Candy Is Edible Joy

November 1, 2006: Treats!Candy is a good thing. Candy is joy given caloric expression. Candy is, to twist an old saying, proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. 

I do not think my wife believes this in her heart. She is a mom, and there is a lot of pressure on moms to believe that candy is bad. In the land of moms, candy is a controlled substance. One, incidentally, for which medical prescriptions are not forthcoming. 

And so as we were going to bed on Halloween I told her, “There’s something important we need to establish before we go to sleep tonight. The presence of leftover candy in our house is not a problem to be solved, it is a joy to be celebrated. We don’t have to give it away, throw it away, or find some creative use for it. Eating it will be sufficient.” 

I felt like a Mormon knocking on Richard Dawkins’ door, but sometimes a dad has to step up. Edible joy is a rare thing and worth defending.

Are You Kidding Me, Vanderbilt?

/dohA while ago I went off on the Supreme Court’s horrendous decision in CLS vs Martinez.

This morning’s news reveals the logical outworking of that silly ruling: Vanderbilt, apparently following the same train of thought, has put several Christian groups on probation for violating the university’s non-discrimination policy.

Among the groups threatened with shut down is the Christian Legal Society. It ran afoul with this language from its constitution. “Each officer is expected to lead Bible studies, prayer and worship at chapter meetings.” CLS President Justin Gunter told me, “We come together to do things that Christians do together. Pray, and have Bible studies.” To that, Rev. Gretchen Person – interim director of the Office of Religious Life at Vanderbilt – responded “Vanderbilt policies do not allow this expectation/qualification for officers.” (source)

Seriously, Vanderbilt? A Christian group cannot require that its leaders lead Christian activities? One wonders what, precisely, Vanderbilt envisions the leaders of Christian groups doing.

Evil, Thy Acronym Is NCAA

Stanford to tip off March MadnessTechnically, NCAA is an initialism rather than an acronym — but you know what I mean. 

I have long been irked at the way the college sports complex abuses students, but I was absolutely floored by some of the details Taylor Branch shared in “The Shame of College Sports” (published in The Atlantic).

Two snippets to whet your appetite:

“Why,” asked Bryce Jordan, the president emeritus of Penn State, “should a university be an advertising medium for your industry?” 

Vaccaro did not blink. “They shouldn’t, sir,” he replied. “You sold your souls, and you’re going to continue selling them. You can be very moral and righteous in asking me that question, sir,” Vaccaro added with irrepressible good cheer, “but there’s not one of you in this room that’s going to turn down any of our money. You’re going to take it. I can only offer it.” 

And later:

But after an inquiry that took me into locker rooms and ivory towers across the country, I have come to believe that sentiment blinds us to what’s before our eyes. Big-time college sports are fully commercialized. Billions of dollars flow through them each year. The NCAA makes money, and enables universities and corporations to make money, from the unpaid labor of young athletes. 

Slavery analogies should be used carefully. College athletes are not slaves. Yet to survey the scene—corporations and universities enriching themselves on the backs of uncompensated young men, whose status as “student-athletes” deprives them of the right to due process guaranteed by the Constitution—is to catch an unmistakable whiff of the plantation. Perhaps a more apt metaphor is colonialism: college sports, as overseen by the NCAA, is a system imposed by well-meaning paternalists and rationalized with hoary sentiments about caring for the well-being of the colonized. But it is, nonetheless, unjust. The NCAA, in its zealous defense of bogus principles, sometimes destroys the dreams of innocent young athletes. 

The whole thing is worth reading, so zip over to The Atlantic and read “The Shame of College Sports” now.

The Church In China

Welcome to the Great Wall of ChinaI recently listened to a Research on Religion podcast about house churches in China and learned four things.

First, I’ve known for years that the state-run Protestant church in China is called the Three Self Patriotic Movement in China, but I never realized where the name came from. Here’s a hint: think missiology. That’s right — the three selves in the Three Self Patriotic Movement are “self-supporting, self-governing, self-propagating.” I am an idiot for never making that connection. I bet there’s a good story behind it.

