For years I have looked forward to teaching the book of Ecclesiastes in a church wide Bible study. Here are the PowerPoint and Adobe Acrobat files for the first presentation.
Ecclesiastes study presentation 1/4
Ecclesiastes study presentation 1/4 – PDF
I have one of the best jobs on the planet. Pastoring a small church whose primary ministry is with international students and scholars. Most of whom are here for a limited period of time. Many of whom are studying the Bible and learning about the Christian faith for the first time. We also have Americans and internationals who have been strong Christians for many years.
The thing about extremely intelligent and well educated internationals who are studying the Christian faith for the first time is that they ask questions that American Christians do not normally ask. Either because we have asked and answered them long ago. Or we avoid them because we have yet to find a satisfactory answer.
Jesus teaches us to forgive others. So why does God not forgive human beings unless we believe in Jesus? And why could God not forgive unless his son died on the cross? And yet God expects us to forgive others without such conditions.
Jesus teaches us to turn the other cheek and love our enemies. President Bush is supposed to be a Christian. So why did America go to war in Afghanistan and Iraq?
Do not misunderstand me. I am not saying there are no satisfactory answers to these questions. Just that they sometimes ask questions that one does not hear from Americans who have grown up going to church. This Sunday they hit me with a good one. We were discussing the Psalms. A short study on different types of Psalm. Wisdom. Lament. Thanksgiving. And praise. For the last type looking at Psalm 146. How often we think “God must be on the side of those who prosper and must be angry with those who suffer”. And yet Psalm 146 clearly proclaims that God cares especially for the oppressed the hungry the imprisoned the blind the fallen the foreigner the widows and the orphans. We might think God must have been punishing the people of Haiti because they “made a deal with the devil”. And yet Psalm 146 invites us to see how God cares about them.
And how does God care for all these different kinds of people who are in need or are suffering? Does he make food *poof* appear out of thin air? Or does he help them through us? I do believe in miracles. That God can and does *poof* provide what people need. But I also believe strongly that we are junior partners with God. That we participate in his ongoing mission to heal and to forgive and to save.
And then someone asked:
Yes but why did God not prevent the earthquake in the first place?
I did not have a good immediate answer for that. Perhaps I should have. Yes there is Genesis 1-3 and the story of the Fall or more precisely the Falling Apart. We can talk about the brokenness of creation and how that goes back to when human beings first turned against God. Paul Achtemeier argues persuasively that the book of Romans is not primarily about the doctrine of salvation by grace which we receive by faith. It is really about the story of God and his relationship with a world in rebellion against him. And it is in that context as part of that story that yes indeed Paul the apostle brings up salvation by grace received by faith.
But somehow that does not seem to answer adequately the question my Chinese friends ask. Or does it?
We talk about how God saves. But these people from other nations who frankly are the best in their home countries ask why God saves but does not prevent in the first place.
In The Silmarillion by J. R. R. Tolkien why does Eru Ilavatar allow the drama to continue?
People are willing to pay more for good care.
Talking with a friend from South Korea during our monthly fellowship meal yesterday. Cannot remember how we got onto the subject. In a nutshell he wondered why so many Americans are upset about the health care reforms that President Obama wants the Congress to pass. After all many nations have national health care in the sense that health care is provided by the government. Rich or poor – you receive the care that you need. It either is free or you pay a nominal fee.
(This friend from South Korea his boss is the head of the local Tea Party. Who used to be one of our active ministry volunteers and is a great guy.)
During an English Conversation lesson about going to the dentist one friend from Japan explained how in Japan you pay $10 to see the dentist. Typically you pay 10% of whatever the cost is. That sounds fair and reasonable to me. I especially appreciate a system in which dental care is not separate from other health care as it is in the United States.
My friends from South Korea and Japan say that people in those nations are generally pretty happy with the care they receive.
I have been greatly concerned about the health care reforms being pushed through(?) Congress. Will it mean what we spend each year goes up? Will it become more difficult to get an appointment with our doctor? Will it reduce the level and quality of care we receive? Because let me tell you right now our family is extremely happy with our doctors and very happy with the care we receive.
