What’s all the fuss about?

Easter. You know, when a holy bunny was reborn from a chocolate egg so that we all might have everlasting gobstoppers. Or something like that.

Class will gather in the square today. Bring rocks.

Now here’s an interesting headline:

9th Circuit: OT laws don’t cover seminarians

Turns out the “OT” stands for overtime. I’ll bet those seminarians are breathing a sigh of relief it doesn’t stand for Old Testament. A potential stoning for apostasy would likely have a chilling effect on term papers.

Expect to win

Caleb has been on a robotics team. They use Lego Mindstorms equipment to overcome a variety of obstacles laid out for them in an annual competition at Wichita State University. It was his first year, and I think he must have relied on genes from his mother, given that I have the spatial reasoning skills of a one-eyed cartoon figure.

So the day came for the big competition. Caleb is part of a home-school robotics club, which fielded three teams for the competition. Each team consists of sub-teams which tackled different obstacles — mazes, tunnels, objects that have to be moved. Scenarios, they call them. Teams are judged on how well their sub-teams do on the various scenarios, on their team spirit, and on their ability to explain to the judges what the heck they’re actually doing.

It basically amounted to a bunch of kids huddling across the university gym for an entire day, making trial runs with their inventions, hastily conferring to determine what they should change, occasionally gathering for “official runs” to cheer on their teammates, and generally behaving like sweaty, eager, brilliant little youngsters.

Finally, at the end of the day, everyone gathered in a big auditorium for the awards ceremony. We sat in the very back, where it was easier to swat and shush Caleb’s siblings, some of whom don’t appreciate the artificial constraints imposed on them by pomp, circumstance, and folding wooden chairs. After much ado, the announcer began calling out winners. He came to the scenario winners. Entire teams don’t win these awards, mind you, just sub-teams. He called out a sub-team, from Caleb’s larger team, who were the high scorers on a scenario Caleb didn’t work on.

But the boy, you see, remembered the name of his team. That’s the part of the announcement he heard. He didn’t pause to consider whether this was his sub-team. Down the aisle he rocketed, before we could stop him, arms in the air like an Olympic gold medalist. He jumped up and down with the kids who actually won the prize, while they looked at him in confusion. He leaned in close as their picture was taken, a big grin on his face.

We sank in our chairs with embarrassment. But it was a rookie mistake. No harm done. We waited for him to make his way back to us so we could explain that the award was for a different sub-team, not his.

Then the announcer called out the name of another sub-team from Caleb’s team. Another sub-team, you see, that he wasn’t actually on.

He stopped halfway up the aisle, threw his arms in the air, and shot back toward the stage. “Caleb!” we hissed at him, to no avail. Again with the jumping up and down beside kids who didn’t understand what he was doing up there, again with the mugging for a picture he shouldn’t have been in.

When he finally got back to where we sat, I explained his mistake. He was mortified, though not nearly as much as his parents. Finally they got to the team winners. The home-school club swept the competition, their teams taking first, second, and third places. Caleb’s team finished second. After checking and double-checking to be absolutely sure he was supposed to go down this time, we set him loose for his third run to the stage.

He apologized to the other sub-teams later, and nobody seemed to mind all that much. I think it’s probably a good thing, to believe it when you win, to expect to win. It’s better, at least, than thinking you haven’t a chance.

From the Why Bother Dept.

Jude Law, model father.

The fine line between unrecognized genius and . . . stupid

From Alternet, this excerpt from a student’s email to his professor, contesting a mediocre grade in light of his self-evident brilliance:

“I am an A student and that is an A paper, and always will be to me. . . But I will still go on to follow the path that God has paved for me regardless of your opinion, because I already had the guideness I needed to help me visualize my purpose. I want my grade changed, and I am sorry if I offend you by this email, but I put my heart and sole into my education and I believe in myself even if you don’t.”

Exclusion of Christ

From Dietrich Bonhoeffer, by way of Lance Nixon’s piece on Down Syndrome and human worth in last month’s Touchstone Magazine:

“The exclusion of the weak and insignificant, the seemingly useless people, from a Christian community may actually mean the exclusion of Christ; in the poor brother Christ is knocking at the door.”

