via Jason at NCU...
This article gives a formula for calculating the cost to use your computer, and some ideas for greener computing.
Friday, February 26, 2010
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
My Response to Richard Mouw
Richard Mouw's "Two Cheers for Capitalism" prompted me to once again refer to Jonathan Sacks.
Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote an excellent article in First Things entitled “Markets and Morals” that deals with the reason why capitalism doesn’t get that third cheer. Those interested can read it here.
Sacks contrasts the “this-worldliness” of Judaism with the “other-worldliness” of Christianity. He then discusses five features of Jewish life that oppose the market ethic, and, if observed, keep it from being viewed in messianic terms:
1) Sabbath
2) Marriage and family
3) education
4)the concept of property
5) the Law
“Socialism is not the only enemy of the market economy. Another enemy, all the more powerful for its recent global triumph, is the market economy itself. When everything that matters can be bought and sold, when commitments can be broken because they are no longer to our advantage, when shopping becomes salvation and advertising slogans become our litany, when our worth is measured by how much we earn and spend, then the market is destroying the very virtues on which in the long run it depends. That, not the return of socialism, is the danger that advanced economies now face. And in these times, when markets seem to hold out the promise of uninterrupted growth in our satisfaction of desires, the voice of our great religious traditions needs to be heard, warning us of the gods that devour their own children, and of the temples that stand today as relics of civilizations that once seemed invincible.”
Sacks wrote this a decade ago, when the Market was idolized and Alan Greenspan was its Prophet. Perhaps our current economic recession is God’s way of reminding us He alone is God.
Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote an excellent article in First Things entitled “Markets and Morals” that deals with the reason why capitalism doesn’t get that third cheer. Those interested can read it here.
Sacks contrasts the “this-worldliness” of Judaism with the “other-worldliness” of Christianity. He then discusses five features of Jewish life that oppose the market ethic, and, if observed, keep it from being viewed in messianic terms:
1) Sabbath
2) Marriage and family
3) education
4)the concept of property
5) the Law
“Socialism is not the only enemy of the market economy. Another enemy, all the more powerful for its recent global triumph, is the market economy itself. When everything that matters can be bought and sold, when commitments can be broken because they are no longer to our advantage, when shopping becomes salvation and advertising slogans become our litany, when our worth is measured by how much we earn and spend, then the market is destroying the very virtues on which in the long run it depends. That, not the return of socialism, is the danger that advanced economies now face. And in these times, when markets seem to hold out the promise of uninterrupted growth in our satisfaction of desires, the voice of our great religious traditions needs to be heard, warning us of the gods that devour their own children, and of the temples that stand today as relics of civilizations that once seemed invincible.”
Sacks wrote this a decade ago, when the Market was idolized and Alan Greenspan was its Prophet. Perhaps our current economic recession is God’s way of reminding us He alone is God.
Thursday, February 18, 2010
I've got that Joy Joy Joy Joy Down in my Heart
Recent research seems to show that happiness is good for one's heart. If that is true, then Christians ought to be the healthiest people around!
Don’t Worry, Be Happy
Research into happiness and how it impacts health, known as positive psychology, is a relatively new.
It was long believed that most people are hardwired to be either naturally happy or not, regardless of life events.
But this view has changed in recent years as more becomes known about the science of happiness, University of Michigan professor of medicine Bertram Pitt, MD, tells WebMD.
In an editorial published with the study, Pitt writes that interventions that focus on improving social skills and decreasing social anxiety may lower heart disease risk.
Both the study and editorial appear in the European Heart Journal.
Pitt cites numerous strategies that could help naturally negative people become happier, including:
Express gratitude on a regular basis.
Practice being optimistic.
Engage in frequent acts of kindness.
Visualize one's best self.
Savor joyful events.
Practice forgiveness.
Don’t Worry, Be Happy
Research into happiness and how it impacts health, known as positive psychology, is a relatively new.
It was long believed that most people are hardwired to be either naturally happy or not, regardless of life events.
But this view has changed in recent years as more becomes known about the science of happiness, University of Michigan professor of medicine Bertram Pitt, MD, tells WebMD.
In an editorial published with the study, Pitt writes that interventions that focus on improving social skills and decreasing social anxiety may lower heart disease risk.
Both the study and editorial appear in the European Heart Journal.
Pitt cites numerous strategies that could help naturally negative people become happier, including:
Express gratitude on a regular basis.
Practice being optimistic.
Engage in frequent acts of kindness.
Visualize one's best self.
Savor joyful events.
Practice forgiveness.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
How healthy is your county?
How healthy is the county you live in? A new database allows you to compare your county against others in your state.
The report — released Wednesday at http://www.countyhealthrankings.org
— isn't the first to examine county-level health. Cancer and access to health care, for example, have long been studied that way. But the new database ties standard measures — general health and the rate of premature death — with more factors that play a role in those outcomes, from smoking, obesity and binge drinking to the unemployment rate, childhood poverty, air pollution and access to grocery stores
Here are some statistics for Lane County, here in Oregon:
- 21% of those under age 65 do not have health insurance
- 17% of our children under age 18 live in poverty.
