Of Random Interest - Page 31

Poisonous Rat-Duck Day

Today is Groundhog Day, which is hilarious to me. How did they outmaneuver the other animals and get their own holiday?

I personally would prefer Platypus Day. There’s an animal that deserves to be celebrated. It’s a furry, poisonous rat-duck. A platypus is practically a living Pokémon.

But somehow the groundhogs won out. I suspect bribery.

For the record, today I will honor platypi in my heart. Although Wikipedia tells me that platypi is incorrect and I should say platypuses or platypodes. Also, they are venomous and not poisonous (venom is injected, poison is consumed).

To which I say: poisonous rat-duck sounds better than venomous rat-duck, and platypi has a satisfying faux-intellectual ring to it. Let rhetoric prevail, and let the poisonous rat-ducks have their day on the calendar!

The Most Amusingly True Sentence I’ve Read In A While

WikiLeaks is what happens when the entire US government is forced to go through a full-body scanner (Evgeny Morozov)

I laughed out loud.

being a Christian in a sorority

A recent convert told me she’s struggling with life in her sorority, so I asked another sorority gal I know to give her some advice.

Sorority gal emailed the recent convert and, with her permission, I’ve anonymized it and present her email for your consideration. I’ve trimmed off the beginning because it’s impossible to anonymize without making it useless (she identifies a specific Christian in the recipient’s sorority for her to connect with), but the rest of her letter is more broadly applicable:

I think [your sorority and my sorority] may be different in terms of their emphasis on partying and drinking, but I will definitely try to give you my two cents, and if you want to meet up at any point, let me know and I’d love to get together to talk and/or pray with you about it.

I have always felt very at home in [my sorority] as a Christian. There are 10–15 Christian girls in [my sorority], and many more who aren’t into getting drunk/hooking up. My big is a Christian, as is my twin, and my twin’s little. I try to surround myself with these girls, rather than the partiers. I do still go out to the events where there is drinking, but I only drink moderately (if at all) and still always have a great time. Do you have a group of girls like this in [your sorority]? Are there other Christians in [your sorority] you can team up with?

Another thing that helped me ensure that there are enough events that don’t center around drinking/partying was getting involved on the sisterhood committee. If you guys have a committee like that, I would encourage you to get involved and make sure those kinds of events are happening.

If you are feeling like [your sorority] is a place where you can’t be yourself or where you are encouraged to make poor decisions, deactivating might be the right choice for you. My biggest advice to you would be to pray about it and go with your gut. I do think there is room to be a Christian in Greek life, but I also think it varies a lot depending on the frat/sorority. Many of my closest friends aren’t Christian, and I think this can definitely make it more difficult to do the right thing at times. But, I think that as long as you have that Christian community somewhere, you can make it work.

I feel like I haven’t done a very good job giving you advice here, so please let me know if you want to talk about it over coffee or something!

I think that, on the whole, it is pretty good advice. What would you have said?

Chutes To Gehenna

I believe I have identified my least favorite part of parenting: playing Chutes and Ladders. My epiphany came about as I was playing the longest round that I’ve ever seen. It was all chutes and no ladders. Playing was like watching crabs in a styrofoam cooler: as soon as one character was close to escaping it was sent tumbling back down to the bottom.

While that most recent round was particularly tedious, I don’t like the game even when it takes ten minutes because it’s a game with no skill component whatsoever. I will confess to thinking — often — that we could determine victory by flipping a coin instead of through the interminable process of moving the game pieces in accordance with the dictates of the spinner and the requirements of the board.

That’s bad enough, but there is one more factor that evokes dread in my soul when asked to play. It is this: children young enough to truly enjoy the game are usually unable to move their characters properly, so I have to do it for them. This means I am playing the game against myself. A game I don’t like. A game whose two-player version is logically indistinguishable from a coin toss yet which has the potential to endure until the heat death of the universe. Even if I win, I lose. I lost as soon as I took the box down from the shelf.

