has a reputation as an Indiana-Jones type) and James Cameron (the director of the highly fictionalized “Titanic”). The publicity s certain to sell books and draw a television audience, but it is not good history or archaeology.
© 2007 Probe Ministries
Monday, February 26, 2007
Film Suggestions
Someone suggested that I ask my august body of blog readers to suggest thoughtful and artistically satisfying movies of recent vintage. Please feel free to do so, with a brief discription. I may see "Amazing Grace" in the near future.
Oscar Omission: What Would Schaeffer Think?
Recently, I have been rereading several of Francis Schaeffer's books. Schaeffer was the intellectual mentor I never met, the one who ignited my desire to speak the truth to the contemporary world without fear and with love and reason. Although North Americans throw this phrase around promiscuously, The God Who is There truly did "change my life" for the better when I read it in the fall of 1976. I went on to read all of his books within a few years.
But on the night of the Academy Awards, I find myself realizing that I am not much like Schaeffer in one respect: I ignore much of popular culture. I don't attend movies. (Of course, I don't watch television.) I have perhaps seen three movies in the past decade. They repulse me, by and large; and I have better things to do. This was not the case in the 70s and 80s. I would often attend films, try to discern their worldview, reflection on how they were shaping the culture, and try to give a Christian response--just as Schaeffer did. But in the late 1980s something radically changed. North American films became horribly garish and offensive, by and large. My wife and I stopped attending.
It is true that theater culture is diminishing. Miniaturization strikes again. We have "the home theater." Many people watch films on DVDs at home. They subscribe to NetFlicks, and so on. My wife watches very old movies she tapes off of TV. I don't. That's it.
Have I betrayed my mentor, or has culture changed so radically that abstention is better than interaction? I honestly don't know. Sometimes after rereading a Schaeffer book, I want to view a film just to analyze its worldview commitments and understand what many people are exposing themselves to on a regular basis. Then again, I remember all the unread books, the music to listen to, the bike rides to take, and so on. (The other day, I illustrated nihilism with a scene from "Annie Hall" by Woody Allen. Most of my students were not born when it came out...)
I hear there are philosophically significant foreign films and perhaps a few North American ones as well. But I am far out of the loop.
Dear Francis, what would you think of me? I am committed to the Lordship of Christ, to Reformation Theology, to outthinking the world for Christ, for showing that Christianity is true, rational, and pertinent. That will not change. But I have changed, and culture has changed.
But on the night of the Academy Awards, I find myself realizing that I am not much like Schaeffer in one respect: I ignore much of popular culture. I don't attend movies. (Of course, I don't watch television.) I have perhaps seen three movies in the past decade. They repulse me, by and large; and I have better things to do. This was not the case in the 70s and 80s. I would often attend films, try to discern their worldview, reflection on how they were shaping the culture, and try to give a Christian response--just as Schaeffer did. But in the late 1980s something radically changed. North American films became horribly garish and offensive, by and large. My wife and I stopped attending.
It is true that theater culture is diminishing. Miniaturization strikes again. We have "the home theater." Many people watch films on DVDs at home. They subscribe to NetFlicks, and so on. My wife watches very old movies she tapes off of TV. I don't. That's it.
Have I betrayed my mentor, or has culture changed so radically that abstention is better than interaction? I honestly don't know. Sometimes after rereading a Schaeffer book, I want to view a film just to analyze its worldview commitments and understand what many people are exposing themselves to on a regular basis. Then again, I remember all the unread books, the music to listen to, the bike rides to take, and so on. (The other day, I illustrated nihilism with a scene from "Annie Hall" by Woody Allen. Most of my students were not born when it came out...)
I hear there are philosophically significant foreign films and perhaps a few North American ones as well. But I am far out of the loop.
Dear Francis, what would you think of me? I am committed to the Lordship of Christ, to Reformation Theology, to outthinking the world for Christ, for showing that Christianity is true, rational, and pertinent. That will not change. But I have changed, and culture has changed.
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Doug Groothuis letter to The Chronicle of Higher Education
[This edited letter of mine was published in the February 16, 2007 edition of The Chronicle Review. It responds to an article by Lawrence M. Krauss, "Reason, Unfettered by Faith," The Chronicle Review, January 12.]
To the Editor:
Lawrence Krauss does little more than assert that religious beliefs are unfounded. ...
For example, he says, "Even scholars with years of training in theology and history have trouble combining the possible existence of divine purpose with a universe governed by natural laws." But the concept of a universe governed by nothing but natural law is the very definition of naturalism (or philosophical materialism), a worldview that excludes in principle a creator or designer. Of course naturalism is incompatible with theism; no theologian — or anyone else — could make them friends.
While theistic philosophers and theistic scientists readily accept the existence of natural laws,...they also point out that empirical investigation has given good evidence that the universe was created (otherwise the Big Bang has no cause or explanation) or designed (otherwise the fine-tuning of so many cosmic constants necessary for life remains inexplicable, and many irreducibly complex molecular machines cannot be adequately accounted for). ...Moreover, there are solid philosophical and historical arguments for biblical miracles such as the resurrection of Jesus (see Richard Swinburne's The Resurrection of God Incarnate).
Professor Krauss fails to interact with any of these arguments. Instead he simply claims that religious beliefs must emanate from bad sources. Now who is being unreasonable?
Douglas Groothuis
Professor of Philosophy
Denver Seminary
Littleton, Colo.
To the Editor:
Lawrence Krauss does little more than assert that religious beliefs are unfounded. ...
For example, he says, "Even scholars with years of training in theology and history have trouble combining the possible existence of divine purpose with a universe governed by natural laws." But the concept of a universe governed by nothing but natural law is the very definition of naturalism (or philosophical materialism), a worldview that excludes in principle a creator or designer. Of course naturalism is incompatible with theism; no theologian — or anyone else — could make them friends.
While theistic philosophers and theistic scientists readily accept the existence of natural laws,...they also point out that empirical investigation has given good evidence that the universe was created (otherwise the Big Bang has no cause or explanation) or designed (otherwise the fine-tuning of so many cosmic constants necessary for life remains inexplicable, and many irreducibly complex molecular machines cannot be adequately accounted for). ...Moreover, there are solid philosophical and historical arguments for biblical miracles such as the resurrection of Jesus (see Richard Swinburne's The Resurrection of God Incarnate).
