Meanderings, 13 May 2023

It’s already mid May. The grasses are greening, the flowers are beginning to bud, the crabapple flowers are falling off, and the Columbine are just now bursting into bloom. All signs of summer around this home.

Photo by Jeffrey Hamilton on Unsplash

A golden retriever puppy for a comfort therapy dog: (good choice)

The Mundelein Police Department said they have added a new comfort therapy dog to their department thanks to a donation from a citizens police academy association.

The Golden Retriever puppy, named Millie, will be partnered with Mundelein Police Department social worker Stephanie Escobar.

The canine was made possible by a donation from the Mundelein Citizens Police Academy Alumni Association.

Escobar selected the female canine from a litter of puppies at TOPS Kennel in Grayslake.

On celebrating Mother’s Day:

Given what the Bible teaches about chosen or found families, how might a church honor Mother’s Day in a way that does not exclude non-parents?

• Look at how Jesus’ mother Mary appears in biblical stories. At Christmas she is generally portrayed quietly in blue robes smiling at her baby, but the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55) declares that God has brought the powerful down from their thrones and lifted up the lowly—like Mary. In John, Mary pushes Jesus into performing his first miracle at the wedding in Cana at Galilee (John 2:1-11). How can we as Christians emulate the mother of Jesus in assertiveness and activism?

• In formation classes, feature texts such as the one from Mark above or its parallels in Matthew and Luke to discuss how the Bible portrays families and discern how your church can function as Jesus’ mother and siblings by doing the will of God.

• Consider a longer series for formation classes, perhaps from Mother’s Day through Father’s Day, featuring stories about mothers such as Hagar, Hannah, Elizabeth, and Mary alongside stories of fruitful non-mothers such as Miriam, Huldah, Martha, and Mary Magdalene. If such a series extends until Father’s Day, consider also featuring fathers like Abraham or Joseph alongside fruitful non-fathers like Paul.

• Such lessons or series can also work in children’s Sunday school, whereas encouraging children to create some sort of gift for their own mother on Mother’s Day can alienate foster children or children whose mothers are deceased, estranged, or otherwise absent. Be aware of the circumstances of all the children in a particular class before asking them to create such crafts.

Mother’s Day is not a Christian calendar observance and when churches celebrate it anyway, some congregants may end up avoiding church on that day. If your church is unwilling to ignore the non-church holiday, focusing on Mary, Jesus’ teaching about families, or teaching about biblical parents alongside non-parents can make the Sunday accessible to all Christians.

Good on Baylor:

Charlie and Cindy Fuller of Woodway, Texas, along with their family, have committed $1.5 million to Baylor University to establish an endowed chair for social justice in the Garland School of Social Work.

The gift will qualify for matching support through Baylor’s Give Light Campaign, which to date has raised $1.3 billion. The campaign has created 791 endowed scholarships and 44 endowed faculty positions.

The Fuller Family Endowed Chair for Social Justice will support a faculty member researching and teaching about social justice for marginalized populations.

Baylor President Linda Livingstone called this a “transformational gift.”

The Garland School of Social Work — named for legendary Baptist social work educator Diana Garland — has developed a national reputation for combining biblical witness with social justice in its teaching. The school also is known for its dual-degree program in partnership with Baylor’s Truett Theological Seminary, by which some students earn both the master of divinity degree and the master of social work degree. Other dual degree programs also are offered.

Garland School alumni are serving in churches, agencies and private practice across the nation.

Social work education began as a department at Baylor in 1967. Baylor began offering an undergraduate degree in social work in 1976. In 1997, the university hired Diana Garland — who previously led the historic Carver School of Church Social Work in Louisville, Ky. — to expand classes to the graduate level. That led to formation of a school of social work in 1999. Garland was named dean in 2005.

Although Baylor is not directly affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, its social work school carries on a part of the tradition that for decades was nurtured among Southern Baptists through the Carver School. A change in administration at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary led to the closure of the Carver School as the new president declared social work education “not compatible” with the Bible.

Charlie and Cindy Fuller come from that tradition of a Southern Baptist Convention now long gone, where social justice was considered biblical.

Guns as a public health issue:

Dr. Deborah Prothrow-Stith was working in an emergency room as a medical student more than four decades ago when she realized that victims of violence were getting treated and then released — unlike other patients — without any sort of preventative care.

"And one night, at 3:00 in the morning, a young man just very specifically said to me that he was going to go out and cut the guy who cut him," she says. "I thought, this is not adequate. My response is not adequate. My profession's response is not adequate."