And yet I will play today and I know I will play again tomorrow. It’s like a torment from a Greek myth. Aaargh!

My heart goes out to thoroughgoing determinists who necessarily regard all of life as a complicated version of Chutes and Ladders. If that’s you, I suggest you arrange to be fated not to think about it.

Look, Ma. I’m in the Stanford Review.

I was recently interviewed by the Stanford Review (a student publication) for an article analyzing the Supreme Court’s decision in CLS vs Martinez as it relates to Stanford (a case I have previously written about).

As is almost always the case with interviews, I said way more than they had space to include in the final article. Since the interview was via email, I have the full text of my remarks available. I should note that Autumn Carter, the interviewer, asked me several questions I declined to answer.

So here’s what I had to say:

SR: What is your opinion towards the Supreme Court’s ruling in general? With regard to Stanford?

Me: The Supreme Court’s logic would not apply at most public universities since the case at UC Hastings is so unique, and it will have no direct impact at all on private universities such as Stanford. And I hasten to point out that the case has been remanded back to a lower court for a closer examination of some factual issues. The Christian Legal Society alleges that UC Hastings enforced its policies unequally and in a discriminatory manner, something which the Supreme Court believes merits further investigation.

But to get bogged down in the legal maneuvering is to miss the essence of the case. For a university to force a Christian ministry to accept leaders who do not share its beliefs is as absurd as China’s plan to choose the next Dalai Lama, and I would suspect such a university of having similar motives: to control and to undermine religious belief which the authorities disapprove of.

Universities must decide what they believe tolerance looks like. Are they willing to become intolerant in the pursuit of tolerance? Are they willing to achieve their goals through coercion rather than reasoned discourse? UC Hastings appears to have decided that it is. It remains to be seen how many universities will embrace their folly.

SR: As you mentioned, Stanford is a private university and is therefore unaffected by the ruling directly. But do you anticipate any moves by Stanford to tighten its own group membership policy either independently or as a result of being lobbied? Or will Stanford likely maintain the looser policy that it currently uses?

Me: Should such lobbying arise I hope that Stanford will prove wiser than the Supreme Court.

In retrospect, I’m surprised the Stanford Review chose the quote they did. Some of my other sentences seem so much more… lively.

A Professor’s Advice to Christians

In Christians in Academe: A Reply, former evangelical Adam Kotsko minimizes a very real problem (recall that one study shows that 53% of faculty disdain evangelicals), but he nonetheless says things worth listening to.

A few bits stood out to me:

Above all, parents and pastors need to stop giving a blank check to anything that professes to be “Christian.” Conservative evangelicals have long been skilled at sniffing out what they consider to be pseudo-Christian liberals — developing some discernment on the other end of the scale would be a welcome shift.

I think he and I would differ considerably on the application of this point, but I like the fact that he brings it up. The truth is that there is a ditch on both sides of the road, and it matters little whether you wreck in the ditch of being too insistent on irrelevant details (theological conservatism) or whether you wreck in the ditch of being too unconcerned about important details (theological liberalism). Both will mess you up, yet most evangelicals practically ignore the ditch of being too theologically conservative.

He goes on:

For instance, if the professor Larsen describes in his opening paragraphs didn’t realize that he would get a paper like Larsen’s student handed in when he assigned an opinion piece on “traditional marriage,” then he or she was incredibly naïve. Personally, I would never assign a paper on abortion or evolution in an intro-level class, because I know doing so would basically mean condemning conservative evangelical students to do poorly. Many of them would simply parrot the stock arguments they’d heard from their leaders with very little reflection or fresh argumentation of their own — and the inevitable bad grade would only feed the persecution complex, turning me into yet another “secular indoctrinator.”

All I have to say in response to this is that I wish more professors were as wise as he. I’d like to order that paragraph to be read to every professor in America once a year.