- 9% of all households are single-parent households.
- 15% of adults reported binge drinking in the last 30 days.
God bless those who have been called to parish nursing ministry!
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Feb 14, 2010
Wow. This Sunday is going to be even bigger than last Sunday: two holidays and a holy day certainly ought to trump the Superbowl!
Transfiguration Sunday
Transfiguration Sunday
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
"Devoted"
I don't often do this, in fact I don't think I've ever done it. Sunday, Steve preached a sermon that IMO deserves to be reproduced here in its entirety. So here goes:
Joshua 6
Joshua 6
“Devoted”
February 7, 2010 - Fifth Sunday after Epiphany
“That’s number 4! Three more times around,” calls our Sunday School teacher as eight first graders march around our second floor classroom, stomping our feet to make the floor shake and blowing as loud as we can on little party favor horns supplied by Mrs. McElroy.
On the seventh circuit, we get to yell as well as blow on the horns, and a couple of white heads from the seniors’ class poke in the door to see what is going on. But when we’ve gone around that last time Mrs. McElroy shouts, “Now!” and we all converge on the tall pile of cardboard blocks we’ve been circling and gleefully kick them down, delighting in the destruction of our miniature Jericho. We had reenacted Joshua’s most famous battle and in the process learned a modest lesson on patient devotion to God’s directions.
The truth is that the “battle of Jericho” was hardly a battle at all. Right from the start in verse 2 we see that God is the real warrior of the story. He gives Joshua directions that have no military value at all. Then God is the one who brings down the walls and makes the victory possible. All that is required of Joshua and the Israelites is devotion.
In about 1,200 B.C., the people of Israel were camped in front of an already ancient city. Archaeology has shown that Jericho was inhabited since about 9,000 B.C., 11,000 years ago. As early as 8,000 B.C. it had a stone wall which included a tower 25 feet high, making it perhaps the oldest walled city in the world. That tower has been uncovered and you can see it today. The archaeological record shows the city destroyed and rebuilt at least a couple times before the Hebrews arrived. You can be sure that the inhabitants knew a thing or two about walls and about defending their home.
Typically, an invading army like Joshua’s would encircle a fortress like Jericho and cut off supplies, so the inhabitants would grow hungry. They would cut down neighboring forests to create battering rams to hammer on the gates and build siege ramps and ladders to climb over the walls. Taking a walled city required a protracted and dedicated effort.
Yet the word Joshua gets from the Lord has no battle plans at all, no preparations for a long siege. God says nothing about stationing outposts at points in a circle all around the city to keep any food from going in or anyone from going out. Instead, a contingent of armed guards is to march with the holy Ark of the Covenant and its priests completely around the city and come back to where they started. They don’t actually surround the city, except with a ritual of music and worship.
As the teaching team I’m part of instructs new Covenant pastors in our theology, one thing we introduce them to is our observance of the church year, that chronological circle moving from Advent to Christmas to Epiphany to Lent to Easter to Pentecost to Christ the King and back to Advent. Many of them, and maybe some of you coming from less formal church backgrounds, wonder about the value of making that circle every year, changing the colors of banners, observing seemingly Catholic holy days like Ash Wednesday. What’s the point? Aren’t we just going around in circles?
You could ask the same thing about our cycles of personal devotion. Why kneel or sit down to pray every day? Why make a point to read through the Bible every year and then start over? Why show up at a fellowship group every week for study and prayer? What does it really achieve? Wouldn’t we accomplish more good just devoting our time and energy to really significant things like feeding the hungry or building houses for the homeless?
The lesson Joshua offers is that, when God directs us, our devotion is not just going around in circles. All those seemingly ineffective and pointless acts of worship are patient, obedient trust in God, who will show up, who will bring down the walls we face, who will give us the victory in His time and in His kingdom.
Israel was, and you and I are, like little children who just need to learn a little patience as we carry out what God asks of us. Seven times around is a symbolic number, a number of wholeness, of completion. Jesus pointed out that some of acts of devotion, like forgiving those who hurt us, may go around and around, seventy times seven cycles, and still we wait, still we trust, still we keep marching on until God’s time comes.
So patient devotion, over and over, around and around is the lesson we teach to children from the battle of Jericho and the lesson we most often learn from it ourselves. It’s a good lesson, but there’s another side to this story, a darker, more difficult lesson.
As we kids knocked down our six foot tall Jericho, none of us really pictured the reality behind our cute little play. We did not think of great stone walls collapsing as guards fell to their deaths from high lookouts. We did not imagine desperate men hastily grabbing weapons to make futile last stands before their homes only to be run through by Israelite spears. We did not hear the weeping of the women of Jericho as they tried to gather and hide their children in back rooms. Nor did we consider that there would be six-year-olds like ourselves running for their lives in narrow streets. And we didn’t smell the flames and smoke as Joshua and his men put the whole city to the torch. No, that wasn’t a lesson for children.