Prothrow-Stith has played a key role in defining youth violence as a public health issue in the years since (her 1991 book Deadly Consequences is considered a classic in the field). That means focusing on prevention efforts — not only in emergency rooms, but in doctor's offices and schools, too.

And guns are increasingly a part of that conversation.

Prothrow-Stith, who is dean and professor of medicine at the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science in Los Angeles, remembers that when she first started out, stabbings were "the number-one way that young men were killed" in Philadelphia. The picture of violence changed dramatically in a matter of years.

"Guns in America play a huge role, especially as we start looking at weapons of war being available and the mass shootings that are taking place," Prothrow-Stith tells Morning Edition's Michel Martin.

… How would prevention work from a public health perspective? Prothrow-Stith uses the analogy of cigarette smoking and lung cancer.

First, there's primary prevention, which involves informing the general public of the consequences of smoking. The second phase is helping smokers quit, and the third is treatment for those who have lung cancer.

When it comes to gun violence, Prothrow-Stith says the primary phase should be raising awareness and trying to increase safety.

The secondary phase is about understanding the risk factors. "How do we help children who are hurt, either because they're victims of violence or they're witnessing violence, especially domestic violence or gang violence, on a regular basis?" she asks. "How do we help them heal from the anger, the guilt, the pain, but also give them the strategies to move forward?"

Many people are used to thinking about guns as a political issue rather than a public health issue. But Prothrow-Stith says a more productive way to talk about it would be to start where the U.S. has seen success in the past: in banning assault weapons from 1994 to 2004.

Studies have shown a decrease in gun massacre deaths during the decade the federal ban was in place — and an increase after it expired, which Prothrow-Stith attributes to the gun industry strategically "flood[ing] the market" with assault weapons.

Amen!

Just tell the (fill in the blank) _________________ denomination that one to exhibit that history does not show the slippery slope, and he should know better.

Allowing women to serve in churches with the title “pastor” is a slippery slope that will lead to acceptance of gay, lesbian and transgender pastors next, according to a Virginia pastor calling for an amendment to the Southern Baptist Convention’s constitution.

Mike Law, pastor of Arlington Baptist Church in Arlington, Va., has released a series of video vignettes addressing his proposed amendment to exclude from the SBC any church with a woman serving as “pastor.”

While the SBC already is not a safe haven for women as senior pastors, Law and other ultraconservatives want to enforce their view that the “office of pastor” is a specific title given by God only to men. Law recently published a list of 170 women serving in SBC churches in Virginia and Texas who have “pastor” in their titles or who have what he believes to be improper authority in the church.

“God’s word and the Baptist Faith and Message limit this office to qualified men,” Law says in the video opening. “In a culture that is seeking to undermine the good and God-given distinctions between men and women, this kind of mindset has made major inroads in our convention.”

This is a dangerous path, he insists, that will lead the SBC to become like other declining mainline denominations.

“This issue has been a canary in the coal mine for many denominations and maybe for ours if we do not stand with conviction and clarity,” he declares. “Generally speaking, history shows that once a denomination allows female pastors it’s usually just a matter of time until they affirm practicing homosexuals as pastors.”

And, this, on IQ tests and genius:

A simple way of saying it: When I read Tolstoy, what I think is that the man was a genius. If he scored a 120 on an IQ test, that would reflect on IQ tests, not Tolstoy. This holds true in my personal experience as well. I’ve known a couple people in life who got perfect or near-perfect SAT scores and went on to places like Harvard and MIT. I would consider none of them geniuses. They just didn’t have it. On the other hand, I’ve also been lucky enough to be able to meet, and occasionally work alongside, people I would consider scientific geniuses. Yet never once did I feel that an IQ test would capture these people operating at the highest level of intellectual output (who I will avoid the embarrassment of name dropping). Many of these intellectual stars were not even quick-witted. Sure, all of them were smart, obviously so, and all of them would score above average, likely well above average, on an IQ test. But their individual rankings on those tests, when compared to each other, would mean absolutely nothing. It would just be dead information. Far more important was how they were deep creative thinkers with good instincts for what questions were fecund, coupled with an obsessive drive to pursue those questions. They had elegant minds, deep pools of expertise, and often voracious cultural knowledge outside their chosen discipline. They were people on fire with thought. So if you only did pretty good on the SAT, don’t worry too much. The evidence says you can still win the Nobel Prize.