This is not to say there have been no problems. Speaking of the government limiting your choices – our private insurance has been limiting our choices. During the last few years we have been told that we can longer go to that excellent hospital we are only fully covered if we go to this hospital. Two of my doctors became so dissatisfied with our private insurance that they pulled out of the network. Because it is difficult to find someone else in those fields I still see them but must pay cash for each visit. So much for having private insurance.
I like the idea of every American receives the care they need. And I am not as repelled by the idea of a “single payer” system as most conservatives are. Talking with congregants from other nations one wonders “What’s so bad about national health care anyway?”
Do not misunderstand me. That does not mean the health care reform(s?) being proposed by President Obama and considered by the Congress are not problematic. There is little question in my mind that they will become another hugely expensive entitlement program. That they will further damage an already struggling economy. That proponents of these reforms have resorted to extensive dishonesty and demogoguery. And because we live in a finite universe there will be times the government will say “no you cannot receive that treatment or procedure because it is too expensive”.
But what exactly is so bad about national health care anyway?
Driving home yesterday listening to National Public Radio “All Things Considered”. Michele Norris interviewing Senator Lamar Alexander concerning the recent push to pass health-care reform in the Senate. She pressed him on the reconciliation issue. Basically “gosh you Republicans did it in the past and are against it now”. Senator Alexander attempted to explain the difference between reconciliation on tax or budget issues versus reconciliation on major policy changes. Ms Norris replied “I guess I still don’t see the difference”. Oh.
Ironically President Obama could have explained it better.
Under the rules, the reconciliation process does not permit that debate. Reconciliation is therefore the wrong place for policy changes. In short, the reconciliation process appears to have lost its proper meaning: A vehicle designed for deficit reduction and fiscal responsibility has been hijacked.
Ding ding ding. That was then Senator Obama in 2005. Ann Althouse assembles similar examples from 2004 2006 and 2007.
Senator Alexander should have just quoted the president. Wonder if Ms Norris would have understood it then.
Having a family member who teaches in a public school gives one a new perspective on the debate over how to reform public education in America.
Can we agree on the following generalizations regarding how politicians on the left and the right propose to improve our public education system?
Let us start with the first. How do we measure teacher performance? By looking at scores. There are several different scores by which reformers suggest we make teachers and schools accountable. One is standardized test scores. The other is some sort of composite score (which may include such things as standardized test scores but also attendance and graduation rates). The common assumption is that if a class is not achieving a certain score then that teacher is ineffective. And/or if a school is not achieving a certain score then something is wrong with that school.
Conservatives of all people should know better than to accept uncritically this method for measuring teacher/school performance. Why? Because there is an unspoken and unexamined assumption that if one simply applies the correct methodology then it will produce the desired behavior. Think about that for a moment. That assumption fails to take into account what in my opinion are two principles of conservatism.
Children are human beings. They have free will. And they are flawed. So just because one applies the correct stimulus (teaching method) that does not guarantee the desired outcome. One of the great insights of the apostle Paul (which theologically we would say is inspired by God the Holy Spirit) is that the law (and yes I am aware of the problem with interpreting torah as nomos) does not make people good. Too often Christians and conservatives (the two groups overlap but are not necessarily the same) fall into the trap of thinking that people will do the right thing if we just pass the right laws. Or that students will perform if we just employ the right methods. It is not that simple. Ultimately a child has the freedom to say “no I will not cooperate”. And because children are not exempt from human nature there is always the real chance that they will choose not to do the right thing.
Do we really think that good parents always produce good children?
Do we really think that good teachers always produce good students?
One thing I have learned from being married to a dedicated and excellent public school teacher is there are many more factors involved in how a student performs academically.
The principal. The administrative staff. The school district. The families.
Let us say you have a disruptive student. Makes it difficult to teach a lesson. But the principal does not back you up (allows that student to remain in the classroom with no discipline or consequences). (That is not the case where my wife teaches but one hears of this at other schools.)