Many of you know that last September I spent a two-week study break partially in thought about just this sort of thing, the terrible violence that is part of the story of the Old Testament. It’s not just the violence that people bring upon other people, as we still experience. It’s God’s violence. God brought the walls of Jericho down, and in verse 17 it is God who demands the total destruction of every living creature there. And when God’s people carry out that direction, it’s another strange and horrible kind of “devotion.”
Verses 17 and 18 and verse 21 speak about the city of Jericho and everyone and everything in it being “devoted to the Lord.” The Hebrew word is ḥerem, and it literally means “devoted to destruction.” It’s a difficult concept for us and as we will see in a couple weeks, it was not very easy for Israel to carry out. They constantly struggled with God’s claim on the cities, people and property they conquered.
Deuteronomy 20, verses 16 through 20, suggest that ḥerem, devotion to God for destruction, is partially a judgment on the wickedness of the Canaanites and a way for God to prevent their sin from corrupting the Israelites. It’s true that the Canaanites engaged in various sorts of sexual immorality and worshipped crude idols. Some even practiced child sacrifice. Yet it’s still hard to grasp how that could warrant the slaughter of the whole population, including innocent children and animals.
Even after some deep study and several months of reflection, I don’t have any really good or satisfying answers about it all for you. It will come up again as we work through Joshua. The best I can suggest is that God took these people and their cultures as He found them, cruel and violent, and worked to bring His good purpose through them. And even in all the destruction, we do find hints of the grace which is God’s deepest purpose. The story we began a few weeks ago, of the redemption and rescue of Rahab and her family, is completed here. Some would argue that what happened for her was available to any Canaanite. Any of them who turned to the one true God and acknowledged Him as Lord would have been saved in the same way.
As difficult as all this is, there is a good lesson for us here about being devoted to God. Cruel and inhuman as it seems to us, by carrying out the ban required by ḥerem, by devoting the cities they conquered to God for destruction, the Israelites were being asked to behave in a way which was not just a product of their culture. The ordinary expectation of an ancient solider, and I’m afraid some modern soldiers, was to directly profit from a victorious battle. You would take your enemy’s weapons. You would plunder his wealth. You would steal his beautiful wife. You would make his children your slaves. You might even live in his house and farm his land. Wars were a business proposition. They often still are.
My wife’s father rarely talked about his experiences in World War II, but he did tell me once about his company being detailed to transport sacks of gold coins found in the liberation of Europe from the Nazis. Almost every grunt soldier that carried a bag tried to find a way to worm out one of those coins and sneak it into a pocket. They felt like they had earned it. The Israelites must have felt the same way.
Yet God claimed the whole of Jericho and everything in it as His own. It was all to be slaughtered and burned, with only the gold, silver, bronze and iron to be saved, and that went not to the fighting men, but to the treasury of the Lord’s Tabernacle. No one in Israel was to profit from this war. There would be no loot, no rape, no drunken victory party guzzling down the enemy’s wine. God claimed it all. It was devoted to Him.
So the lowliest Israelite fighter was expected to walk through Jericho and not bring anything home for himself, not that pretty woman, not that shiny sword, not those fat sheep, not even a little gold necklace that would look lovely around his wife’s neck. They were to devote it all to God and trust in His reward, rather than what they could take for themselves.
God forbid that you and I would not learn a lesson that took such violence to teach to God’s people. But we live in a culture that is built on the idea that everyone will take everything he can for himself. We’re taught from the moment of our very first babysitting or lawn mowing job, or by small chores our parents pay us for even before that, to look for the gain, to look for the profit, to look for what we can take home for our own. Yet even in a hard, cruel narrative, Scripture is teaching us something else, teaching us to consider what in our lives belongs not to us, but to God.
We may learn to devote what we have in ways that feel as difficult as the battle of Jericho, as we lose possessions and people we’ve cherished, thinking they belonged to us when they really belong to God. Yet our Lord also gives us the choice and the grace to make that devotion of our own free will. In the Gospel this morning, we read how Peter, James and John walked away from their boats and their nets, “left everything,” to follow Jesus. That’s the devotion God wants to teach us.
So how will you and I devote the people and possessions that come our way to God? It’s absolutely clear from Christ our Lord that there is no more ḥerem. Devotion no longer means destruction. But devotion does mean letting go. It means not holding onto persons and things as if they were ours alone to have and control. It means giving them to God so they can be what He means them to be, so that they can be used as He desires to use them.
Devotion may mean letting your teenager go to the college of her choice, rather than yours. It may mean turning over an estranged spouse or friend or parent to God and letting Him deal with their hearts and minds. Devotion suggests giving at least some of your financial resources up to God’s purposes and surrendering control over them. It suggests relinquishing some portion of your time to daily devotion and weekly worship and regular service. Devotion means placing even your own self at God’s disposal.
