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?
the NIV reloaded
I sent an email to my students and it occurred to me that it might be of more general interest:
Chi Alphans,
You might be interested to know that the NIV translation of the Bible has been revised. You can’t buy it in stores yet, but it is available online at biblegateway.com
I think you’ll find the translator’s notes interesting. They include a section on language and gender and also have a list of key passages that have changed in the newest translation. http://www.biblegateway.com/niv/Translators-Notes.pdf
And while I’m on the subject of new releases of the Bible (which is a weird sentence), I should mention that there is a new, academically legit compilation of the Greek New Testament available at http://sblgnt.com/
Finally, remember that every translation optimizes some things at the expense of others. There is no “best” translation. It’s far more important you read whatever you have than that you engage in some fruitless quest for the ideal. In other words, your existing NIV will do just fine from now until you die.
Glen
P.S. There is no “best translation” but there is an option you might not have considered — you can learn to read the Bible in its original languages. It’s not for everyone, but just think of it: you can earn Stanford credits while growing in your understanding of God’s Word — it’s a twofer!
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.
Yikes — New Students Arrive Today!
In which I describe in great detail my panicked yet joyous feelings as the school year begins.
New students arrive on campus today. Yikes!
To Do:
- Brush my teeth really well, including my tongue so my breath doesn’t stink.
- Shave head. Carefully. We don’t want a repeat of that incident when I missed a patch and looked like a Who from Whoville.
- Trim edges of beard. The difference between an epic prophet beard and a crazy cult leader beard is surprisingly hard to define, but raggedy beard edges have something to do with it. That, and neck hair. Say no to the throat beard.
- Print literature for tabling: new student devotional guide, Why Jesus? essay, The Jesus FAQ.
- Practice smiling in the mirror.
- Double check on throat hair.
P.S. I don’t think I’ve publicized it here, but I put a new writing online. I mention it above in the “print literature” bullet point — it’s a ten-day devotional guide for new students called Thrive. It, along with all my other writings, is indexed here.
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.
Get Better Grades By Understanding How Your Brain Works
One of my favorite blogs is the British Psychological Society’s Research Digest. It summarizes current research in a way interesting to non-academics. I eat that kind of stuff up.
Their most recent post is a real winner for college students: 9 Evidence-Based Study Tips. You’ll receive a lot of advice in college — but these principles actually have experimental support.
- Adopt a growth mindset: believe that your brain is capable of getting smarter. You’re not stuck where you are.
- Sleep well: internalize that all-nighters hurt more than they help.
- Forgive yourself for procrastinating: as a minister, I was quite taken by this one. It’s a beautiful illustration of a more general lesson on grace as the primary catalyst for growth in life.
- Test yourself: don’t just review the material — turn it into a quiz.
- Pace your studies: review the material once 20% of the time elapses between the day you first learned it and the day of the test. Combining this with the previous tip will revolutionize your study life.
- Vivid examples may not always work best. This is more of a tip for teachers, so here’s the student version: don’t assume that the charismatic teacher will help you understand better simply because they entertain you more. Be suspicious of vivid illustrations because they can make it harder to learn the abstract principles you must master.
- Take naps: lie down and rest for 10–30 minutes. It will help more than you think.
- Get handouts prior to the lecture: the evidence for this one seemed weak to me. Read it and judge for yourself.
- Believe in yourself: confidence matters. Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re probably right.
Each tip has a brief paragraph explaining the principle in more detail including links to the research upon which it is based. Go read it now!
You’re welcome.
Notes From God Is Not One
I recently read/skimmed Stephen Prothero’s book God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World–and Why Their Differences Matter. Prothero is a professor of religion at Boston University who was raised Episcopalian but has since rejected Christianity. He now describes himself as confused. Be that as it may, he makes some true but unfashionable claims in his introduction. Here are some bits I was particularly keen on:
The book is well summed up on the inside front dust jacket:
To claim that all religions are the same is to misunderstand that each attempts to solve a different human problem. For example:
- Islam: the problem is pride / the solution is submission
- Christianity: the problem is sin / the solution is salvation
- Confucianism: the problem is chaos / the solution is social order
- Buddhism: the problem is suffering / the solution is awakening
- Judaism: the problem is exile / the solution is to return to God
In a section called “Allergic to Argument” he described a frustrating reality that I see almost every day as a minister to college students:
In my Boston University courses, I work hard to foster respectful arguments. My students are good with “respectful,” but they are allergic to “argument.” They see arguing as ill-mannered, and even among friends they avoid it at any cost.… Especially when it comes to religion, young Americans at least are far more likely to say “I feel” than “I think” or (God forbid) “I believe.” (4)
I liked this bit, too:
All too often world history is told as if religion did not matter. The Spanish conquered New Spain for gold, and the British came to New England to catch fish. The French Revolution had nothing to do with Catholicism, and the U.S. civil rights movement was a purely humanitarian endeavor. But even if religion makes no sense to you, you need to make sense of religion to make sense of the world. (8)
I first heard the following observation from Joe Zickafoose years ago, and the longer I reflect upon it the more convinced I am of its truth:
What the world’s religions share is not so much a finish line as a starting point. And where they begin is with this simple observation: something is wrong with the world.… Religious folk worldwide agree that something has gone awry. They part company, however, when it comes to stating just what has gone wrong, and they diverge sharply when they move from diagnosing the human problem to prescribing how to solve it. Christians see sin as the problem, and salvation from sin as the religious goal. Buddhists see suffering (which, in their tradition, is not ennobling) as the problem, and liberation from suffering as the religious goal. (11)
And I think his four-part analysis is one of the more useful ways to summarize religions:
At the heart of this project is a simple, four-part approach to the religions, which I have been using for years in the classroom and at lectures around the world. Each religion articulates:
- a problem;
- a solution to the problem, which also serves as the religious goal;
- a technique (or techniques) for moving from this problem to this solution; and
- an exemplar (or exemplars) who chart this path from problem to solution.
(14)
And in one of his many non-PC moments:
While in Jerusalem researching this book, I struck up a conversation with an elderly Muslim. When I told him I was writing a book on the world’s religions, he looked at me sternly, pointed a finger in my direction, and instructed me to be honest. “Do not write false things about the religions,” he said. Religious Studies scholars are rarely honest enough to admit this in person, much less in print, but we all know there are things that each of the world’s religions do well, and things they do poorly. If you want to help the homeless, you will likely find the Christian Social Gospel more useful than Hindu notions of caste. If you want to find techniques for quieting the mind through bodily exercises, you will likely find Hindu yogis more useful than Christian saints. (20)
The rest of the book is fine, I suppose. If you need a summary of the global religions you could do far worse than this one, but it doesn’t live up to the promise of the introduction (hence the skimming alluded to in the first sentence of this post).
That notwithstanding, I must confess that I liked one image from his section on Pentecostal Christianity:
U.S. president Abraham Lincoln once remarked that, when he sees a man preach, he likes “to see him act as if he were fighting bees.” Pentecostalism is replete with bee-fighting preachers. (87–88)
That’s my tribe — the mighty bee-fighters.
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