Riverwood Presbyterian Church

Education

Mary, Mary, Why Ya Buggin?

by Clay Staggs

I am a fan of Macintosh computers. I work on a MacBook Pro, which I adore, and there are no fewer than 7 other Macs in my house. It’s one of my interests. So, I peruse several Mac-related websites on a regular basis.

Recently, I came across an article where Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs, who is famously liberal (Al Gore is on Apple’s board of directors), made some very pointed comments about teachers’ unions. He said:

“What kind of person could you get to run a small business if you told them that when they came in they couldn’t get rid of people that they thought weren’t any good?”

“Not really great ones because if you’re really smart you go, ‘I can’t win.’”

“I believe that what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way.”

“This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy.”

Now, I didn’t really think that comments like those would go unnoticed. And it’s one thing for union supporters to disagree, but, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan observed, everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

Enter Mary Bergan, president of the California Federation of Teachers. Mary is upset with Mr. Jobs, and has decided to take him on. She, on behalf of the CFT, has demanded that he either attend their annual conference to respond or issue an apology for his “insulting comments.” Should he fail to do either, then the CFT will award Mr. Jobs its inaugural Rotten Apple Award, “for the individual who best personifies the need to think differently about public education and teacher unions.” Clever play on Apple’s “Think Different” ad campaign, no?

Mary apparently put all this in a letter to Steve. She tried to turn the tables on him, writing:

How well could a business — say, a computer company — operate if you paid its professional employees so poorly and put them in work environments so unsupportive that nearly half of them left the company within five years? … How long could that business survive if it had to hold bake sales to get enough chips to build its machines?

This made me wonder just how poorly teachers were paid in California. So I did a little googling. According to the California Department of Education, in 2003, beginning teachers’ salaries ranged from $33,000 to $37, 000, varying with the size of the school. A midrange salary is $50,000 to $58,000. Now, I realize that the cost of living is higher there than here, but that didn’t exactly sound like poverty level living to me. So I googled to find a standard of comparison. According to the US Census Bureau, the median household (note that there are two earners in many households) income in California from 2002-04 (in 2004 dollars) is $50,000. So a midrange teacher’s salary (alone) equals or exceeds the median household income.

But what about that bake sale part? What’s the state of California putting out each year per pupil? According to the National Education Association, $7,860.000 in 2003. I believe that would cover just about any private school tuition here, and I suspect many fine ones in California too.

Mary is definitely buggin. She certainly does not have to like Steve Jobs’s view of teachers’ unions. But why attack him with accusations that are disprovable with a few Google searches? A cynical reader might think that Mary couldn’t refute Steve’s points, and was just trying to change the subject.

Culture Wars

The Boring Life of a Prince

by Clay Staggs

In a strange way, I feel very sorry for Prince Charles. He’s an extremely important person, but yet he’s utterly irrelevant. That is to say, he will never wield any real power. But since he’s the Prince of Wales, the media will hang on his every word. So, he has this bully pulpit, but is completely impotent to do anything other than talk - or maybe I should say nag.

Today the UK Evening Standard carried a report (read it here) quoting Charles as saying that, in effect, McDonald’s fast food should be banned. How noblesse oblige of him to determine what his lowly little subjects should and should not be eating. It’s for their own good you know.

But my sarcasm aside, he can say that all day long, and yet he’s without the first whit of authority to do anything about it. That must be extremely frustrating. All the riches and splendor in the world, and all he can do is rail against Big Macs. What’s actually sadder is that he obviously can’t appreciate the simple pleasure of a good, greasy hamburger and fries.

Education

News Flash: Sun Rises in East

by Clay Staggs

Sorry for the snarky title, but stories like this really get under my skin. Lo and behold, there’s now an academic study that says that praising your children when praise is not deserved is - brace yourselves - counterproductive. Stop and ask yourself how many stories you’ve read from the supposed experts in childrearing and education about the crucial importance of the child’s self-esteem. Some have even gone so far as to advocate that children be allowed to pursue “inventive spelling” of words, urging teachers and parents to “ignore spelling and grammar errors, unless the learners ask to be corrected,” and “respect learners and be sensitive to their feelings as you help them build confidence in writing.” Yes, heaven forbid that anyone be corrected, lest their feelings and self-esteem suffer irreparable injury.

Only, now there’s evidence (as if any were really needed) that it’s all baloney. You see, it turns out that if you praise your child for being smart (even in the face of their failures and mistakes) they come to believe that they are indeed smart, and need not expend all that much effort on learning since they’re so smart already. The study also found that, if, instead, you praise a child for his or her efforts or hard work, then the child believes that effort and hard work yield good results and he or she tries to work harder and put forth more effort. Read the whole story.

If you really need to.

Politics

Handicapping the Evangelical Vote

by Clay Staggs

There’s an interesting article on the web today about one man’s view on the 2008 Republican presidential primaries. The one opining is Richard Land, who is president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, and a sometime informal adviser to President Bush. You can read the whole article here.