And we are devoted in all these difficult ways for one reason only. God is devoted to us. That’s what the Table before us means today. Christ Jesus became ḥerem, He devoted Himself to destruction, to death on the Cross, for us. His broken body, His shed blood are offerings of devotion calling us to absolute devotion to Him. May you and I eat and drink together the gifts which God has given us in Jesus, and give ourselves back to Him.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2010 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
Last updated February 7, 2010
February 7, 2010 - Fifth Sunday after Epiphany
“That’s number 4! Three more times around,” calls our Sunday School teacher as eight first graders march around our second floor classroom, stomping our feet to make the floor shake and blowing as loud as we can on little party favor horns supplied by Mrs. McElroy.
On the seventh circuit, we get to yell as well as blow on the horns, and a couple of white heads from the seniors’ class poke in the door to see what is going on. But when we’ve gone around that last time Mrs. McElroy shouts, “Now!” and we all converge on the tall pile of cardboard blocks we’ve been circling and gleefully kick them down, delighting in the destruction of our miniature Jericho. We had reenacted Joshua’s most famous battle and in the process learned a modest lesson on patient devotion to God’s directions.
The truth is that the “battle of Jericho” was hardly a battle at all. Right from the start in verse 2 we see that God is the real warrior of the story. He gives Joshua directions that have no military value at all. Then God is the one who brings down the walls and makes the victory possible. All that is required of Joshua and the Israelites is devotion.
In about 1,200 B.C., the people of Israel were camped in front of an already ancient city. Archaeology has shown that Jericho was inhabited since about 9,000 B.C., 11,000 years ago. As early as 8,000 B.C. it had a stone wall which included a tower 25 feet high, making it perhaps the oldest walled city in the world. That tower has been uncovered and you can see it today. The archaeological record shows the city destroyed and rebuilt at least a couple times before the Hebrews arrived. You can be sure that the inhabitants knew a thing or two about walls and about defending their home.
Typically, an invading army like Joshua’s would encircle a fortress like Jericho and cut off supplies, so the inhabitants would grow hungry. They would cut down neighboring forests to create battering rams to hammer on the gates and build siege ramps and ladders to climb over the walls. Taking a walled city required a protracted and dedicated effort.
Yet the word Joshua gets from the Lord has no battle plans at all, no preparations for a long siege. God says nothing about stationing outposts at points in a circle all around the city to keep any food from going in or anyone from going out. Instead, a contingent of armed guards is to march with the holy Ark of the Covenant and its priests completely around the city and come back to where they started. They don’t actually surround the city, except with a ritual of music and worship.
As the teaching team I’m part of instructs new Covenant pastors in our theology, one thing we introduce them to is our observance of the church year, that chronological circle moving from Advent to Christmas to Epiphany to Lent to Easter to Pentecost to Christ the King and back to Advent. Many of them, and maybe some of you coming from less formal church backgrounds, wonder about the value of making that circle every year, changing the colors of banners, observing seemingly Catholic holy days like Ash Wednesday. What’s the point? Aren’t we just going around in circles?
You could ask the same thing about our cycles of personal devotion. Why kneel or sit down to pray every day? Why make a point to read through the Bible every year and then start over? Why show up at a fellowship group every week for study and prayer? What does it really achieve? Wouldn’t we accomplish more good just devoting our time and energy to really significant things like feeding the hungry or building houses for the homeless?
The lesson Joshua offers is that, when God directs us, our devotion is not just going around in circles. All those seemingly ineffective and pointless acts of worship are patient, obedient trust in God, who will show up, who will bring down the walls we face, who will give us the victory in His time and in His kingdom.
Israel was, and you and I are, like little children who just need to learn a little patience as we carry out what God asks of us. Seven times around is a symbolic number, a number of wholeness, of completion. Jesus pointed out that some of acts of devotion, like forgiving those who hurt us, may go around and around, seventy times seven cycles, and still we wait, still we trust, still we keep marching on until God’s time comes.
So patient devotion, over and over, around and around is the lesson we teach to children from the battle of Jericho and the lesson we most often learn from it ourselves. It’s a good lesson, but there’s another side to this story, a darker, more difficult lesson.
As we kids knocked down our six foot tall Jericho, none of us really pictured the reality behind our cute little play. We did not think of great stone walls collapsing as guards fell to their deaths from high lookouts. We did not imagine desperate men hastily grabbing weapons to make futile last stands before their homes only to be run through by Israelite spears. We did not hear the weeping of the women of Jericho as they tried to gather and hide their children in back rooms. Nor did we consider that there would be six-year-olds like ourselves running for their lives in narrow streets. And we didn’t smell the flames and smoke as Joshua and his men put the whole city to the torch. No, that wasn’t a lesson for children.
Many of you know that last September I spent a two-week study break partially in thought about just this sort of thing, the terrible violence that is part of the story of the Old Testament. It’s not just the violence that people bring upon other people, as we still experience. It’s God’s violence. God brought the walls of Jericho down, and in verse 17 it is God who demands the total destruction of every living creature there. And when God’s people carry out that direction, it’s another strange and horrible kind of “devotion.”