Professor Krauss fails to interact with any of these arguments. Instead he simply claims that religious beliefs must emanate from bad sources. Now who is being unreasonable?
Douglas Groothuis
Professor of Philosophy
Denver Seminary
Littleton, Colo.
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Stuffed Animal Rights: Animals of Fabric Speak Out!
1. Animals of fabric (stuffed animals) are no less significant than animals of flesh. If you think otherwise, you are a fleshist.
2. They deserve to be washed regularly. Don't you?
3. They need counseling before and after being put into the dryer.
4. They should never be abused (punched, stepped on, piled on top of each other, made to listen to Kenny G, etc.).
5. They should never have idiotic comments attributed to themselves, such as, "Teddy says he thinks a Pro-Life Democrat will run for President in 2008").
6. They should never be given to the dogs as playthings. A stuffed animal would never hurt a dog.
7. They should be repaired when damaged. You go to the doctor, don't you?
8. They should never be thrown out, but rather given a proper burial (with a eulogy).
9. They should never be left out in the elements (even at roadside memorials). Would you stay outside for days on end?
10. No one should spend more than a fraction of their income on procuring stuffed animals. Even they know they are not real and shouldn't be made into idols.
2. They deserve to be washed regularly. Don't you?
3. They need counseling before and after being put into the dryer.
4. They should never be abused (punched, stepped on, piled on top of each other, made to listen to Kenny G, etc.).
5. They should never have idiotic comments attributed to themselves, such as, "Teddy says he thinks a Pro-Life Democrat will run for President in 2008").
6. They should never be given to the dogs as playthings. A stuffed animal would never hurt a dog.
7. They should be repaired when damaged. You go to the doctor, don't you?
8. They should never be thrown out, but rather given a proper burial (with a eulogy).
9. They should never be left out in the elements (even at roadside memorials). Would you stay outside for days on end?
10. No one should spend more than a fraction of their income on procuring stuffed animals. Even they know they are not real and shouldn't be made into idols.
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
More Jazz Awards
In light of the responses to my self-generated Curmudgeon Classics Awards (and because of other musings on music), here are more.
1. Utterly in his own transcendent category: piano: Thelonious Monk
2. Contemporary tenor saxophone: Michael Brecker (RIP)
3. Piano: Bill Evans
4. Fusion drummer: Billy Cobham
5. Fusion electric guitar: Alan Holdsworth
6. Fusion electric bass: Stanley Clark
1. Utterly in his own transcendent category: piano: Thelonious Monk
2. Contemporary tenor saxophone: Michael Brecker (RIP)
3. Piano: Bill Evans
4. Fusion drummer: Billy Cobham
5. Fusion electric guitar: Alan Holdsworth
6. Fusion electric bass: Stanley Clark
Monday, February 12, 2007
Evolution Sunday: Groothuis Responds
[This story is from today's Rocky Mountain News.]
Church makes evolutionary change over time
February 12, 2007
Here's a neat historic twist: Sunday, in the same Denver sanctuary where William Jennings Bryan, that fiery foe of evolution, is believed to have thundered out an oration 96 years ago, the Rev. Mark Meeks was celebrating a new national church movement called . . . Evolution Sunday.
"I don't need a religion that explains everything, or a sacred text that conforms to my understanding," Meeks told 60 worshippers at Capitol Heights Presbyterian Church, 1100 Fillmore St.
"Scientific exploration can help us understand our religion," continued Meeks, a cozy, bearded presence in a well-seasoned fleece sweater.
On the other side, he said, are biblical literalists who believe "the world came to be 6,000 years ago, already ripe, so to speak . . . They make an idol of the sacred texts, trying to reduce God to our own understanding."
The Bryan link? It's a fanciful but fun stretch. Legend has it that Bryan came to the Capitol Heights church to stemwind at its 1911 opening. Fourteen years later, he was the legendary prosecutor of evolution teacher John Scopes.
Nearly 100 years later, Bryant is nearly forgotten, while the fight over evolution has proved to be timeless.
About a dozen Colorado churches took part in Evolution Sunday, a movement begun last year by Michael Zimmerman, a dean at Butler University in Indianapolis. He's collected 10,000 clergy signatures supporting evolution over creationism.
Nor do the Evolution Sunday supporters like the "intelligent design" theory, says Doug Groothuis, a Denver Seminary philosophy professor who himself writes and debates extensively in support of intelligent design.
"By examining the evidence empirically," Groothuis says, "intelligent design people appeal to certain features of nature that they think are better understood according to a designing mind rather than some mindless process."
But to Evolution Sunday-goers, notions of a grand designer threaten to undermine the science.
"It fosters contempt for scientists in general, and voters are worried scientists aren't doing real science, and so they slash science funding, which is so important to this country," warned Cathy Russell, an evolutionary biologist who celebrated Sunday at her Boulder church.
By the way, Evolution Sunday is pegged to the birthday of Charles Darwin, who turns 200 in two years. (Imagine that celebration.) Russell will be there: "I'm totally passionate about this."
torkelsonj@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-5055
Church makes evolutionary change over time
February 12, 2007
Here's a neat historic twist: Sunday, in the same Denver sanctuary where William Jennings Bryan, that fiery foe of evolution, is believed to have thundered out an oration 96 years ago, the Rev. Mark Meeks was celebrating a new national church movement called . . . Evolution Sunday.
"I don't need a religion that explains everything, or a sacred text that conforms to my understanding," Meeks told 60 worshippers at Capitol Heights Presbyterian Church, 1100 Fillmore St.
"Scientific exploration can help us understand our religion," continued Meeks, a cozy, bearded presence in a well-seasoned fleece sweater.
On the other side, he said, are biblical literalists who believe "the world came to be 6,000 years ago, already ripe, so to speak . . . They make an idol of the sacred texts, trying to reduce God to our own understanding."
The Bryan link? It's a fanciful but fun stretch. Legend has it that Bryan came to the Capitol Heights church to stemwind at its 1911 opening. Fourteen years later, he was the legendary prosecutor of evolution teacher John Scopes.