Nixon notes a 1999 study in the medical journal Prenatal Diagnosis which found that 90 percent of babies who are determined in utero to have Down Syndrome are subsequently aborted.

Mr. Orwell, please call your office

Chinese Minister of Industry and Information Technology, in response to Google’s refusal to assist China’s thugocracy in stifling free speech and oppressing it’s citizenry:

“You are unfriendly and irresponsible…”

Cost accounting

“What are Democratic leaders saying? ‘If you pass the Stupak amendment, more children will be born, and therefore it will cost us millions more.’”

Following

Christian Radio Pirate derives the new Christianity from a sampling of seeker-friendly churches:

“Christ Follower: Someone who has made the decision to be an emotionally well adjusted self-actualized risk taking leader who knows his purpose, lives a ‘no regrets’ life of significance, has overcome his fears, enjoys a healthy marriage with better than average sex, is an attentive parent, is celebrating recovery from all his hurts, habits and hang ups, practices Biblical stress relief techniques, is financially free from consumer debt, fosters emotionally healthy relationships with his peers, attends a weekly life group, volunteers regularly at church, tithes off the gross and has taken at least one humanitarian aid trip to a third world nation.”

Still more evidence that I am a bad Christian

“Those who love the Lord may be recognized by the fact that because of their hope in Him they bear every affliction that comes, not simply courageously but also wholeheartedly…” (St. Macarius the Great)

More evidence that Tony is a bad Christian

I understand the importance of civil society, and laws, and turning the other cheek, but there are some people I’d like to beat senseless with a tire iron.

Barring the doors

In Colorado, a Catholic school has refused readmission to the children of two lesbian parents. “Parents living in open discord with Catholic teaching in areas of faith and morals unfortunately choose by their actions to disqualify their children from enrollment,” explains the Archdiocese of Denver.

Now, the conservative in me thinks that it’s entirely reasonable for a Catholic school to have standards for admission that turn on, well, being Catholic. On the other hand, how can Christianity ever divorce itself from the call to spread the Gospel? And if it cannot divorce itself from this calling, ought we to feel at least a bit squeamish at the sight of Christians barring the doors to children in need of the light and Word and love of Christ?

I recall a Buddhist mother telling Wife and me about her desire to enroll her child in a Wichita Christian school. She told them she didn’t care what religion they taught her child, that they could teach her child Christianity if they liked. They refused her, because they require parents to sign a statement of Christian doctrinal adherence (we Christians call those things “statements of faith,” which ought to make anyone familiar with James 1:22 a tad uncomfortable).

I understand the desire of parents who enroll their children in such schools to avoid having their youngsters taught side by side with devil worshippers. On the other hand, if your child’s faith is so weak that sitting next to a confused little devil worshipper in French class can render him apostate, isn’t the problem with your parenting, rather than your school’s admission policy?

It seems that the gold standard is to take them all. Take every child, and compromise not an inch on doctrinal purity or standards of conduct. I know that’s easier said than done. At the very least, however, we ought to pause before turning our backs on the very children we claim to care about when we talk our talk about upholding marriage and spreading the Gospel.

Daily dying

John Hinderacker at Powerline (I got there from Instapundit) has this observation about the latest slaughter of Christians in Nigeria:

“So where is the outrage? I don’t know what denomination those Nigerian Christians were, but Lutherans are the most numerous Christian denomination in Africa. I’m a Lutheran, but I have never heard a single word from any church source, local or national, about the mass murder of African Christians. No one seems to care.

No doubt readers can refer us to some Christian sources–evangelical, most likely–who have tried to draw attention to the plight of Christians in Africa, the Middle East and Asia who are being exterminated. But any such effort has wholly failed to gain traction in the “mainstream” Christian community.

Why? I can’t explain it. Maybe ‘mainstream’ Christianity is dead, except as an appendage of secular liberal opinion. Maybe, as the world’s largest religion, Christianity has become so diffused that New World Christians don’t much relate to their co-religionists in Africa and Asia. I don’t know. What I do know is that it is much more dangerous to publish a cartoon of Mohammed than to slice apart a Christian with a machete.”

I suspect most of us Christians living in the relatively safe West are here because we haven’t the faith or strength to be martyred like our brothers and sisters elsewhere. But do we have the faith and strength to remember them in more than a passing prayer?