Verses 17 and 18 and verse 21 speak about the city of Jericho and everyone and everything in it being “devoted to the Lord.” The Hebrew word is ḥerem, and it literally means “devoted to destruction.” It’s a difficult concept for us and as we will see in a couple weeks, it was not very easy for Israel to carry out. They constantly struggled with God’s claim on the cities, people and property they conquered.
Deuteronomy 20, verses 16 through 20, suggest that ḥerem, devotion to God for destruction, is partially a judgment on the wickedness of the Canaanites and a way for God to prevent their sin from corrupting the Israelites. It’s true that the Canaanites engaged in various sorts of sexual immorality and worshipped crude idols. Some even practiced child sacrifice. Yet it’s still hard to grasp how that could warrant the slaughter of the whole population, including innocent children and animals.
Even after some deep study and several months of reflection, I don’t have any really good or satisfying answers about it all for you. It will come up again as we work through Joshua. The best I can suggest is that God took these people and their cultures as He found them, cruel and violent, and worked to bring His good purpose through them. And even in all the destruction, we do find hints of the grace which is God’s deepest purpose. The story we began a few weeks ago, of the redemption and rescue of Rahab and her family, is completed here. Some would argue that what happened for her was available to any Canaanite. Any of them who turned to the one true God and acknowledged Him as Lord would have been saved in the same way.
As difficult as all this is, there is a good lesson for us here about being devoted to God. Cruel and inhuman as it seems to us, by carrying out the ban required by ḥerem, by devoting the cities they conquered to God for destruction, the Israelites were being asked to behave in a way which was not just a product of their culture. The ordinary expectation of an ancient solider, and I’m afraid some modern soldiers, was to directly profit from a victorious battle. You would take your enemy’s weapons. You would plunder his wealth. You would steal his beautiful wife. You would make his children your slaves. You might even live in his house and farm his land. Wars were a business proposition. They often still are.
My wife’s father rarely talked about his experiences in World War II, but he did tell me once about his company being detailed to transport sacks of gold coins found in the liberation of Europe from the Nazis. Almost every grunt soldier that carried a bag tried to find a way to worm out one of those coins and sneak it into a pocket. They felt like they had earned it. The Israelites must have felt the same way.
Yet God claimed the whole of Jericho and everything in it as His own. It was all to be slaughtered and burned, with only the gold, silver, bronze and iron to be saved, and that went not to the fighting men, but to the treasury of the Lord’s Tabernacle. No one in Israel was to profit from this war. There would be no loot, no rape, no drunken victory party guzzling down the enemy’s wine. God claimed it all. It was devoted to Him.
So the lowliest Israelite fighter was expected to walk through Jericho and not bring anything home for himself, not that pretty woman, not that shiny sword, not those fat sheep, not even a little gold necklace that would look lovely around his wife’s neck. They were to devote it all to God and trust in His reward, rather than what they could take for themselves.
God forbid that you and I would not learn a lesson that took such violence to teach to God’s people. But we live in a culture that is built on the idea that everyone will take everything he can for himself. We’re taught from the moment of our very first babysitting or lawn mowing job, or by small chores our parents pay us for even before that, to look for the gain, to look for the profit, to look for what we can take home for our own. Yet even in a hard, cruel narrative, Scripture is teaching us something else, teaching us to consider what in our lives belongs not to us, but to God.
We may learn to devote what we have in ways that feel as difficult as the battle of Jericho, as we lose possessions and people we’ve cherished, thinking they belonged to us when they really belong to God. Yet our Lord also gives us the choice and the grace to make that devotion of our own free will. In the Gospel this morning, we read how Peter, James and John walked away from their boats and their nets, “left everything,” to follow Jesus. That’s the devotion God wants to teach us.
So how will you and I devote the people and possessions that come our way to God? It’s absolutely clear from Christ our Lord that there is no more ḥerem. Devotion no longer means destruction. But devotion does mean letting go. It means not holding onto persons and things as if they were ours alone to have and control. It means giving them to God so they can be what He means them to be, so that they can be used as He desires to use them.
Devotion may mean letting your teenager go to the college of her choice, rather than yours. It may mean turning over an estranged spouse or friend or parent to God and letting Him deal with their hearts and minds. Devotion suggests giving at least some of your financial resources up to God’s purposes and surrendering control over them. It suggests relinquishing some portion of your time to daily devotion and weekly worship and regular service. Devotion means placing even your own self at God’s disposal.