Nearly 100 years later, Bryant is nearly forgotten, while the fight over evolution has proved to be timeless.
About a dozen Colorado churches took part in Evolution Sunday, a movement begun last year by Michael Zimmerman, a dean at Butler University in Indianapolis. He's collected 10,000 clergy signatures supporting evolution over creationism.
Nor do the Evolution Sunday supporters like the "intelligent design" theory, says Doug Groothuis, a Denver Seminary philosophy professor who himself writes and debates extensively in support of intelligent design.
"By examining the evidence empirically," Groothuis says, "intelligent design people appeal to certain features of nature that they think are better understood according to a designing mind rather than some mindless process."
But to Evolution Sunday-goers, notions of a grand designer threaten to undermine the science.
"It fosters contempt for scientists in general, and voters are worried scientists aren't doing real science, and so they slash science funding, which is so important to this country," warned Cathy Russell, an evolutionary biologist who celebrated Sunday at her Boulder church.
By the way, Evolution Sunday is pegged to the birthday of Charles Darwin, who turns 200 in two years. (Imagine that celebration.) Russell will be there: "I'm totally passionate about this."
torkelsonj@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-5055
Sunday, February 11, 2007
Grammy Inspired Jazz Awards (for fun, but serious music)
Inspired by the institution known as the Grammys, I hereby create the Curmudgeon Classic Awards for greatest jazz musicians and album--not limited to contemporary musicians.
Jazz musicians:
1. Saxophone: John Coltrane.
2. Small combo: John Coltrane Quartet.
3. Big Band drummer, soloist: Buddy Rich. No one else is close.
4. Small combo drummer: Elvin Jones, Tony Williams.
5. Piano: Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner, Keith Jarrett.
6. Trumpet: Miles Davis (pre-electric).
7. Bass: Jimmie Garrison.
8. Circular breaching champion (saxophone and a lot of other things): Roland Kirk
Jazz albums:
1. John Coltrane, "A Love Supreme."
2. John Coltrane, "Crescent."
Contemporary favorites:
1. Alto Saxophone: Kenny Garrett, Greg Osby.
2. Tenor Saxophone: Joshua Redman, Branford Marsalis, Charles Lloyd, Wayne Shorter, Sonny Rollins (living legend category, just below Coltrane).
3. Drums: Brian Blade, Dave Stewart, Jeff Watts, Roy Haynes (living legend).
4. Guitar: Pat Metheny, Pat Martino.
Jazz musicians:
1. Saxophone: John Coltrane.
2. Small combo: John Coltrane Quartet.
3. Big Band drummer, soloist: Buddy Rich. No one else is close.
4. Small combo drummer: Elvin Jones, Tony Williams.
5. Piano: Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner, Keith Jarrett.
6. Trumpet: Miles Davis (pre-electric).
7. Bass: Jimmie Garrison.
8. Circular breaching champion (saxophone and a lot of other things): Roland Kirk
Jazz albums:
1. John Coltrane, "A Love Supreme."
2. John Coltrane, "Crescent."
Contemporary favorites:
1. Alto Saxophone: Kenny Garrett, Greg Osby.
2. Tenor Saxophone: Joshua Redman, Branford Marsalis, Charles Lloyd, Wayne Shorter, Sonny Rollins (living legend category, just below Coltrane).
3. Drums: Brian Blade, Dave Stewart, Jeff Watts, Roy Haynes (living legend).
4. Guitar: Pat Metheny, Pat Martino.
Saturday, February 10, 2007
Letter to Christianity Today from Dr. Gordon Lewis
[My esteemed colleague, Dr. Gordon Lewis, wrote this leter to Christianity Today recently. Since they may not print it in its entirety, I wanted to make the full argument available to my intrepid readers. Dr. Lewis, now 80, is an evangelical treasure.]
Letter to the Editor of Christianity Today
From: Gordon R. Lewis, Sr. Professor of Theology and Philosophy,
Denver Seminary
Re: “Five Streams of the Emerging Church” (CT February 2007, pp 35-39).
Commendably, Scot McKnight seeks to “practice the way of Jesus;” sadly, he fails to follow Jesus’ way with words. Does not McKnight’s assertion that “no language is capable of capturing absolute truth.” contradict what Jesus said to his heavenly Father? “I gave them the words you gave me” (John 17:8). “I have given them your word” (v.14) and “your word is truth” (v.17).
Apparently McKnight’s wordless god is not the God who has spoken in human languages. “In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son” (Heb 1:1-2).
Like the mystics of the world’s religions, as well as Kierkegaard and Barth, McKnight presupposes that God’s thoughts are infinitely different in every quality from any concepts expressed in human language. So what God reveals is himself, not information about himself. Apparently McKnight overlooks the fact that God created men and women in his image and that the image includes a mental capacity for receiving revealed information. A believer’s new nature is “renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator” (Col 3:10).
So McKnight alleges that, “God didn’t reveal a systematic theology but a storied narrative, and no language is capable of capturing the Absolute Truth.” However, in the midst of the Bible’s true stories are indicative sentences asserting what is the case. In the narrative of Jesus’ conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well, he asserted, “God is spirit.” When walking on the road to Emmaus, Jesus explained, “A spirit does not have flesh and bones.” Such affirmations are the building blocks of a consistent view of God. The parables illustrated the true information Jesus taught about his kingdom.
Logic haters to the contrary, Jesus used indicative sentences conveying propositions to teach about God, angels, human souls or spirits, his own deity and mission, signs of the end of the age and a spirituality that exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees. Paul’s letters, furthermore, began with doctrinal assertions before moving to their applications in life. If McKnight’s postmodern theory of language were true, Jesus and Paul would be guilty of “linguistic idolatry!” In contrast, Jesus said, “The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life: (John 6:63). His assertions were not limiting but liberating. “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:31-32).
Although systematic theologians claim that divinely revealed assertions are necessary to evangelical spiritual experience, they do not regard them sufficient for every aspect of life. Yes, anyone who comes to God must believe the revealed information that he exists (Heb 11:6). Assent to the truth of that proposition should guide one’s holistic commitment to its personal referent, the living Lord of whom it speaks. “God is spirit” does not completely encompass infinity; God’s awesome being has many other characteristics.