Second, one of the unregistered churches in China (commonly called house churches) has grown to around 500,000 members. That is not a typo — this one “house church” has half a million members. Wow. That blows my mind.

Third, the unregistered rural churches are almost entirely Pentecostal/charismatic and the unregistered urban churches are more sedately evangelical. The unregistered urban churches tend to be led by university professors and other intellectuals. Interesting. 

Fourth, China has largely stopped sending pastors of unregistered churches to labor camps because the pastors were too effective at planting churches in prison. Now the state uses indirect pressure to thwart churches, so that the Communist party pressures landlords to cancel leases and employers to hassle employees.

After listening to the podcast and reflecting on it for a while I realized that there’s an interesting contrast between the challenges faced by the church in China and those faced by the church in America. America seeks to seduce the Church into complacency, whereas China seeks to intimidate the Church into compliance.

These challenges correspond to the strategies Satan deploys against the Church in the book of Revelation: Babylon (seduction) and the Beast (intimidation).

No, I did not just say that China is the Beast nor did I say that America is the Great Harlot called Babylon. I merely said that China and America resemble them in certain ways. 

If this intrigues you check out the free online book The Returning King by Vern Poythress. It’s one of the best introductions to the book of Revelation that I know.

All in all that was one of the more stimulating podcasts I’ve heard lately.

Punishment

Chinese Punishment, Whipping A Lawbreaker [c1900] Attribution Unk [RESTORED]I recently read an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education called “In Defense of Flogging” by Peter Moskos, a former police officer and now a criminologist at the City University of New York (specifically at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice).

The article seems to have been written to gin up interest in a book he has coming out in June called, well, In Defense of Flogging.

Without further ado, an excerpt:

For most of the past two centuries, at least in so-called civilized societies, the ideal of punishment has been replaced by the hope of rehabilitation. The American penitentiary system was invented to replace punishment with “cure.” Prisons were built around the noble ideas of rehabilitation. In society, at least in liberal society, we’re supposed to be above punishment, as if punishment were somehow beneath us. The fact that prisons proved both inhumane and miserably ineffective did little to deter the utopian enthusiasm of those reformers who wished to abolish punishment.

Incarceration, for adults as well as children, does little but make people more criminal. Alas, so successful were the “progressive” reformers of the past two centuries that today we don’t have a system designed for punishment. Certainly released prisoners need help with life—jobs, housing, health care—but what they don’t need is a failed concept of “rehabilitation.” Prisons today have all but abandoned rehabilitative ideals—which isn’t such a bad thing if one sees the notion as nothing more than paternalistic hogwash. All that is left is punishment, and we certainly could punish in a way that is much cheaper, honest, and even more humane. We could flog.

Yes. He just argued for flogging as a more enlightened view than imprisonment.

Pause for a moment to let your brain adjust to that.

Troubled? Get ready — he’s about to own you.

The opening gambit of the book is surprisingly simple: If you were sentenced to five years in prison but had the option of receiving lashes instead, what would you choose? You would probably pick flogging. Wouldn’t we all?

I propose we give convicts the choice of the lash at the rate of two lashes per year of incarceration. One cannot reasonably argue that merely offering this choice is somehow cruel, especially when the status quo of incarceration remains an option. Prison means losing a part of your life and everything you care for. Compared with this, flogging is just a few very painful strokes on the backside. And it’s over in a few minutes. Often, and often very quickly, those who said flogging is too cruel to even consider suddenly say that flogging isn’t cruel enough. 

I found the article fascinating and have been telling people about it since I read it. And I’ve asked them if they would personally prefer flogging to prison. Everyone I have posed the question to has opted for excruciating physical pain. 