And we are devoted in all these difficult ways for one reason only. God is devoted to us. That’s what the Table before us means today. Christ Jesus became ḥerem, He devoted Himself to destruction, to death on the Cross, for us. His broken body, His shed blood are offerings of devotion calling us to absolute devotion to Him. May you and I eat and drink together the gifts which God has given us in Jesus, and give ourselves back to Him.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2010 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
Last updated February 7, 2010
Tuesday, February 09, 2010
Roots
click on image to enlarge
My Uncle George, who is 90 years old, just sent me this collage of pictures. It features my grandfather, George Tichacek, and his wife, my grandmother, Josephine (see their wedding picture in the upper left hand corner). Especially poignant is the clipping from the Jan. 9, 1918 St. Louis Post Dispatch, announcing "G.R. Tichacek, like three brothers, weds servant." (Sixty-nine years later, to the day, our daughter Susan would be born.)
Grandma T. (Josephine) had a difficult life. She was a Bernat, a people now known for their yarns. Her family made linen sheets, and I recall Grandma telling about how her father would "break in" the sheets by having the family use them. Once they got softer, they would be ready to sell. Josephine's mother died giving birth to her younger brother. From that point on, her older sister took over the household; but as soon as she could, left for America, and settled in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
That left Josephine in charge. She was a bright girl, and dreamed one day of being like the lady who ran the village post office. She even won a scholarship to continue her education, but her father forbid it. Josephine was crushed, but not broken. The Austro-Hungarian empire was on the brink of war, and when she was 16 years old, Joesphine told her father she was going to a local dance. In reality, she was immigrating with two other girlfriends.
They went to the dance, then changed out of their party clothes in a field and made their way to Graz, then Marseilles, then Ellis Island. Josephine found work as a cook's helper in St. Louis. One day, George was hired to do some interior painting, and Josephine caught his eye. Thus began (from what I can figure) a stormy marriage. Grandma was proud and independent for a woman those days, and Grandpa was quite the male chauvinist, being one of 10 brothers, and eleven years older than Josephine.
One of those brothers, Louis J., and his wife Anna are pictured in the lower right corner. Grandpa George's drafting table and his father's missal have been passed on to me. Thank you, Uncle George, for sending these photos.
Grandma T. (Josephine) had a difficult life. She was a Bernat, a people now known for their yarns. Her family made linen sheets, and I recall Grandma telling about how her father would "break in" the sheets by having the family use them. Once they got softer, they would be ready to sell. Josephine's mother died giving birth to her younger brother. From that point on, her older sister took over the household; but as soon as she could, left for America, and settled in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
That left Josephine in charge. She was a bright girl, and dreamed one day of being like the lady who ran the village post office. She even won a scholarship to continue her education, but her father forbid it. Josephine was crushed, but not broken. The Austro-Hungarian empire was on the brink of war, and when she was 16 years old, Joesphine told her father she was going to a local dance. In reality, she was immigrating with two other girlfriends.
They went to the dance, then changed out of their party clothes in a field and made their way to Graz, then Marseilles, then Ellis Island. Josephine found work as a cook's helper in St. Louis. One day, George was hired to do some interior painting, and Josephine caught his eye. Thus began (from what I can figure) a stormy marriage. Grandma was proud and independent for a woman those days, and Grandpa was quite the male chauvinist, being one of 10 brothers, and eleven years older than Josephine.
One of those brothers, Louis J., and his wife Anna are pictured in the lower right corner. Grandpa George's drafting table and his father's missal have been passed on to me. Thank you, Uncle George, for sending these photos.
Pinyin in 6 Minutes / We Better Learn It
This may be the only way I will ever learn any Mandarin!
We’d Better Learn It
Bruce Fuller, professor of education and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, served as a sociologist at the World Bank. He is the author of “Standardized Childhood.”
Imagine that your monthly mortgage bill arrives, unremarkable except that it’s suddenly written in Mandarin. Then, your bank sends over a Chinese translator to explain that you are falling deeper into debt. Mind-boggling? Well, this is America’s contemporary predicament as the Chinese finance a growing share of our national debt. Beijing holds $1.8 trillion in U.S. bonds and other instruments of borrowing. We are fused at the hip with the Chinese, economically speaking.
So, we better get to know them. They certainly want to know us, sending over hundreds of teachers to spark our children’s interest in Mandarin and East Asian ways. Affluent urban parents get it. (One San Francisco colleague felt compelled to apologize that his 6-year-old daughter had access only to a dual-language Spanish-speaking school, rather than to the Mandarin immersion he wanted.) But unlike Europe, the U.S. has no coherent strategy for making our society bilingual, unless you count our growing Babel of texting as a second tongue.
We are pathetically slow in realizing that East Asia will soon dominate the global economy. We believe, as did the last living Romans, that the American empire will reign forever. So, we fail to grasp the hard work, collective spirit and enormous investment in public institutions advanced by Chinese citizens.
We must learn the language and engage them at a human scale as first steps in appreciating the strengths of East Asian cultures. These virtues already lift America’s best universities. Over half of Berkeley’s undergraduates are now of East Asian descent.
Rather than bumbling along, government and corporate leaders should advance coherent policies for bilingualism. Europe began this process about four centuries ago. Washington moves quickly when military interests dominate. My Arabic-speaking son, Dylan, was offered $20,000 up front to staff intelligence outposts in the Middle East. But Mandarin? What’s the rush? The count of American high school students enrolled in Chinese classes is less than those studying German.