One who practices the way of the articulate Jesus teaches the truth of his assertions. As he said, “These words you hear are not my own; they belong to the Father who sent me” (John 14:23-24). “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away (Mat 24:35).
Letter to the Editor of Christianity Today
From: Gordon R. Lewis, Sr. Professor of Theology and Philosophy,
Denver Seminary
Re: “Five Streams of the Emerging Church” (CT February 2007, pp 35-39).
Commendably, Scot McKnight seeks to “practice the way of Jesus;” sadly, he fails to follow Jesus’ way with words. Does not McKnight’s assertion that “no language is capable of capturing absolute truth.” contradict what Jesus said to his heavenly Father? “I gave them the words you gave me” (John 17:8). “I have given them your word” (v.14) and “your word is truth” (v.17).
Apparently McKnight’s wordless god is not the God who has spoken in human languages. “In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son” (Heb 1:1-2).
Like the mystics of the world’s religions, as well as Kierkegaard and Barth, McKnight presupposes that God’s thoughts are infinitely different in every quality from any concepts expressed in human language. So what God reveals is himself, not information about himself. Apparently McKnight overlooks the fact that God created men and women in his image and that the image includes a mental capacity for receiving revealed information. A believer’s new nature is “renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator” (Col 3:10).
So McKnight alleges that, “God didn’t reveal a systematic theology but a storied narrative, and no language is capable of capturing the Absolute Truth.” However, in the midst of the Bible’s true stories are indicative sentences asserting what is the case. In the narrative of Jesus’ conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well, he asserted, “God is spirit.” When walking on the road to Emmaus, Jesus explained, “A spirit does not have flesh and bones.” Such affirmations are the building blocks of a consistent view of God. The parables illustrated the true information Jesus taught about his kingdom.
Logic haters to the contrary, Jesus used indicative sentences conveying propositions to teach about God, angels, human souls or spirits, his own deity and mission, signs of the end of the age and a spirituality that exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees. Paul’s letters, furthermore, began with doctrinal assertions before moving to their applications in life. If McKnight’s postmodern theory of language were true, Jesus and Paul would be guilty of “linguistic idolatry!” In contrast, Jesus said, “The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life: (John 6:63). His assertions were not limiting but liberating. “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:31-32).
Although systematic theologians claim that divinely revealed assertions are necessary to evangelical spiritual experience, they do not regard them sufficient for every aspect of life. Yes, anyone who comes to God must believe the revealed information that he exists (Heb 11:6). Assent to the truth of that proposition should guide one’s holistic commitment to its personal referent, the living Lord of whom it speaks. “God is spirit” does not completely encompass infinity; God’s awesome being has many other characteristics.
One who practices the way of the articulate Jesus teaches the truth of his assertions. As he said, “These words you hear are not my own; they belong to the Father who sent me” (John 14:23-24). “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away (Mat 24:35).
Friday, February 09, 2007
Are Newspapers Dying?
Upon our return to Centennial, we noted that The Rocky Mountain News had shrunk and was redesigned as a tabloid. The heft was gone; it seemed emaciated. The Rocky Mountain News and The Denver Post are now distributed by the same company and are housed in the same building, although their editorial leadership is distinct. This is a cost-cutting move. This follows a trend of several years: people--particularly younger people, "wired people"--are turning to other news sources. One cartoon depicted two twenty-somethings looking at a newsstand. One said to the other, "I don't get it. It's a day old and you have to pay for it." Is there a point to the daily newsprint?
Major newspaper put most of their material on line. News is posted as it breaks. Why wait until the next day? Why bother with the dirty paper, most of which you never read, and that ends up in the garbage? Is one's preference or attachment for the newspaper merely generational? I was brought up reading it, writing letters to editor, clipping articles, and writing editorials in my junior and high school papers and later in major city newspapers. Nevertheless, in almost five months in Sun City West, Arizona, we did not take the newspaper. I listed to the radio (NPR and Talk Radio--quite a contrast), read The New York Times and other sources on line, and read magazines and books.
Newspapers have their constitutional draw backs and trade-offs. They separate and present a collage, unlike a book or magazine. They splatter divergent articles on the same page, often without much coherence or integration. (This is Marshall McLuhan's insight.) They are incessantly daily; that is, they seldom put things into an historical context. Editorials may articulate such a context, but they are boxed in to 500-750 words. Some feature stories run as a series, which may go on for several days. This may provide more context and depth, if they are well-researched and well-written. But some stories are there simply to fill space. There has to be news, after all. But why? Maybe silence or a blank page would be better for the soul.
Images end to dominate most newspapers now. USA Today is modeled after television, as Neil Postman pointed out long ago. Images are not conceptual, but impressionistic, incapable of abstraction or analysis.
Yet newspapers have their allure, a justified uniqueness worth preserving. They are embodied--not as substantial or long-lived as books or even magazines, but they exist off of the screen. The screen carries with it an entirely different set of sensibilities. (I wrote of this in a chapter of a book, "The Book, The Screen, and the Soul," in The Soul in Cyberspace. That book was put onto a CD-ROM, ironically.) The screen moves. One screen can house an unlimited number of different words or images; it is not inscribed upon, but filled with markings without ink.
Heft has its virtues; bulk has its rewards. You pick up the paper; bring it in; leave it out; pick through it; talk about it with family members (the same paper; you do not have many people staring at different screens). You can clip a story. You can rip it to shreds in disgust or crumple it up and throw it across the room--good curmudgeonly performance art. You may find something unexpected, something a search engine would not reveal. The paper is not constituted or styled for your own individual interests, as is so much of the internet. You take what it gives and see what you find.
This past Sunday, I spent an hour in a local Starbucks, reading The Old Gray Lady's Sunday edition. (I didn't buy it, but borrowed it from the stand, and put it back--pretty much--as I found it.) There was a review of a book about the dark side of Paris and other interesting things and ridiculous things--a narcissistic and pointless story about a new professor's anxieties about his sartorial comportment. Yes, I could have read this on line, but it wouldn't have been the same. You don't turn through pages on line, you search for articles. Those pages, encountered as pages, may yield a serendipitous reward. And the pages will not mysteriously disappear, as data on screens so often does. Yes, I may spill my coffee on it, but it won't short-circuit anything.