Let us say you have a child with learning difficulties. You try to get that child extra help. You do all the administrative paperwork and jump through all the bureaucratic hoops. But the administrative staff will not follow through. Or the parents refuse to work with you (and they have the right to refuse special intervention). Then you have a child who drags down the scores of the class and of the school.
Let us say the child comes from a family that is struggling to get by. So the family moves to a new apartment every few months. Which means the child moves to a new school every few months. And if that child has learning difficulties it becomes not difficult but impossible to provide that child extra help.
Let us say the school district has magnet schools which only the best students attend. That will naturally pull down scores in regular schools that now have only average to poor students.
I could continue but you get the idea. There are limits to what the best teacher using the best teaching methods can accomplish. There are several factors involved in student performance over which the best teachers using the best teaching methods have no control. And conservatives of all people should be sensitive to the effect the bureaucracy can have on rank and file teachers!
Do not misunderstand me. I do not deny there are such things as poor teachers who teach poorly. I do not deny that good teachers who employ good methods will generally see better results. Nor am I arguing one should have no standards or no accountability. But it is deeply problematic to impose a score and assume that if a class or a school fails to measure up to that score then there must be something wrong with the teachers or with the school.
Let me address briefly “generally see better results”. During the season of Lent I have been leading a series of Bible studies on the book of Ecclesiastes. Ecclesiastes would have something to say about all this.
Human beings are finite. The ultimate futility of human effort. The ultimate futility of human knowledge. No one knows the future. No one knows what God is doing. Everybody dies.
Which means there are no guarantees. You can have wisdom and live righteously and still lose everything in a moment.
But Ecclesiastes does recognize the relative value of human effort and human knowledge. Wisdom is better than folly. Righteousness is better than wickedness. Perhaps that good teachers are better than bad teachers. And good teaching is better than bad teaching.
It is in light of the above I would address the issue of consequences. Charter schools and school takeovers.
Yesterday I heard on the radio that President Obama is proposing some new efforts to improve public education. The kernel of which is “schools that fail to produce a certain score will be taken over and turned into charter schools”.
Lest it sound like I am picking on President Obama let me point out that this stand is hardly new and hardly the exclusive domain of leftists liberals and/or Democrats. Can you say “No Child Left Behind”? Can you say the state of Louisiana? Governor Jindal? Education Superintendent Paul Pastorek?
For the last several years we have seen many schools declared as “failing” then put on probation then taken over and turned into charter schools. In some cases there has been no improvement. (In New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina there has been although it is fair to ask if the improvement the result of handing control to charter school organizations.) Schools that are taken over and turned into charter schools have a mixed track record.
One middle school here in Baton Rouge was taken over. This year all students at that school were given A’s. Seriously. All students. Why? Because it looks good and encourages nervous parents not to remove their children from a school that has just been taken over.
And now Education Superintendent Paul Pastorek has raised the stakes. Now schools have to have overall passing scores in science and social studies in addition to mathematics and language arts (English). The passing score is now 75. There is no longer a probation period. Failing schools will be taken over and turned into charter schools immediately.
There was a school in Shreveport with a very low score that was not taken over. Because there were “extenuating circumstances” beyond the control of teachers and administrators. Which may be entirely true. But why does this school get a pass and a dozen schools in Baton Rouge do not?
You know what one African-American parent said about the then impending takeover of these Baton Rouge schools? “This is just one more way to keep black people down”. At the time I thought “Oh come on you’re being paranoid”. But then I thought about the pattern of takeovers. About which schools. Where. With what population. And I looked up which state school board members voted for and against this. And even which were white and which were black.
Hmm.
President Obama yesterday mentioned making available $900 million in “turn around grants” including to outside organizations that would take over failing schools and turn them into charter schools. Again lest it sound like I am picking on President Obama the same thing is true within the state of Louisiana. Tens of millions of dollars to school management companies to take over failing schools and turn them into charter schools.
Dare we ask who is making money from this?