Now, the reason I post this is not because I find his view persuasive. Quite the contrary, I find it self-contradictory. By conventional wisdom, at this point, there are three major candidates for the Republican nomination: Rudy Guiliani, John McCain, and Mitt Romney. Each has well identified issues that don’t exactly square with the stereotypical Republican primary voter (i.e., Evangelical Christians). Guiliani is a social liberal on many issues. McCain hasn’t reliably supported popular positions within the party (like his support of the McCain-Feingold legislation and his refusal to support the Bush tax cuts in 2001). Mitt Romney has in the past either espoused some socially liberal positions or at least failed to advance the conservative ones, and he’s a Mormon.

Mr. Land was asked to comment on how Evangelicals would view each of the three candidates and how they’d respond in the general election if each of the three were the GOP nominee. Interestingly, Mr. Land suggested that social conservatives could support McCain or Romney against Hillary (the presumptive Dem nominee), but not Rudy. He outright predicted that the “vast majority” of Evangelicals wouldn’t vote for Rudy, even against Hillary.

Assuming the article quotes him correctly, the big problem he sees for the Mayor is that he’s been married and divorced (or annulled) several times:

Land said the mayor’s annulment, divorce and subsequent third marriage will seal the deal against hizzoner for social conservatives.

That’s it. Now, consider that Mr. Land believes that Evangelicals can get over the fact that Romney’s a Mormon (!) and that McCain has betrayed conservative causes in the Senate many, many times, and support either of them against Sen. Clinton.

I think this is ridiculous. Social conservatives voted for Reagan, who had been married twice. Is that really such a big deal? A bigger deal to a conservative Christian than a Mormon president? I’m not poo-pooing, Romney, either (in fact, were I to have to cast a vote today, he’d be my choice, with Rudy a close second), but come on.

Personally, I think that as long as the GOP nominee has not assumed room temperature, if the Dem nominee is HRC, then social conservatives will turn out in DROVES to vote against her. Frankly, the issue of the times is the war with Islamo-fascism. Rudy and Romney definitely get that, and probably so does McCain. I think that, especially in the general election against a candidate perceived not to get who the bad guys are and what they’re capable of, Evangelicals would support any of the three GOP contenders. I’d like to think that Christian conservatives are savvy enough to understand that if those bad guys get their way, it won’t really matter who’s been divorced and who hasn’t.

The Absolution of Sin, circa 1805

by Jimmy Hopper

I am currently reading a book called Memoirs of a Fighting Captain by Admiral Thomas Lord Cochran (hope I did that right!) He was a captain and later an admiral in the British Navy during the Napoleonic wars. Cochran served as the model for Jack Aubrey and Horatio Hornblower in the two series of novels by Patrick O’Brien and C.S. Forester. You may remember that the Aubrey character was played by Russell Crowe in the Master and Commander movie. The quote below was on the occasion of Cochran examining the cargo of a Spanish ship captured on the way from Mexico to Spain about 1805 .

“Another curious circumstance must not be passed over. In one of the captured vessels was a number of bales marked ‘invendables’. Making sure of some rich prize, we opened the bales, which to our chagrin consisted of pope’s bulls, dispensations for eating meat on Fridays, and indulgences for peccadilloes of all kinds, with the price affixed. They had evidently formed a venture from Spain to the Mexican sin market, but the supply exceeding the demand, had been reconsigned to the manufacturers. We consigned them to the waves.”

I thought this was absolutely hilarious, especially the “Mexican sin market” quote. On another note, however, how could anyone ever dare conceive of the idea of selling God’s forgiveness of sin, already purchased through the death of His Son? And they call modern Americans mercenary!

Culture Wars

The Gray Lady Channels Marie Antoinette, Or, Let Them Eat Pastel?

by Clay Staggs

Anyone who knows my political leanings will not be surprised to learn that I’m no fan of the New York Times editorial page. Yesterday’s editorial about the price of corn, however, was one of the most astonishing things I’ve ever seen them print.

For anyone who’s not heard about this yet, a bit of background is in order. For years, ethanol made from corn has been pushed as an alternative fuel for cars. However, with gasoline approaching $3 per gallon, and with the abject hysteria in some quarters over alleged human-induced global warming, alternative fuels have taken on a new urgency, and the demand for ethanol has increased, meaning, of course, a greater demand for corn.

What do we (well, those of us who acknowledge free markets, anyway) know is going to happen when demand for ethanol made from corn increases? Surprise, Surprise! The price of corn has gone up. OK, big deal, right? So the bag of Doritos costs a few cents more - so what? That’s all well and good here in the good old USA, but south of the border, it’s a different story.

It seems that in Mexico, there are protests in the streets over the spike in the price of tortillas. According to the AP, “[Mexican] workers earning the minimum wage of about $4 a day could spend a third of their earnings on tortillas for their family.” The article goes on to explain that poor Mexicans get 40% of their protein from tortillas. It’s as much a staple for them, or even more so, than bread is for us. If they can’t afford it, malnutrition is a serious possibility.

This seems very, very bad. The poor are being squeezed by this turn of events. Surely something should be done. Ah, yes, but that inflexible law of supply and demand. It puts the impoverished workers of the developing world at cross-purposes with the zealots of global warming. With whose side will the all-compassionate NYT editorial writers cast their lot?