There are the inevitable trade-offs with any medium, electronic or not. But newspapers have their charm, their telos, their place in our culture. May their demise be denied, or at least prolonged.
Major newspaper put most of their material on line. News is posted as it breaks. Why wait until the next day? Why bother with the dirty paper, most of which you never read, and that ends up in the garbage? Is one's preference or attachment for the newspaper merely generational? I was brought up reading it, writing letters to editor, clipping articles, and writing editorials in my junior and high school papers and later in major city newspapers. Nevertheless, in almost five months in Sun City West, Arizona, we did not take the newspaper. I listed to the radio (NPR and Talk Radio--quite a contrast), read The New York Times and other sources on line, and read magazines and books.
Newspapers have their constitutional draw backs and trade-offs. They separate and present a collage, unlike a book or magazine. They splatter divergent articles on the same page, often without much coherence or integration. (This is Marshall McLuhan's insight.) They are incessantly daily; that is, they seldom put things into an historical context. Editorials may articulate such a context, but they are boxed in to 500-750 words. Some feature stories run as a series, which may go on for several days. This may provide more context and depth, if they are well-researched and well-written. But some stories are there simply to fill space. There has to be news, after all. But why? Maybe silence or a blank page would be better for the soul.
Images end to dominate most newspapers now. USA Today is modeled after television, as Neil Postman pointed out long ago. Images are not conceptual, but impressionistic, incapable of abstraction or analysis.
Yet newspapers have their allure, a justified uniqueness worth preserving. They are embodied--not as substantial or long-lived as books or even magazines, but they exist off of the screen. The screen carries with it an entirely different set of sensibilities. (I wrote of this in a chapter of a book, "The Book, The Screen, and the Soul," in The Soul in Cyberspace. That book was put onto a CD-ROM, ironically.) The screen moves. One screen can house an unlimited number of different words or images; it is not inscribed upon, but filled with markings without ink.
Heft has its virtues; bulk has its rewards. You pick up the paper; bring it in; leave it out; pick through it; talk about it with family members (the same paper; you do not have many people staring at different screens). You can clip a story. You can rip it to shreds in disgust or crumple it up and throw it across the room--good curmudgeonly performance art. You may find something unexpected, something a search engine would not reveal. The paper is not constituted or styled for your own individual interests, as is so much of the internet. You take what it gives and see what you find.
This past Sunday, I spent an hour in a local Starbucks, reading The Old Gray Lady's Sunday edition. (I didn't buy it, but borrowed it from the stand, and put it back--pretty much--as I found it.) There was a review of a book about the dark side of Paris and other interesting things and ridiculous things--a narcissistic and pointless story about a new professor's anxieties about his sartorial comportment. Yes, I could have read this on line, but it wouldn't have been the same. You don't turn through pages on line, you search for articles. Those pages, encountered as pages, may yield a serendipitous reward. And the pages will not mysteriously disappear, as data on screens so often does. Yes, I may spill my coffee on it, but it won't short-circuit anything.
There are the inevitable trade-offs with any medium, electronic or not. But newspapers have their charm, their telos, their place in our culture. May their demise be denied, or at least prolonged.
Monday, February 05, 2007
The Downside of the Wireless Classroom.
[Some of the students at my own institution are using their laptops to play video games and do on line shopping while attending lecture classes. Apparently, this problem is rampant. I am very impressed with the insights of Dr. Bugeja's article, which are similar to some of the idea's articulated in my book, The Soul in Cyberspace.]
The Chronicle of Higher Education
From the issue dated January 26, 2007
FIRST PERSON
Distractions in the Wireless Classroom
Getting your students' attention may be as simple as requiring them to turn off the technology
By MICHAEL J. BUGEJA
When Kevin and Mollie Cooney recently visited their daughter's psychology class at the College of William and Mary, they noted how attentive students seemed to be in the large lecture hall.
The Cooneys, who are both news anchors for the CBS affiliate in Des Moines, Iowa, and who sit on the advisory council of the journalism school I head at Iowa State University, were intrigued by the tapping of the laptop keys as students appeared to be taking copious notes. "As we looked over their shoulders from our back-row seats," says Mollie Cooney, "we found instead they were on Facebook, Dave Matthews Band Web sites, instant-messaging friends, and e-mailing fellow classmates."
"Granted," she adds, "these students were in the minority, and our daughter swears she never takes her laptop to class for that reason. But as parents who pay hard-earned money to send kids to school with better computers than we will ever own, it's a bit disconcerting as to how they are actually being used!"
That scenario is happening across the country. Cynthia M. Frisby, associate professor of strategic communication at the University of Missouri, has noticed students on MySpace and eBay during her lectures. She has also noticed more failing grades. The final straw, she says, came in an e-mail message from a student "complimenting my outfit, failing to realize that the time stamp was on the e-mail, further suggesting that he was not paying attention to my lecture."
Now she bans laptops in large lecture courses and has a clause in her syllabus about the inappropriate use of technology. The result? "Huge increases in attention and better performance on exams," she says. "Students have even mentioned that they feel like they are doing better without the laptop."
Syllabus clauses warning against the misuse of technology are increasingly common. In my own school of journalism, about 20 percent of syllabi contain such warnings. Some examples:
"Anyone who engages in rude, thoughtless, selfish behavior, such as use of a cellphone for instant messages, games, etc., will have his or her cellphone confiscated until the next class session and will be excused from the class. The cellphone will be returned after the student apologizes to the class at the next class session."
"If your cellular phone is heard by the class, you are responsible for completing one of two options: 1. Before the end of the class period you will sing a verse and chorus of any song of your choice or, 2. You will lead the next class period through a 10-minute discussion on a topic to be determined by the end of the class. (To the extent that there are multiple individuals in violation, duets will be accepted)."
As more and more classrooms go wireless, technology warnings on syllabi soon will be as standard as the ones about cheating (which laptops also facilitate). In 2004, only about a third of classrooms provided wireless Internet access, according to the annual Campus Computing Survey. Wireless networks now cover more than half (51.2 percent) of college classrooms.
My own university, one of the most wireless in the country, may be experiencing those problems ahead of the curve. As the number of wireless access points has increased on the campus, so has the number of reports of Web surfing, text-messaging, and gaming during class.