I do not deny there are such things as failing schools. That should be taken over. That should be turned into charter schools. By outside organizations. In return for fair and reasonable amounts of money. I am not arguing that “charter schools are (always) bad”. I understand the conservative fondness for consequences and competition. And I recognize that at least in some states teachers’ unions bear large responsibility for problems with public education.
But liberals and conservatives alike are jumping onto this bandwagon too easily. Conservatives of all people should be suspicious of the “politicians give large amounts of taxpayer money to some outside organization to do something locally and not bound by the usual rules”.
Remember when many conservatives said that Republicans should stay away from the Health Care Summit called for by President Obama? Because it would be a sham? Because the president was not really interested in open debate?
Oh. My.
Jonah Goldberg was right when he said sham or no sham the Republicans should go. They did. The first day alone has been interesting.
The Republicans were given an opportunity to make their points without being filtered or misrepresented by the mainstream media. And boy did they use it.
I think in some ways this has hurt President Obama. He does not respond well when people disagree with him or challenge him. And he and the Democrats did not have good responses to some of the Republican arguments. They did not even try to respond to most of them.
But I also think it may help him. He has finally allowed an open debate. He sat there and took it. He has an opportunity to make some changes to his healthcare reform plan that just might gain bipartisan support. If he is willing to learn and adapt he just might get healthcare reform – even if it is not the reform he originally wanted.
{More later.}
The way the “racism” charge has been thrown around since oh January 2009 has been deeply troubling to me. Just this week was listening to a very enjoyable interview on National Public Radio with singer Dee Dee Bridgewater who mostly discussed the life and career of Billie Holiday. The interview was excellent and illuminating.
Until.
She dropped this little bomb:
I’m sorry, there’s no two ways about it. I will say it on the air. They [President Obama and his wife] are suffering from racist thoughts and actions on the part of the Republican Party. I will say this. It is true, and nobody wants to say this. You know, he can’t get anything passed. They, like, stall everything that he’s trying to pass just because, just because.
And it’s no wonder that the man has become defensive, you know, now that, you know, we’re getting ready to go into his, you know, second year of presidency. Who wouldn’t? Who wouldn’t? He’s being personally attacked. I mean, he has you know, we’re talking about lynchings. This is a subtle lynching that is going on, unfortunately.
Read the whole transcript here.
Suddenly I was angry. Deeply angry. The season of Lent had begun and instead of practicing holy speech cursed at the radio. I am getting mighty tired of this “people criticize President Obama and/or oppose his agenda just because” canard.
So I have been especially interested in alternative perspectives. I particularly recommend Afroconservative. What I appreciate is that she challenges conservatives/Republicans as well. “Okay. So the left’s policies are disastrous. So what is the alternative? What urban policies will you offer?”
Good stuff. Check it out. Bookmark it.
[This new version of WordPress the "insert media" function does not work. Sorry no illustrations until that gets fixed.]
Man – National Review Online was just swimming with powerful articles this morning. Where to start?
Charles Krauthammer on whether America truly is “ungovernable”. How much have we heard lately about how the “system” is broken? How the federal government is “structurally dysfunctional”?
He reminds us of which recent presidents were quite able to govern and get stuff done even when Congress was controlled by the opposition party.
It turned out that the country’s problems were not problems of structure but of leadership. Reagan and Clinton had it. Carter didn’t. Under a president with extensive executive experience, good political skills, and an ideological compass in tune with the public’s, the country was indeed governable.
Read the whole thing at National Review Online. Krauthammer could also have mentioned George W. Bush and such legislation as “No Child Left Behind” and the Medicare prescription coverage (whether one cares for those two pieces of legislation or not). The Senate is not broken. America is not ungovernable. The problem is not the system. The problem is poor leadership. The system is working perfectly fine.
I also have (such as when listening to National Public Radio) lately heard much kvetching about filibusters and cloture. We cannot believe 41 senators can stop the government! There are two problems with recent calls from the left to change the Senate rules.
The first is the hypocrisy. There are some who defended filibusters when George W. Bush was in office who now call for ending them.