As for the difference between Muslims and Christians on the point of violence, I don’t know what to say. They are called to force the world into bloody submission; we are called to turn the other cheek. They are called to strap bombs to the chests of their sons and daughters; we are called to obey the civil authorities.

Still, I don’t know how I could witness the slaughter of my family and friends without taking up a gun or blade or rock and spilling blood. Which is one reason why, I suppose, I live here and not there — because I haven’t the faith to die as these martyrs daily die.

Walking vices

From Anthony Esolen’s “Filthy Rich: The Unnoticed Gift of Trickle-Down Decadence:”

“The poor teach us what our vices mean, because we have not the self-knowledge to see through the disguises we ourselves have given them. When we see the poor doing what we would not, let us not say, ‘There but for the grace of God (or family, social class, or education) go I.’ We must say, ‘There are my vices, walking.’”

You are what you might have eaten

The best part of this story about the drastic increase in the average American child’s diet as a consequence of snacking (168 more calories per child a day than kids thirty years ago) is the disclaimer at the end:

“The surveys depended on parents’ or older children’s recall of what they had eaten, so there could be inaccuracies.”

Ya think? Like when I discovered an empty Wheat Thin box in the basement yesterday, looking like it had been mauled by a pack of lions? Lucky for us (actually, it’s good parenting on Wife’s part), the boys are big on apples and cheese sticks, and they mostly get water to drink, sometimes juice, on rare occasions root bear or lemonade.

That we know of. For all I know, they’re out there killing wild animals and roasting them at their tree fort. Which is still, admittedly, better than a bag of Doritos.

Popular science notions

Mark Noll, in John Wilson’s Books & Culture email newsletter (which is provided free by Christianity Today and which you really ought to subscribe to, if not the premium online version) has this to say about a book that I really want to read now:

“If you want to keep thinking that medieval Islam was unfriendly to science, that medieval Christians propounded a flat-earth theory, that the church once denounced anesthesia as unscriptural, that Huxley routed Wilberforce in a famous confrontation over Darwin’s “monkey theory,” that the Scopes Trial blew opposition to evolution out of the water, that creation science is a uniquely American phenomenon—then you’d better avoid this book.” (From Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion, edited by Ronald Numbers)

Birthday boy and girl

Monday was Eli’s 8th birthday, and Wife’s . . . significantly more than 8th birthday. She’s always been gracious about sharing her day. And her life. And whatever’s on her plate, when some hungry little boy asks to sit in her lap at dinner time.

Tonight at bedtime I gave Eli his birthday blessing. I put my hand on his head as he lay on his pillow and prayed that he would be strong and safe and that he would know God. His face grew peaceful and sweet as I prayed. Tomorrow he will be a little sad that there are now 364 days between him and another birthday, so I’ll sweep him up into my arms and cover his face with kisses, because he’s still light enough and young enough, and I’m still strong enough.

Soon we will turn out the lights, and then I will put my hand on Wife’s sweet head and pray for her as well, that time does indeed heal all wounds just as it wounds all heels, that faith endures even when our flesh feels as if it cannot, that all things and any thing can be made new, and not just in the life that awaits, but in this life where we wait and endure and wonder sometimes if God has forgotten we are down here.

They are good to me. They are good for me. I forget it too often, but not this day. And, God willing, not in all the days left.

New cover for my book

So, Amazon and Barnes and Noble have the new cover for my book up. Hopefully Borders and Christianbook are soon to follow.

Fourteen

You would have been fourteen today. Amidst the chaos of cobbled-together derby cars and robot obstacle courses and four sweaty boys we might have made a cake just for you. I would have made you spaghetti, because it is your favorite. We could have walked across the bridge in the late afternoon, to sit on the swing that hangs on the other side of the creek. Maybe it would have been awkward, because what do I know of raising teenaged girls? Perhaps it would have been your mother to sit with you on that swing, and this would be just fine with me, to look out our back window and see the two of you there, talking or maybe just quiet, allies in a house of men.

I think they might be gentler with you here, your brothers. You might have soothed something in them. Or perhaps instead they would be roused to even bolder feats of stupid bravery. Perhaps instead of racing their bicycles down the hill and sliding to a stop before toppling over the creek’s steep bank, they would have tried to leap it, for you.