I’ve long been fascinated by the different notions of justice. I remember hearing Jim Railey argue quite convincingly in seminary that the proper Christian notion of justice is primarily retributive (punishment-oriented) rather than rehabilitative. Not that Christians are opposed to rehabilitation — but we ought to think of rehabilitation as a function of mercy and not of justice. Perhaps sometimes we should pursue mercy instead of justice, and other times we should offer mercy following justice. But we shouldn’t pretend that they are identical.

Incidentally, if you conceive of justice in purely rehabilitative terms then you probably can’t believe in hell or in capital punishment. If, on the other hand, you believe that justice is essentially retributive then both are viable intellectual options for you. 

Agree with Dr. Moskos or not, you should at least read the whole article. There’s way more than I’ve quoted here. I should also note that he doesn’t seem to be seriously arguing for flogging itself so much as he is arguing for fixing our broken criminal justice system. Consider his conclusion:

…how can offering criminals the choice of the lash in lieu of incarceration be so bad? If flogging were really worse than prison, nobody would choose it. Of course most people would choose the rattan cane over the prison cell. And that’s my point. Faced with the choice between hard time and the lash, the lash is better. What does that say about prison? 

All in all, a phenomenal essay.

On a related note, you should read my thoughts on the pervasive insanity of professors.

Conversations

Three recent conversations, presented verbatim:

Domino

A Conversation With My Daughter
I set up a line of dominoes running around a corner and had my seven-year-old daughter sit where she could only see the end. I tipped the first domino over and we watched the entire chain fall.

Then I asked her, “How do you know there was a first domino? You didn’t see it.”

She stared at the fallen dominoes with a furrowed brow for a few seconds, then said, “If there was no first domino there would be no world. Nothing could exist.”

Look out, Aristotle. My daughter is gunning for you.

new face
A Conversation With My Son
Yesterday I took my children to Happy Hollow. As we were entering the park we passed by an Asian gal dressed up as an anime character. I’m not sure which one, but she had on some sort of bulky white body armor. More to the point, she had also dyed her hair purple. 

So I said to my wife, “If I was Asian I would totally have purple hair.”

My four-year-old son overheard and said with a dismissive tone, “If I was Asian I’d have black hair.”

kiwanja_palo_alto_texting_3
A Conversation With A Student
A text message conversation with one of my students (verbatim with a few words removed to preserve anonymity):

Student: “Is public nudity a sin?”
Me: “What?”
Student: “Is it just kind of weird or is it something to avoid altogether?”
Me: “Search biblegateway.com for the term ‘modest’.”

One Of The Most Revolutionary Thoughts I Have Read

Papyrus in Greek regarding tax issues (3rd ca. BC.)It doesn’t happen too often, but every once in a while I become aware of some new piece of data that explodes what I think I know about some area I’m interested in. New Testament scholar (and fellow Pentecostal) Larry Hurtado just dropped a bomb on me. 

In his blog post How Long Were Manuscripts Used? he mentions something that had never occurred to me before. Not even a little bit.

One matter Houston addresses is how long manuscripts appear to have been in use. On the basis of manuscripts from Oxyrhynchus and from Herculaneum in particular, Houston notes numerous examples of manuscripts discarded when they were ca. 2–3 centuries old. Overall, he judges that the evidence indicates “a useful life of between one hundred and two hundred years for a majority of the volumes, with a significant minority lasting two hundred years or more” (p. 251). And, as he notes, the evidence from Qumran leads to a similar view.

This is of potential relevance for questions about the transmission of early Christian texts, especially those that became part of the NT. If early copies were intact for something approaching a century or more, then this could be a factor against notions that these texts were highly unstable and susceptible to major revision in the course of transmission. But we might adjust our thinking to allow for an earlier wearing-out of NT manuscripts through greater frequency of usage. OK. Let’s suppose that early manuscripts of NT writings typically wore out sooner: twice as fast (ca. 50–75 years)? That still means that the manuscripts from which copies were made remained available for potential checking for a fair period of time. 