The second is the danger. There are some who call for ending filibusters (or changing the rules for cloture) that no doubt would sing a different tune if the Republicans were in charge and wanted to do something like oh I don’t know privatize Social Security.
(And while we are it note that on other occasions the president brags about how much he and the Congress have accomplished. Look at all the acts that have passed! The only time he complains about how the “system is not working” is when he is talking about the one thing that matters more to him than anything else that he just cannot seem to get. Radically restructuring one sixth of the American economy.)
One of the things that frosts my mug is people who keep changing the rules to suit themselves. And who want to have their cake and eat it too.
Check out also the delightful “Pick an Excuse, Any Excuse” by Jonah Goldberg. During the last few months he has become one of my favorite commentators. One thing that stands out about him is his sense of fairness. He often defends or gives credit to the “opposition” when appropriate. Not one of those “we are always right and they are always wrong” people.
In a nutshell his article explores how when you listen to Democrats these days none of their problems are their fault. Oh wait. One thing is their fault. They have failed to communicate clearly enough to the American people.
That sounds reasonable doesn’t it? “If we just explain what we want to do well enough then everyone will support these policies”. But think about it that for a moment. These people who are so educated and brilliant that they know what is best for us do not know how to explain something adequately.
Well, that’s not entirely right. The Obama administration admits one mistake — and one mistake only. It didn’t explain itself better. In both his State of the Union address
and interviews, Obama insisted he got all the policies right. It’s just that the reportedly greatest orator in the history of the republic couldn’t quite make himself clear enough.
Read the whole thing at National Review Online. This is similar to the constant “the reason everything is still so awful despite the trillions we have spend is the mess Bush left us”. Which again sounds reasonable. But as Anglican Curmudgeon pointed out a while back implies that they are completely unable to make any difference. “Elect us so we can fix this mess”. And later “the mess is not fixed because someone else made it”.
Speaking of mugs and frost. Why devote space on this website to discuss this? Because as mentioned before one of my “buttons” is when people insult my intelligence. When they say things so stupid so lame so contradictory so contrary to logic and fact and they think I am stupid enough to buy it.
Oh yes. Speaking of. That is precisely what many liberals think. We are we resisting the Obamessiah? We are we resisting a radical restructuring of the American economy? Why we are resisting radical changes to the relationship between the American people and their government? Because we are stupid.
But even this explanation amounts to dodging blame. It’s still code for “you stupid Americans, why can’t you understand I’m right and you’re wrong?”
That’s certainly how Joe Klein, Obama’s de facto press flack at Time magazine, sees things. In a piece titled “Too Dumb to Thrive,” Klein argues that Americans are too stupid to understand how totally awesome the stimulus was. (Time’s Peter Beinart makes a similar argument in a debate with me for Bloggingheads.tv.) What’s funny about this is that if nearly two-thirds of Americans are idiots, that means roughly half of Obama’s voters were idiots, too. His election was once the epitome of American wisdom. Now it seems he was elected despite the stupidity of his supporters.
Some adamantly refuse to accept the possibility that we do get it. The problem is that we do not want it. And the “you are too stupid to realize that what we are doing is for your own good” line may reveal the quintessence of what some call “progressivism”.
Was listening to NPR in car this morning (yeah yeah I know) and “Writer’s Almanac” with Garrison Keillor came on. It was more interesting than most days.
Ah yes a poem about cleaning up after the dog. Guess who walks the dog in our family? And yes letting everyone see you use the bag is important.
Birthday of Chaim Potok. This got my attention because Potok is one of my favorite writers and I have read most of his books. He is one of the people I draw upon for my theology of the importance of silence. His books also help us understand the Jewish religion. Most of my teachers were Jewish and so I have a special respect and affection for the Jewish religion and people.
Premiere of the opera “Madame Butterfly” by Giacomo Puccini. Did terribly until Puccini made some changes and then presented it again later that year.
And a great quote that every preacher should heed:
A good sermon should be like a woman’s skirt: short enough to arouse interest but long enough to cover the essentials.
Word! From Ronald Knox born this day in 1888.
Today is Ash Wednesday. Today we enter Lent.
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