Other high-tech institutions are seeing the same phenomenon. I became acquainted with Ione DeOllos, an associate professor of sociology at Ball State University, after USA Today interviewed me about her institution's purported status as the most wireless in the nation.
Last year, she says, the University Senate adopted a policy "that allows professors to limit technology use in classrooms. Senators had received complaints from faculty members about students who were using computers to play games, watch videos, and e-mail and instant-message others." The Senate decided it needed to make a clear statement to students "that inappropriate use of technology would not be tolerated."
DeOllos added a warning about in-class use of cellphones to her own syllabi, and plans to extend it to include laptop computers, banning them on a case-by-case basis.
Shutting off the wireless. You can't. In a few short years, universities have moved from dial-up, to wired Ethernet, to controlled Ethernet (which could be switched off), to wireless.
Dennis Adams, chairman of the information-sciences department at the University of Houston, wrote about shutting off wireless networks in the September 2006 issue of Communications of the ACM, the flagship journal of the Association for Computing Machinery. "While classroom access to the Internet may be a wonderful teaching tool," he wrote, "it can also be a barrier to learning."
Adams admitted in an interview that turning off wireless was nearly impossible. But you can see why he is tempted. In "The Laptop Backlash," an article published in the October 14, 2006, issue of The Wall Street Journal, a reporter who sat in on Adams's "Management of Information Systems" course observed: "While Prof. Adams lectures, five students use an online chat room to post comments on his lecture. ... Another student spends nearly two-thirds of the three-hour class playing computer chess, instant-messaging, and viewing photos of a fraternity party posted on the Web." The reporter also saw another student buying shoes on eBay.
In his Communications essay, Adams cites a 1972 work by Eda LeShan on "the Sesame Street syndrome." She argued that, by overemphasizing the idea of right and wrong answers, the show taught children that thinking and questions are irrelevant because adults do the asking and answering. Nowadays, the syndrome "has come to describe students who expect to be entertained as they learn," Adams wrote. "If the entertainment doesn't come from the front of the wireless classroom, it comes from the Internet."
Theodore Roszak, whose books include The Making of a Counter Culture and The Cult of Information, has sounded that warning for decades. When cellphones started ring-toning in his classroom at California State University's East Bay campus, the professor of history retired.
"What kids need to learn," he says, "and what teachers must commit themselves fiercely to defending, is the fact that the mind isn't any sort of machine, that thinking with your own naked wits is a pure animal joy that cannot be programmed, and that great culture begins with an imagination on fire. We should remind our children at every turn that more great literature and more great science were accomplished with the quill pen than by the fastest microchip that will ever be invented."
Roszak's greatest fear is that technology "will reduce the mind to the level of the machine."
The Google syndrome. If Sesame Street taught generations that there are right and wrong answers, Google reinforces that lesson but makes no claim as to the accuracy of the answers.
Certainly, search engines and databases are vital in many disciplines, especially the medical sciences.
"In the setting of the medical school, particularly clinical encounters, wireless access is actually beneficial," says Lawrence H. Phillips, a professor of neurology at the University of Virginia. "There is often competition between students on rounds to see who can access clinically useful information the fastest.
"On the other hand, I think my 16-year-old and her friends text-message each other continuously during class and other times when they should be studying," he adds. "The IM function on the computer goes continuously when she is working on the computer at home. This type of behavior will certainly carry over into the college classroom."
Will the emerging distracted generations be able to meet complex challenges on the horizon, like global warming and pandemics?
David D. Ho, chief executive officer of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center and a professor at Rockefeller University, is best known for his work in suppressing viral replication through the use of multiple-drug therapies. Early in his AIDS-related research, he would come upon treatments that succeeded in the lab but failed in humans — "but that's science," he has said. Soon he came to understand that the AIDS virus mutates rapidly, resisting each individual drug. That's when he and his team turned to mathematics, calculating probabilities of the virus mutating simultaneously around multiple therapies. Odds were in the patient's favor.
Computers can calculate those odds in a nanosecond, but they cannot formulate the question nor conceive the process by which to do so. Neither can Google.
"We should be teaching our students to think creatively or to become innovators, not just test takers," he says.
David J. Skorton, president of Cornell University, says that students have been doodling since the days of chalk and slate, "but the ability to check the weather or game scores or the headline news from their laptops during class puts an unprecedented barrier between the student and the instructor."
Coping methods. Dennis Adams, at the University of Houston, is adapting to the wireless classroom. When he makes an important point, he asks students to close their laptops and listen. "I don't abuse this," he says, "but use it as a way to summarize or to communicate a difficult concept." He concedes, however, the problem is probably more in changing the way professors teach.
That is predictable. According to the French philosopher Jacques Ellul (1912-94), technology is autonomous and "radically modifies the objects to which it is applied while being scarcely modified in its own features."
Apply technology to the economy, and the economy henceforth is about technology. Apply it to journalism, and journalism is about technology. Apply it to education, and education is about technology. All must adapt, and in so doing we lose centuries of erudition because principles no longer apply in practice. Worse, because autonomous technology is independent of everything, it cannot be blamed for anything.
To combat technology distractions, some universities are relying on educational campaigns to make students more sensitive to classroom etiquette. The University of Wisconsin at Madison provides information via links to Web pages that faculty members can note in their syllabi. One link (http://www.doit.wisc.edu/network/wireless/advice_stu.asp) encourages students to stay on task and not distract others or themselves. Another (http://www.doit.wisc.edu/network/wireless/advice_fac.asp) provides ground rules for wireless use and classroom laptop etiquette.
Jane Drews, information-technology security officer for the University of Iowa, believes that a solution to wireless distractions is etiquette education. "From the person who endlessly chats on a phone while in a restaurant, to someone's pager or cell going off in the middle of a presentation or lecture, we are creating a society of very rude technology users. We have an online class offered to freshmen that includes a Responsible Computing' module, with a section on netiquette.' I've suggested it be expanded to include classroom etiquette, too."
I have been advocating a required orientation class, "Interpersonal Intelligence," informing first-year students about when, where, and for what purpose technology is appropriate or inappropriate.
Perhaps the best suggestion comes from my associate dean, Zora Zimmerman, who proposes that student government take the lead with a campaign to "Reclaim the Classroom."