I told Caleb today, as we left your grave, how you used to lay your tired head on your mother’s belly, knowing he was inside. You called him your brother-baby. This is what your mother remembered to Caleb. He smiled, and he was sad because for two years he was an only child who was not our only child. I wonder if something in him, in all of them, knows this presence of absence as your mother and I know it, grieve it, breathe it in and breathe it out.

What your presents would have been, I have no idea. I don’t know what 14 year-old girls want. We only know, now, to buy you flowers. Fourteen roses for your grave, a larger bunch of them here — your mother has them in vases. They are here because you are not, and they are here as you are with us still, a sudden sense of belief within a cold heart, a breathless ache, a distant sound that was once so familiar we could forget the fleetingness of life.

The worm turns

Macbook, iPhone, moleskin notebook. I have now fully become the guy I used to quietly mock in Starbucks.

The weeping Christ

From David Bentley Hart’s First Things article, “Tsunami and Theodicy,” rightly called once again to our attention, in light of recent disasters, by Civitate:

“I do not believe we Christians are obliged — or even allowed — to look upon the devastation visited upon the coasts of the Indian Ocean and to console ourselves with vacuous cant about the mysterious course taken by God’s goodness in this world, or to assure others that some ultimate meaning or purpose resides in so much misery. Ours is, after all, a religion of salvation; our faith is in a God who has come to rescue His creation from the absurdity of sin and the emptiness of death, and so we are permitted to hate these things with a perfect hatred. For while Christ takes the suffering of his creatures up into his own, it is not because he or they had need of suffering, but because he would not abandon his creatures to the grave. And while we know that the victory over evil and death has been won, we know also that it is a victory yet to come, and that creation therefore, as Paul says, groans in expectation of the glory that will one day be revealed. Until then, the world remains a place of struggle between light and darkness, truth and falsehood, life and death; and, in such a world, our portion is charity.

As for comfort, when we seek it, I can imagine none greater than the happy knowledge that when I see the death of a child I do not see the face of God, but the face of His enemy. It is not a faith that would necessarily satisfy Ivan Karamazov, but neither is it one that his arguments can defeat: for it has set us free from optimism, and taught us hope instead. We can rejoice that we are saved not through the immanent mechanisms of history and nature, but by grace; that God will not unite all of history’s many strands in one great synthesis, but will judge much of history false and damnable; that He will not simply reveal the sublime logic of fallen nature, but will strike off the fetters in which creation languishes; and that, rather than showing us how the tears of a small girl suffering in the dark were necessary for the building of the Kingdom, He will instead raise her up and wipe away all tears from her eyes — and there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain, for the former things will have passed away, and He that sits upon the throne will say, ‘Behold, I make all things new.’”

Conversation via email

Me: “Did you check the mail today?”

Wife: “Isaac did. The sweepstakes prize went to somebody in a trailer, but you did get an LL Bean catalog. It’s making the garbage bag heavier to carry out tomorrow.”

Me: “How am I supposed to get my LL Bean on when you throw the catalog out?”

“If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there’d be a shortage of sand.” (Milton Friedman, courtesy of Larry Reed)

Straight to danger

Five year-old Isaac decided that he wanted to ride his bike without the training wheels. “They slow me down,” he explained. If you knew this boy, you would understand why I was reluctant to give him more speed. But there he stood with Eli, who volunteered to “learn him how to ride.” If you had seen Eli teaching himself, at age four, how to ride a bike, you would understand my further reluctance; Eli was relentless in spite of two bloodied knees and who knows how many spills.

But I acquiesced, thinking I could just point the boy toward an open field. We have twenty acres, after all. So long as he’s falling down in the dirt, how much danger can there be? So I took off the training wheels. Isaac eagerly hopped on. I pointed him out of the barn and toward the grass, and gave him a good push.

Away he went. Not into the long field to the right of our house. Not into the grassy fenced area beside our barn. Not even onto the basketball court on the other side of the house. Nope, he went straight up the driveway. Peddling, wobbling, peddling, wobbling, up the graveled drive. Right at my truck. Twenty acres of property, and in his first twenty seconds of freestyle biking, the boy hits my truck.