Since their site is registration required, I’ll reproduce that editorial below:

The current price of corn is $3.23 a bushel, more than half again what it was a year ago, and beginning to bring to mind the record $5.545 a bushel set in July 1996. There are many reasons for this price spurt. The ethanol boom has created a sharp new demand for corn. The Department of Agriculture revised its estimate of the 2006 corn harvest downward by some 200 million bushels because of weather and other factors. There is also a smaller corn reserve on hand than usual — the smallest in a decade — which parallels shortages around the world. Add to this the growing weight of commodities funds investing in agricultural markets, and you have daydreams — or nightmares — of that $5 mark. Yet all this has taken place against the backdrop of three record harvests in a row, a sure sign of how strong the ethanol appetite for corn production is turning out to be. It’s tempting to assume that the effect of sharply higher prices is confined primarily to the agricultural sector. But where corn is concerned, we are all part of the agricultural sector. The historical cheapness of corn has driven it into nearly every aspect of our economy, in the form, most familiarly, of corn syrup. The low price of corn over the past half-century lies at the very foundation of America’s historically (and unrealistically) low food prices. Gratifying our two major appetites — cheap food and cheap gas — used to seem easy because both corn and oil were abundant. Cheap oil helped keep corn prices low because it cost farmers less to run their tractors and combines. But we are entering a new dynamic now. While there has been talk recently about refining ethanol from sources other than corn, that could take a while. So at the moment what we are trying to do is gratify those appetites from the same resource: agricultural land. No matter how high prices go, what will need to change isn’t the amount of corn acreage available or even the size of the enormous harvests we are already getting. What will need to change is the size of our appetites.

Get that? The Mexican poor had just better change the size of their appetites. I guess we know now where the NYT’s priorities are. Keep Al Gore and his acolytes happy, and the peasants can just eat cake, or something.

Arts & Aesthetics

Beauty Works

by Jeff Miller

I was trolling through some back issues of Credenda Agenda recently & came across this article about beauty & the lost concepts of architecture as art. Function and form (like science and religion) are not antithetical, but in proper aspects, exponentially complimentary.

We have developed a very narrow and short sighted view of the arts and aesthetics in our culture. It has devolved to the point that architecture is rarely considered among the arts (neither do the works produced don’t demand artistic discussion of late, but I digress).

The above listed article answers the following questions beautifully:

Q. Why should Christians reflect more upon architecture?

Q. How does an architect begin to think about creativity?

Q. How do you answer the pietistic objection that spending time on architecture is laying up “treasures upon earth, where moth and rust corrupt”?

Q. Are there any distinctive aesthetic values of Protestantism, especially the Reformed tradition, which might shape an architectural style or vision?

Consider these questions & then look at the answers in the article. I’d be interested in seeing what discussion this fosters.

Here is the ‘nutshell quote’ from the concluding section:

We must study His artistic work, the universum itself. Before us lie patterns, rules, and principles of design which spring directly from His manifold perfections. Dorothy Sayers observed “As the mind of the maker has been made manifest in a work, a way of communication is established between our mind and his.” The mind of our Maker is manifest in the creation. When we draw from the ordering principles of the architect of the cosmos, we establish a setting in which beauty can emerge. Alas, these principles have been abandoned in our generation. But our buildings, whether in our cities or countryside must again quake with intimations of God’s great Glory through their magnificent beauty, embodiment of eternal principles in fine proportions, a sublime harmony of parts, and carefully crafted, appropriate materials. These are so deeply rooted in the stunning beauty of the created order, they will either serve God’s purposes for the redemption or condemnation of those who suppress the truth of His eternal nature and power.

Beauty- it’s not just for the museum anymore. It’s required of the imagebearers of God.

Jeff

General Theology

Open Thread

by Clay Staggs

A Baptist Church in Australia has posted a sign that says “Jesus Loves Osama.”

The full story is here. It has caused enough consternation that the PM of Australia has commented on it.

I have my own reaction to this, but I thought it might be more interesting to hear what the readers/commenters out there had to say. I’ll post my thoughts later.

What say you all?

2/8/07 ADDENDUM: I wanted to add my thoughts to this, now that Tim and Jimmy have so ably commented on the aspects of limited atonement that the sign presents. My impression was really more in line with what PM Howard pointed out. If you assume an Arminian mindset (which, as Tim & Jimmy pointed out, the sign does), then is it not incumbent on the Christian not to do anything to drive the unbeliever away from the Church?

Consider the non-believing family of an Australian soldier killed by the jihadists. What is their reaction to this sign to be? It seems reasonable to me that they react by saying that these church folks care more about the enemy than they do their own countrymen who have fallen at the hand of this enemy. If I were that family, I’d be thinking “so much for Christian compassion” and I’d probably conclude that my instincts that Christians are naive hypocrites were right.

So, in their Arminian world, they’ve alienated all those folks and Osama’s never even seen the silly sign since he’s in a cave somewhere in Pakistan, and is on record anyway as pretty firmly opposed to Christianity. So, even if you assume their worldview (which I don’t) then the sign still doesn’t make any sense.