Despite digital distractions, ever-larger class sizes, decreased budgets, and fewer tenured colleagues, professors still are responsible for turning students on to learning. To do so, we just may have to turn off the technology.
Michael Bugeja, director of the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication at Iowa State University, is the author of Interpersonal Divide: The Search for Community in a Technological Age (Oxford University Press, 2005).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Chronicle of Higher Education
From the issue dated January 26, 2007
FIRST PERSON
Distractions in the Wireless Classroom
Getting your students' attention may be as simple as requiring them to turn off the technology
By MICHAEL J. BUGEJA
When Kevin and Mollie Cooney recently visited their daughter's psychology class at the College of William and Mary, they noted how attentive students seemed to be in the large lecture hall.
The Cooneys, who are both news anchors for the CBS affiliate in Des Moines, Iowa, and who sit on the advisory council of the journalism school I head at Iowa State University, were intrigued by the tapping of the laptop keys as students appeared to be taking copious notes. "As we looked over their shoulders from our back-row seats," says Mollie Cooney, "we found instead they were on Facebook, Dave Matthews Band Web sites, instant-messaging friends, and e-mailing fellow classmates."
"Granted," she adds, "these students were in the minority, and our daughter swears she never takes her laptop to class for that reason. But as parents who pay hard-earned money to send kids to school with better computers than we will ever own, it's a bit disconcerting as to how they are actually being used!"
That scenario is happening across the country. Cynthia M. Frisby, associate professor of strategic communication at the University of Missouri, has noticed students on MySpace and eBay during her lectures. She has also noticed more failing grades. The final straw, she says, came in an e-mail message from a student "complimenting my outfit, failing to realize that the time stamp was on the e-mail, further suggesting that he was not paying attention to my lecture."
Now she bans laptops in large lecture courses and has a clause in her syllabus about the inappropriate use of technology. The result? "Huge increases in attention and better performance on exams," she says. "Students have even mentioned that they feel like they are doing better without the laptop."
Syllabus clauses warning against the misuse of technology are increasingly common. In my own school of journalism, about 20 percent of syllabi contain such warnings. Some examples:
"Anyone who engages in rude, thoughtless, selfish behavior, such as use of a cellphone for instant messages, games, etc., will have his or her cellphone confiscated until the next class session and will be excused from the class. The cellphone will be returned after the student apologizes to the class at the next class session."
"If your cellular phone is heard by the class, you are responsible for completing one of two options: 1. Before the end of the class period you will sing a verse and chorus of any song of your choice or, 2. You will lead the next class period through a 10-minute discussion on a topic to be determined by the end of the class. (To the extent that there are multiple individuals in violation, duets will be accepted)."
As more and more classrooms go wireless, technology warnings on syllabi soon will be as standard as the ones about cheating (which laptops also facilitate). In 2004, only about a third of classrooms provided wireless Internet access, according to the annual Campus Computing Survey. Wireless networks now cover more than half (51.2 percent) of college classrooms.
My own university, one of the most wireless in the country, may be experiencing those problems ahead of the curve. As the number of wireless access points has increased on the campus, so has the number of reports of Web surfing, text-messaging, and gaming during class.
Other high-tech institutions are seeing the same phenomenon. I became acquainted with Ione DeOllos, an associate professor of sociology at Ball State University, after USA Today interviewed me about her institution's purported status as the most wireless in the nation.
Last year, she says, the University Senate adopted a policy "that allows professors to limit technology use in classrooms. Senators had received complaints from faculty members about students who were using computers to play games, watch videos, and e-mail and instant-message others." The Senate decided it needed to make a clear statement to students "that inappropriate use of technology would not be tolerated."
DeOllos added a warning about in-class use of cellphones to her own syllabi, and plans to extend it to include laptop computers, banning them on a case-by-case basis.
Shutting off the wireless. You can't. In a few short years, universities have moved from dial-up, to wired Ethernet, to controlled Ethernet (which could be switched off), to wireless.
Dennis Adams, chairman of the information-sciences department at the University of Houston, wrote about shutting off wireless networks in the September 2006 issue of Communications of the ACM, the flagship journal of the Association for Computing Machinery. "While classroom access to the Internet may be a wonderful teaching tool," he wrote, "it can also be a barrier to learning."
Adams admitted in an interview that turning off wireless was nearly impossible. But you can see why he is tempted. In "The Laptop Backlash," an article published in the October 14, 2006, issue of The Wall Street Journal, a reporter who sat in on Adams's "Management of Information Systems" course observed: "While Prof. Adams lectures, five students use an online chat room to post comments on his lecture. ... Another student spends nearly two-thirds of the three-hour class playing computer chess, instant-messaging, and viewing photos of a fraternity party posted on the Web." The reporter also saw another student buying shoes on eBay.
In his Communications essay, Adams cites a 1972 work by Eda LeShan on "the Sesame Street syndrome." She argued that, by overemphasizing the idea of right and wrong answers, the show taught children that thinking and questions are irrelevant because adults do the asking and answering. Nowadays, the syndrome "has come to describe students who expect to be entertained as they learn," Adams wrote. "If the entertainment doesn't come from the front of the wireless classroom, it comes from the Internet."
Theodore Roszak, whose books include The Making of a Counter Culture and The Cult of Information, has sounded that warning for decades. When cellphones started ring-toning in his classroom at California State University's East Bay campus, the professor of history retired.
"What kids need to learn," he says, "and what teachers must commit themselves fiercely to defending, is the fact that the mind isn't any sort of machine, that thinking with your own naked wits is a pure animal joy that cannot be programmed, and that great culture begins with an imagination on fire. We should remind our children at every turn that more great literature and more great science were accomplished with the quill pen than by the fastest microchip that will ever be invented."
Roszak's greatest fear is that technology "will reduce the mind to the level of the machine."
The Google syndrome. If Sesame Street taught generations that there are right and wrong answers, Google reinforces that lesson but makes no claim as to the accuracy of the answers.
Certainly, search engines and databases are vital in many disciplines, especially the medical sciences.