This probably means nothing to most of you, but this is huge if you’re interested in the textual reliability of the New Testament. This is surprising and strong evidence in the “Bible is reliable” column. Check out his comments section where Dr. Hurtado unpacks this a bit more.

Something Dr. Hurtado does not mention is that this makes it plausible that our earliest papyrus fragments (such as P52 or one of the handful of others from the mid-second century) might actually be direct copies from the autograph or only one generation removed. It’s impossible to know, of course. But the mere fact that we can even think it plausible is mind-boggling.

Dr. Hurtado got this data from UNC’s George W. Houston in his article “Papyrological Evidence for Book Collections and Libraries in the Roman Empire,” in Ancient Literacies: The Culture of Reading in Greece and Rome, ed. William A. Johnson and Holt N. Parker (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 233–67.

Poisonous Rat-Duck Day

PlatypusToday 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!

Commentary Review: Blomberg & Kamell on James

I recently received a review copy of the Zondervan Exegetical Commentary on James by Craig Blomberg and Mariam Kamell.

I was particularly excited to receive this book for two reasons:

So here’s my take on the commentary:

  1. It’s nice and short. This is a plus, not a minus. Too many commentaries today run to the thousands of pages. This volume is long enough to helpfully explain puzzling aspects of the text without being so massive that the central message gets lost.
  2. It pays attention to usability. For example: the commentary on each verse is preceded by a bolded English translation of the verse followed by the Greek text. Contrast this with most commentaries that seem to assume you’ve got three or four books open on your desk (or windows on your monitor) at once (view the explanation of James 1:2 to see what I mean).
  3. It keeps you oriented. Every section begins with an outline of the surrounding text and an extraordinarily clear grammatical outline that makes the author’s argument clear. You can see a sample page at Google Books (click that link — seriously).
  4. The commentary ends with a very helpful summary of the overall theology of the book of James — something I wish more commentaries did. The discipline of Biblical theology would be much richer if that were the case.
  5. It uses footnotes. Yay!
  6. I dug into some of the more puzzling verses in James and thought that Blomberg & Kamell explained them with clarity and wisdom. Disclaimer: I have not read this commentary all the way through.

Overall, I recommend this commentary if you need to preach or teach on James anytime soon and urge you to look carefully at the other volumes in the series as reviews on them become available (the linked website — bestcommentaries.com — is, in my opinion, the best place to begin searching for a commentary).

Thanks for the freebie, Zondervan! I would have told the truth if your commentary was lackluster, but I am delighted to report that this is a solid exposition of the book of James.

How To Get Better Grades In Physics

Enrico Fermi (1901-1954)Ben Shank is a Ph.D. candidate in physics at Stanford, where he also serves as a teaching assistant (TA) for an undergrad physics course. At our recent Thanksgiving party he began rattling off advice to one of our students on how to get better grades in physics (or almost any technical course). Said student was amazed and beseeched Ben to make this information more publicly available, and so he typed it up and sent it to our Chi Alpha email list.

With Ben’s permission, I also share it below (emphasis is mine):