But the part I like best is this:

More immediately, though, if conservative evangelicals are not willing to abandon their siege mentality, I would urge them to at least adopt the practices that the New Testament authors recommended to persecuted communities: live quietly, seek to be at peace with all, respect authority, work hard — in short, keep the moral high ground. The sober advice of the Apostles has stood the test of time and will endure long after whatever radical preacher is in the ascendant now is forgotten.

This is Biblical and good advice and should be the baseline for Christians at secular universities. If a university actually prevents you from obeying Christ, then by all means take a stand and deploy every peaceful tool in your arsenal to stymie them (this is to follow the example of the apostles — Acts 5:25–32 and Acts 16:36–39). But if a university is merely teaching you things you consider to be untrue, then suck it up, master the materials, and excel academically (this is to follow the example of Daniel and his friends in Babylon — Daniel 1:17–20). In the long run you will accomplish far more for the faith by getting good grades than by causing lots of disruptions in class.

Kotsko’s essay is worth reading and pondering (and so is the piece he is responding to, No Christianity Please, We’re Academics).

As I said, he minimizes a real problem. Anyone who thinks that some professors do not seek to destroy the faith of students is simply uninformed, and anyone who doesn’t realize that huge swaths of university culture are hostile to evangelical sensibilities has not been paying attention. But Kotsko is right to point out that evangelical students often create their own problems by allowing the evangelical subculture to define their relationship to the university rather than allowing the Bible’s teaching to prevail.

Freedom of Association at Public Universities

Stanford law professor Michael McConnell recently represented the Christian Legal Society (CLS) in their case against San Francisco’s UC Hastings College of The Law before the U. S. Supreme Court. The CLS lost that case on a 5–4 vote (read the ruling). I’ve asked Professor McConnell to answer a few questions about the ruling, and he has graciously agreed to do so and to allow me to publish his answers online.

Q: The court ruled 5–4 in favor of UC Hastings “all-comers” policy. Was this a broad ruling affecting Christian groups at public universities generally or a relatively narrow ruling?

A: It was the most narrow ruling possible. The all-comers policy on which the Court ruled is exceedingly unusual. The Court declined to rule on the more typical situation, where the school applies religious nondiscrimination rules to religious organizations, thus denying to religious groups the freedom enjoyed by most expressive organizations of choosing their own leaders. The Court did not even rule on the all-comers policy as actually applied at Hastings, but only on an abstract and hypothetical version that applies across the board to all organizations.

Q: So let’s say I’m a Chi Alpha or an Intervarsity director at some public university. Should I be discouraged or alarmed?

A: You should be concerned, and try to work with your university to prevent infringements on your rights, because the Court’s decision provides no help to you.

Q: Did any parts of the ruling surprise you?

A: In the course of rejecting CLS’s argument, the Court gave a surprisingly narrow interpretation to free speech (public forum) precedents that I thought were firmly established law.

Q: You have no doubt read many blog posts, op-eds and news articles summarizing both the case and the court’s decision. Are there any misunderstandings you would like to correct?

A: Too many to list.

In case you’re wondering, this case only affects public universities. Our ministry at Stanford won’t be directly affected.

You can read lots of summaries of the verdict. A few of the more interesting ones:

ScotusWiki has a detailed summary with many interesting links
Christianity Today has a very good summary
Patheos has a longer interview with Michael McConnell
Patheos also has an interview with David French (senior legal counsel at the Alliance Defense Fund)
Inside Higher Ed has a summary that leads me to believe that the author fundamentally misunderstood the facts of the case, but is nonetheless worth reading

The Hardest Other Culture To Learn From

After seeing a favorable mention by Andy Naselli, I read a fascinating interview with Tom Nettles, a scholar who wrote a biography of the Baptist leader James Boyce.

The interviewer asked Dr. Nettles, “How would you respond to someone who said he would never read your book for the simple fact that James P. Boyce was from the South and owned slaves?”