"In the setting of the medical school, particularly clinical encounters, wireless access is actually beneficial," says Lawrence H. Phillips, a professor of neurology at the University of Virginia. "There is often competition between students on rounds to see who can access clinically useful information the fastest.
"On the other hand, I think my 16-year-old and her friends text-message each other continuously during class and other times when they should be studying," he adds. "The IM function on the computer goes continuously when she is working on the computer at home. This type of behavior will certainly carry over into the college classroom."
Will the emerging distracted generations be able to meet complex challenges on the horizon, like global warming and pandemics?
David D. Ho, chief executive officer of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center and a professor at Rockefeller University, is best known for his work in suppressing viral replication through the use of multiple-drug therapies. Early in his AIDS-related research, he would come upon treatments that succeeded in the lab but failed in humans — "but that's science," he has said. Soon he came to understand that the AIDS virus mutates rapidly, resisting each individual drug. That's when he and his team turned to mathematics, calculating probabilities of the virus mutating simultaneously around multiple therapies. Odds were in the patient's favor.
Computers can calculate those odds in a nanosecond, but they cannot formulate the question nor conceive the process by which to do so. Neither can Google.
"We should be teaching our students to think creatively or to become innovators, not just test takers," he says.
David J. Skorton, president of Cornell University, says that students have been doodling since the days of chalk and slate, "but the ability to check the weather or game scores or the headline news from their laptops during class puts an unprecedented barrier between the student and the instructor."
Coping methods. Dennis Adams, at the University of Houston, is adapting to the wireless classroom. When he makes an important point, he asks students to close their laptops and listen. "I don't abuse this," he says, "but use it as a way to summarize or to communicate a difficult concept." He concedes, however, the problem is probably more in changing the way professors teach.
That is predictable. According to the French philosopher Jacques Ellul (1912-94), technology is autonomous and "radically modifies the objects to which it is applied while being scarcely modified in its own features."
Apply technology to the economy, and the economy henceforth is about technology. Apply it to journalism, and journalism is about technology. Apply it to education, and education is about technology. All must adapt, and in so doing we lose centuries of erudition because principles no longer apply in practice. Worse, because autonomous technology is independent of everything, it cannot be blamed for anything.
To combat technology distractions, some universities are relying on educational campaigns to make students more sensitive to classroom etiquette. The University of Wisconsin at Madison provides information via links to Web pages that faculty members can note in their syllabi. One link (http://www.doit.wisc.edu/network/wireless/advice_stu.asp) encourages students to stay on task and not distract others or themselves. Another (http://www.doit.wisc.edu/network/wireless/advice_fac.asp) provides ground rules for wireless use and classroom laptop etiquette.
Jane Drews, information-technology security officer for the University of Iowa, believes that a solution to wireless distractions is etiquette education. "From the person who endlessly chats on a phone while in a restaurant, to someone's pager or cell going off in the middle of a presentation or lecture, we are creating a society of very rude technology users. We have an online class offered to freshmen that includes a Responsible Computing' module, with a section on netiquette.' I've suggested it be expanded to include classroom etiquette, too."
I have been advocating a required orientation class, "Interpersonal Intelligence," informing first-year students about when, where, and for what purpose technology is appropriate or inappropriate.
Perhaps the best suggestion comes from my associate dean, Zora Zimmerman, who proposes that student government take the lead with a campaign to "Reclaim the Classroom."
Despite digital distractions, ever-larger class sizes, decreased budgets, and fewer tenured colleagues, professors still are responsible for turning students on to learning. To do so, we just may have to turn off the technology.
Michael Bugeja, director of the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication at Iowa State University, is the author of Interpersonal Divide: The Search for Community in a Technological Age (Oxford University Press, 2005).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Saturday, February 03, 2007
The Strange Silence: Omission Explosion
No one is commenting on the kind of activities I am proposing instead of consuming the spectacle of football. Everyone is weighing in on football. That is telling in itself.
What about the alternatives proposed? They were supposed to be provocative and edifying.
What about the alternatives proposed? They were supposed to be provocative and edifying.
Thursday, February 01, 2007
More Super Bowl Party Ideas
1. Read a good book in one sitting.
2. Inspect your soul in silence for one hour.
3. Pray for the American church to wake up.
4. Pray for the global church, especially the suffering church.
5. Lament what needs to be lamented.
6. Rejoice in your salvation (if you are saved).
7. Ask yourself where you will spend forever (it isn't in a football stadium).
8. Read The Book of Romans.
9. Memorize Scripture.
10. Sing unto the Lord.
11. Recite Scripture unto the Lord.
12. Associate with the lowly.
13. Compose an essay on the moral viciousness of football.
14. See how many push ups you can do.
15. Organize your library (of books!).
16. Write a hand-written letter to someone.
17. Call someone you miss and try to edify them.
18. Fast unto the Lord, seeking wisdom.
19. Repent what needs to be repented of.
20. Listen to John Coltrane's "A Love Supreme" in one sitting through headphones.
21. Write poetry--even bad poetry.
22. Read poetry--only good poetry.
23. Pray for the Victoria's Secret Models.
2. Inspect your soul in silence for one hour.
3. Pray for the American church to wake up.
4. Pray for the global church, especially the suffering church.
5. Lament what needs to be lamented.
6. Rejoice in your salvation (if you are saved).
7. Ask yourself where you will spend forever (it isn't in a football stadium).
8. Read The Book of Romans.
9. Memorize Scripture.
10. Sing unto the Lord.
11. Recite Scripture unto the Lord.
12. Associate with the lowly.
13. Compose an essay on the moral viciousness of football.
14. See how many push ups you can do.
15. Organize your library (of books!).
16. Write a hand-written letter to someone.
17. Call someone you miss and try to edify them.
18. Fast unto the Lord, seeking wisdom.
19. Repent what needs to be repented of.
20. Listen to John Coltrane's "A Love Supreme" in one sitting through headphones.
21. Write poetry--even bad poetry.
22. Read poetry--only good poetry.
23. Pray for the Victoria's Secret Models.
Super bowl Party
The Curmudgeon Super bowl party is unlike any other:
1. You do not watch it.
2. You do not talk about it.
3. You do something constructive instead.
You abstain for edification.
1. You do not watch it.
2. You do not talk about it.
3. You do something constructive instead.
You abstain for edification.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