Instead, President Obama’s ballooning budget for education could focus dollars on teaching foreign languages. This should be co-financed by multinational corporations who richly benefit from the bilingual skills and graduate training of top Chinese students, financed in part by American taxpayers. Cash-strapped school districts need strong incentives to rethink their language programs. And let’s see language as a window into China’s cultural assets and cooperative skills, not simply as a tool to expand market share.
Sunday, February 07, 2010
Happy High Holy Day, Everyone!
It's Superbowl Sunday, the holiest day of the Secular Year. Let's all sing!
Good sportsmen now rejoice
With heart and soul and voice!
Give ye heed to what we say
News! News!
Superbowl is on today!
Busch and Block before it bow;
Apple, Coke--come see them now--
Commercials deck this golden cow.
Superbowl today!
Superbowl today!
Here we come a-chugging
Before the TV Screen!
Here we come a-swigging--
our Superbowl routine.
Couch and cash come to you
And to you an ice cold Bud too,
CBS bless and send you
A winning team this year,
CBS send a winning team this year.
Saturday, February 06, 2010
Honoring the Greatest (Christian) Philosopher of our Day
Wishing Steve and I could be there for this significant occasion... this will mark the end of an era.
ALVIN PLANTINGA RETIREMENT CELEBRATION
May 20–22, 2010
University of Notre Dame
Center for Continuing Education (McKenna Hall)
In 1980, Time magazine reported on the remarkable resurgence of religious philosophy. Using a 'kind of tough-minded intellectualism', Christian philosophers, it was reported, have stemmed the rising tide of strict empiricism. This quiet revolution was led by Alvin Plantinga, John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, whom the article describes as 'the leading philosopher of God.'
It would be difficult to overestimate the hostility towards theism among professional philosophers over the past seventy years. The swell of empiricism was thought to sound the death knell of religious belief. From the 1930s to the 1960s religious philosophers went into hiding. What happened from the 1960s to the 1980s to so radically transform the face of philosophy? Few philosophers today fail to recognize the courageous, original and powerful work of Alvin Plantinga as the impetus behind this revolution in philosophy. His first book, God and Other Minds, was an astonishing and potent defense of the rationality of religious belief. His next two major works, The Nature of Necessity and God, Freedom and Evil, included an original argument for the existence of God and a novel and universally recognized solution to the problem of evil.
Plantinga, who taught for twenty years at Calvin College, was one of the co-founders of the Society of Christian Philosophers in April 1978. The society has since grown to over 1,100 members and is the largest single-interest group among American philosophers. In 1984 the society initiated its own scholarly journal, Faith and Philosophy. His inaugural lecture for the O'Brien Chair of Philosophy, 'How to Be a Christian Philosopher', was published as the lead article in the premier issue of Faith and Philosophy and changed the course of Christian philosophy. Philosophers from such leading universities as Yale, Harvard, Rutgers, UCLA, Princeton, and Oxford attribute their subsequent scholarly projects in Christian philosophy to that lecture.
He has lectured around the world and has been admirable in his devotion to furthering philosophical research in developing countries, such as China, Russia, Romania, and Poland.
Plantinga has helped make religious belief once again a rationally acceptable option. His enduring contributions are: the free will defense in response to the deductive argument from evil, the ontological argument for the existence of God, the rationality of belief in God without the support of arguments, and a theistic theory of knowledge. Those interested in creating intellectual breathing room for religious belief are grateful to the work of Alvin Plantinga.
We will honor Alvin Plantinga with a retirement celebration that looks back on his tremendous accomplishments and forward to the future of the above topics as they’ve been influenced by Plantinga.
This conference is generously supported by the John Templeton Foundation, the Society of Christian Philosophers, Calvin College, and the University of Notre Dame.
ALVIN PLANTINGA RETIREMENT CELEBRATION
May 20–22, 2010
University of Notre Dame
Center for Continuing Education (McKenna Hall)
In 1980, Time magazine reported on the remarkable resurgence of religious philosophy. Using a 'kind of tough-minded intellectualism', Christian philosophers, it was reported, have stemmed the rising tide of strict empiricism. This quiet revolution was led by Alvin Plantinga, John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, whom the article describes as 'the leading philosopher of God.'
It would be difficult to overestimate the hostility towards theism among professional philosophers over the past seventy years. The swell of empiricism was thought to sound the death knell of religious belief. From the 1930s to the 1960s religious philosophers went into hiding. What happened from the 1960s to the 1980s to so radically transform the face of philosophy? Few philosophers today fail to recognize the courageous, original and powerful work of Alvin Plantinga as the impetus behind this revolution in philosophy. His first book, God and Other Minds, was an astonishing and potent defense of the rationality of religious belief. His next two major works, The Nature of Necessity and God, Freedom and Evil, included an original argument for the existence of God and a novel and universally recognized solution to the problem of evil.