  1. From the first day of class, sit in the front of the room toward the center. At least one study has shown that students who sit in the front are 2–3 times more likely to get an A and 6 times less likely to fail than students sitting in the back even when seats are randomly assigned on the first day of class. We can debate why this is so all day, but it is so, so take advantage of it. (By ‘the front’ i mean the first ten or so rows of Hewlett 200.)
  2. Be sure to get plenty of sleep the two nights before the exam. Of all the bad conditions you could be in going into a physics test, being tired is probably the worst one that is legal. Studies indicate that the second night before the test is even more important than the night immediately before. A clear, thinking, creative mind is your single greatest asset for any physics you might encounter. If you have been keeping up with the class, getting two full nights of sleep is probably more important than any amount of studying you might do during those two days.
  3. That said you will probably want to do some studying. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend finding someone else in the class to study with. Go over problems together. Go into the later problems in each chapter and pick some that you’re not sure you can both do. Taking an exam well is very similar to teaching the grader how to do the problems, so even if you are teaching a friend how to do something you already know, you are preparing for the test. If you both (or all) get stuck on something, contact a TA.
  4. Read every problem at the beginning of the test. Your mind will continue to process problems you are not looking at, provided it is awake. (See Tip 2) Studies show that you are best served loading all the questions into your brain at the start to give yourself maximum time to contemplate. If you get really stuck on a problem, leave plenty of space and move on. Odds are you’ll have better insight when you come back to it.
  5. DON’T PANIC. Attempt every question. This sounds really obvious, but we occasionally get blue books that have a few scribbles labeled ‘Problem 1’ and nothing else. As best we can tell, these students are looking at the first question, panicking and staring blankly at the paper for forty-five minutes or just walking out. This is something worth practicing to avoid. If you find yourself in a panic: stop, look away from the paper while slowly counting to ten. If you are feeling calm, you can go back and draw a diagram or write down some possibly relevant equations. If you start panicking again, repeat Steps 1 and 2. If you are not feeling calm, turn a couple pages and start the next question. Things will look better when you come back to this one. Trust me.
  6. Now for a few tips on getting the most [points] out of your graders. Grading a midterm takes 4–5 hours. As much as we try to assess each of you according to all the knowledge of physics you demonstrated, we are going to get tired and eventually parts of our brains are going to go on autopilot. If your answers are in clearly marked boxes (preferably near the left side of the page) and they are right, there is a reduced chance of any error in your work being marked off. If an answer is wrong, but it’s in a box near the left side of the page immediately below the work that produced it, then it is very easy for us to find the one little error and give you most of the points. I know having all the answers in one box at the bottom of the page feels concise, but if one of them is wrong we have no idea where on the page to look for the mistake. On a related note, it is better if you work one part of a problem and then work the next one below it. Believe it or not, grad students can get confused if part c is to the right of part b instead of below it. It’s silly, but after a few hours of grading that’s the way we are, so you might as well not let it hurt you. As a general rule, each line on the page should only have one equation or statement on it. (pictures excluded) You may use up more pages that way, but there’s no shortage of blue books.
  7. Whenever possible, draw a picture. Not only will it help you think, but it also helps us know what you were thinking. If you are not absolutely confident in your solution, a minute spent drawing a decent picture is probably worth it in terms of partial credit. Too often I’ve suspected a student knew more than their answer indicated, but they didn’t leave a good record of their thought process so I couldn’t grant partial credit. And that makes me sad. (Organizing graphics are also great antidotes to panic, see Tip 5.)
  8. When you get an answer, check that it makes sense. Negative lengths and times are often indicators that you’ve made a mistake, as are e.g. megaCoulomb charges and kiloAmp currents. If this happens to you, go look for the error and fix it. If you can’t find it, let us know that you don’t like the answer and why. One of the easiest ways to tell that someone is lost is if they give you a non-physical answer and don’t blink. As a physicist, it is much easier to grade leniently if a student indicates that they understand why the result of their calculation can’t be right. If nothing else, the grading rubric often has a point designated just for having a result that could be true. You’ll at least get that.
  9. It is well known that having good handwriting improves the attitude of those grading your exam. What is less well known is that having tiny handwriting can hurt you. Often what is perfectly legible to you while you are curled up with your nose 12 inches from the paper makes our eyes hurt after the third or fourth hour of grading. Obviously this vastly reduces the incentive to hunt for that tiny little math error you made in part a. This is not a small matter. I, for one, tend to get a migraine when I bend over small text for too long. So imagine a three hour migraine and then gauge the incentive to just mark you off so I can stop looking at your paper. Find a test that you have taken recently. If you (or better, a friend) can’t clearly read your text at arm’s length, you might consider consciously writing larger on all tests from now on. Grading fatigue isn’t limited to physics TAs.

And that’s what Ben has to say about that. Hope it helps you out as finals draw nigh.