He tried to sideskirt it, whipping around the back bumper and disappearing from my view. Then I heard the whump of little-boy body and scratchy bicycle metal hitting the side. At moments like this, you try to at least pretend like you are more concerned for the child than for your truck. I waited for the wail. There was none. He darted back around the corner, on his feet now, and waved both his hands, vaudeville style. “I’m okay!”

The truck was okay too. This is how it is with them. You bundle them up and put helmets on them and push them toward where it’s safe, and instead they go straight to danger. I hope I’ll always see him standing by my truck, waving his hands, telling me he’s okay, knowing that I was waiting to see him, knowing how I love him.

Finding a home for schooling

The German home-schooling family which fled the government in their country has been granted asylum by a federal immigration judge in Memphis, on the grounds that they face persecution for both their religious beliefs and their social group. The U.S. Immigration and Customs authority is appealing the judge’s decision, reportedly for fear of inviting applications from many more home-schooling families persecuted across Europe. Apparently that would be some sort of tragedy, having to deal with thousands of families so committed to educating their children that they’re willing to face the onus of their secular governments.

How wise is the SitG crowd?

I’ve been working for days on a spreadsheet for my publisher, listing not only my media contacts and influential acquaintances — all of whom will receive advance copies of my book in hopes that they will read it and subsequently say good things to thousands of book-buying citizens — but also renowned parents. The thought is, since this is a book about faith and raising children and just trying to get by in life when the whole world seems sometimes like it wants to chew you up, that we might send copies of the book to said personages in hopes that, by virtue of being parents, they’ll be inclined to give the book a read and then perhaps mention it to a few thousand of their closest friends.

So here I sit, hunched over my laptop in our luxurious wooded headquarters at an undisclosed location in the heartland. It occurs to me that I should read the list to Wife, in case she has an idea or two. When I finish, the woman who took all of two economics classes in her undergraduate and graduate careers tells me, the political science PhD who often teaches economics concepts, that I ought to ask you, the brilliant masses, for your ideas. Harness the power of the crowd, in other words.

I hate when she has a good idea that I should have thought of first.

So what do you think? Who are famous parents who come to mind when you think of the intersection between faithful striving and dedicated parenting?

Scouting the handbook

In Friday’s Wall Street Journal I assess the state of the Boy Scout Handbook after 100 years of revisions:

Scouts founders hoped the BSA could remain above politics and address character. They couldn’t anticipate the day when a future honorary Scout president would insist that the word “is” has debatable meanings.

UPDATE:

And yes, if you read all the way to the byline, you’ll see I have a book coming out this spring. I’m sorry, dear readers, that you had to find out from someone else like that. I kept meaning to tell you, but then I thought I’d wait until I could get some nifty buttons for you to click through to each of the major booksellers who have it available for pre-order, and then we got some lovely new cover art and so I figured I should wait until that was what one sees at the booksellers’ websites, and so on and so on, and so now you know. It’s a memoir called Somewhere More Holy, and in every chapter I tell the stories of a room in our house, the death and life, the mourning and joy, faith gained and lost and somehow found again.

So if you’re suitably inclined, feel free to skip on over to one of the following booksellers and get yourself a copy on pre-order, at a discount over the list price. Who knows, if you get enough of your friends and neighbors to buy a copy, maybe I’ll come visit your neck of the woods, eat some of your food, and tell you some stories.

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Borders

Christianbook

Because the Church has a history between Acts and 1536

“But what proof is there that we have a right belief in God, that we have a trustworthy and devout understanding of Him? It is that we confess the same faith as our God-bearing Fathers.” (St. Gregory Palamas, Homily On Faith- Delivered on the Sunday of Orthodoxy)

Own it

Jim Taylor on instilling self-esteem in children:

“Parents were told to love and praise and reinforce and reward and encourage their children no matter what they did. Unfortunately, this approach created children who were selfish, spoiled, and entitled. . . without [a] sense of ownership, children are thoroughly unprepared for the adulthood because in the real world our actions do have consequences.”

Art and criticism vs. the world

“Like legitimate art, legitimate criticism is a tragicomic holding action against entropy.”  (John Gardner, On Moral Fiction, p. 6)