Plantinga, who taught for twenty years at Calvin College, was one of the co-founders of the Society of Christian Philosophers in April 1978. The society has since grown to over 1,100 members and is the largest single-interest group among American philosophers. In 1984 the society initiated its own scholarly journal, Faith and Philosophy. His inaugural lecture for the O'Brien Chair of Philosophy, 'How to Be a Christian Philosopher', was published as the lead article in the premier issue of Faith and Philosophy and changed the course of Christian philosophy. Philosophers from such leading universities as Yale, Harvard, Rutgers, UCLA, Princeton, and Oxford attribute their subsequent scholarly projects in Christian philosophy to that lecture.
He has lectured around the world and has been admirable in his devotion to furthering philosophical research in developing countries, such as China, Russia, Romania, and Poland.
Plantinga has helped make religious belief once again a rationally acceptable option. His enduring contributions are: the free will defense in response to the deductive argument from evil, the ontological argument for the existence of God, the rationality of belief in God without the support of arguments, and a theistic theory of knowledge. Those interested in creating intellectual breathing room for religious belief are grateful to the work of Alvin Plantinga.
We will honor Alvin Plantinga with a retirement celebration that looks back on his tremendous accomplishments and forward to the future of the above topics as they’ve been influenced by Plantinga.
This conference is generously supported by the John Templeton Foundation, the Society of Christian Philosophers, Calvin College, and the University of Notre Dame.
Friday, February 05, 2010
Is Youth Ministry Killing the Church?
via Brad.
Guaranteed to be controversial, IMO this article from the Theolog blog points to a real problem. If we are theological nominalists, then we will be more prone to ecclesiastical "grouping" rather than ecclesistical "participation." As a result we will be more vulnerable to the temptation to "have our needs satisfied" and "be fed," because we will have identified ourselves--consciously or unconsciously--as consumers, rather than servants. This has consequences not only for youth ministry, but for women's ministry, children's ministry, etc.
Guaranteed to be controversial, IMO this article from the Theolog blog points to a real problem. If we are theological nominalists, then we will be more prone to ecclesiastical "grouping" rather than ecclesistical "participation." As a result we will be more vulnerable to the temptation to "have our needs satisfied" and "be fed," because we will have identified ourselves--consciously or unconsciously--as consumers, rather than servants. This has consequences not only for youth ministry, but for women's ministry, children's ministry, etc.
The great challenge is to be able to minister without fragmentating into focus groups.
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February 4, 2010
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February 4, 2010
Is youth ministry killing the church?
by Kate Murphy
After having worked for several years as a youth pastor, I recently accepted a call to be an interim solo pastor. One weekend, Sara, a beloved saint of the church, died after a long battle with Alzheimer's. On Sunday morning I was standing in the choir room discussing plans for the funeral when Jonathan—a high school sophomore—walked in. “Deanne,” he said to the music director, “I heard about Sara, and I thought you might need me to take Libba's spot in the bell choir this morning.” She gratefully accepted his offer and excused herself from our conversation to review the music with him.
It was a pretty mundane exchange, but I was blown away. It's remarkable enough to see a 16-year-old boy drive himself to church early to join a bell choir comprised of adults in their 50s and 60s. But even more intriguing was Jonathan's perceptiveness. Not only did he know that Libba was Sara’s daughter, but life in the church had taught him to anticipate congregational needs. He knew that Libba played with the bell choir, and he realized she probably couldn't play that morning. Unprompted—I checked with his parents—he offered to fill in.
This couldn't have happened at any of my previous churches—though it's not Jonathan's faith that's of a rare caliber. It's his connection to the congregation.
I've always met young Christians through youth programs. I've been hired by churches so committed to the discipleship of their young people that they've dedicated resources to creating specialized curriculae and activities. These churches expect regular events that are created exclusively to minister to young people.
But I wonder now if we're ministering them right out of the church. Unlike Jonathan, the kids I've previously pastored never sat around a table with adults at church-wide fellowship events—they had their own program options. They've never worked side by side with other members to put on a neighborhood vacation Bible school—they were off on their own mission trips.
When the youth were asked to contribute to the larger church, it was usually through manual labor, the only thing we thought they were capable of doing. Yes, we may have let them plan and lead one worship service a year, but we never dreamed of asking any of them to sit on the worship committee or serve as a regular worship leader. The message was that the church existed to serve them, not the other way around.
Kenda Creasy Dean and others warn that when our children and youth ministries ghettoize young people, we run the risk of losing them after high school graduation. I saw evidence of this in Jonathan. Over the years I've worked with young people as passionate and serious about their faith as Jonathan is. I think I've done youth ministry with integrity.
But I may have been unintentionally disconnecting kids from the larger body of Christ. The young people at my current congregation—a church that many families would never join because “it doesn't have anything for youth”—are far more likely to remain connected to the faith and become active church members as adults, because that's what they already are and always have been.
Kate Murphy is the interim pastor of Hickory Grove Presbyterian Church in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Monday, February 01, 2010
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