As a minister to college students, I was curious to see what he would say. Young people today are often eager to learn from every culture but our own for precisely the reasons implicit in the question. The virtues of earlier American or European leaders are often swamped by their vices, and so college students seem unable to appreciate the other culture that is our past. And they are particularly prone to judge dead Christians harshly.

Dr. Nettles’ answer is amazing:

I would try to resist the production of a long list of insults to the intelligence of one so bigoted, narrow-minded, unthinking and hypocritical as even to think such a thing. Employment of such a principle would shut one off from the study of the Old Testament, virtually all of the ancient cultures, Greek dominance of the intertestamental period, the Roman Empire, the history of England until the first half of the nineteenth century, the history of colonial America, the lives of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, the entire ante-bellum South and so forth. If one believes that the union of church and state has brought untold suffering and evil to both church and state as well as society in general (which I do), and feels that avoiding the documents produced in that context is a moral necessity for a Christian and that awareness of their viewpoints on theology, politics, philosophy, and society are reprehensible and unworthy of the intellectual and spiritual life of a Christian (which I don’t), then avoid the study of the German Reformation, the English Reformation and all western medieval culture. Bring to void any benefit from the study of Augustine, Anselm and Aquinas. Know nothing of the City of God, the Proslogion, and the Summa. If one studies history and gains interest in persons and nations simply on the basis of personal moral approval of the subject or the era in which he lived, he probably can find justification for the study of nothing and spend his life congratulating himself that he is ignorant of everything. But if one wants to see the operations of the mind of a highly gifted, intellectually and morally driven person, whose flaws are obvious and will not hurt us and whose strengths are massive and will inspire and help us, then go for Boyce. If one wants to see the way in which theological and biblical commitments transcend the ability of any individual to facilitate the moral, intellectual, and spiritual loftiness engendered in the study of divine revelation, study Boyce. If one want to see how that same commitment, nevertheless, raises a common sinner such as we all are to uncommon heights of self-sacrifice inspired by a vision of the divine glory, study Boyce. If one wants to see how Christian character constantly nourished by increased knowledge of the truth as it is in Jesus Christ can interrupt the natural tendency to bitterness and resentment and seething hostility fostered by the crushing destruction and snarling ridicule of deeply-held conviction and unfettered commitment to a cause and transform the soul to the sweetness of a reconciled and reconciling posture of mind, study Boyce.

Emphasis mine.

Wow. So yeah, learn from the past. Even dead slave owners were not without some wisdom and virtue. And remember — your descendants will judge you far more harshly than you imagine.

I Am Now Twice The Age Of A Freshman

Today I am twice the age of an incoming college freshman. My students are in trouble now, because age and treachery always trump youth and exuberance.¹

The scales are tilted even more in my favor than you might suppose. It’s not just that I’m twice their age — I’m far older in terms of adult experience. Let’s say that you begin experiencing the world as an adult at the age of 16 (ignore the howls of laughter you hear in the background). Then most freshmen have experienced life as a grown up for two years. I, on the other hand, have spent twenty years in that same state.

Twenty is ten times two. So although I am merely twice the biological age of freshmen, I am TEN TIMES as experienced at thinking like an adult. Advantage: me.

And if you think about it from a purely legal perspective, the freshmen have mere months of experience as an eighteen-year-old. I’ve been a legal adult for something like 50 times longer than them.

So there. Happy birthday to me.

—-

¹That’s sort of a quote. There are a lot of variants of it online.

An Easter Ballad

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “When I was a kid what I
needed for Easter was a basket filled with candy. But what do I need
for Easter now that I’m all grown up?”

And the answer is: you need a ballad. You didn’t know you needed a
ballad until just now, but you do.

Happy Easter!

Now on the first day of the week, at early dawn, the women went to the tomb, taking the aromatic spices they had prepared. They found that the stone had been rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men stood beside them in dazzling attire. The women were terribly frightened and bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has been raised! Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.” Luke 24:1–7, NET

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