Meanderings, 16 September 2023

Good morning from Naxos, a Greek island in the Cyclades!

What has survived of an ancient temple at Chora on Naxos. The water, the sky. So blue.

A Wheaton College task force has released a 122-page historical report on race relations at the evangelical institution. Read it here.

Here is Daniel Silliman and Kate Shellnut at Christianity Today:

Though the flagship evangelical institution was founded by abolitionists, over the next century and a half it turned away from concerns about racial equality. Even when the school’s leadership knew what was right, they frequently lacked the courage to “take a more vocal role in opposing widespread forms of racism and white supremacy,” the report says, and too often “chose to stay silent, equivocate, or do nothing” about racial injustice.

“We cannot be healed and cannot be reconciled unless and until we repent,” the task force concluded at the end of an 18-month study. “These sins constituted a failure of Christian love; denied the dignity of people made in the image of God; created deep and painful barriers between Christian brothers and sisters; tarnished our witness to the gospel; and prevented us from displaying more fully the beautiful diversity of God’s kingdom.”

President Philip Ryken told CT he believes the report is important and he’s glad the college will be making it publicly available.

Read the rest here.

Mark R. Elliott and the Asbury Revival:

What word would you share with critics or skeptics of events like this?

In writing Taken by Surprise, I originally did not intend to address criticisms, preferring to let descriptions of the winsome character of worship and spiritual renewal speak for themselves. But negative assessments—often by individuals who were not in attendance—ended up generating an appendix titled, “A Critique of the Critics.” In answer to the question if what was happening at Asbury was really genuine, the stress is upon marks of authenticity, many of which run counter to society’s expectations of Gen Z youth and an increasingly irreligious age. As examples:

The night of February 12, the Super Bowl could not compete with worship on the campus of Asbury University and Asbury Seminary across the street. One student told LEX18 News: “Like I’m a big Eagles fan, and I didn’t even watch the Super Bowl.”

One worshipper, and not of the Asbury tribe, told a Washington Post reporter onsite, “You can’t tell a bunch of college students that we’re going to pray together all night and share our secrets. You can’t plan that or engineer that.”

In March–May 2023 Asbury University’s counseling service experienced an eight-fold drop in student appointments compared to the previous spring; and Asbury’s student body president offered her own no-nonsense critique: “I know this campus very well. It’s small, and I know exactly which students on this campus hate each other. Those are the people I have seen praying together, singing together, hugging, crying. . . . It’s been totally life-changing.”

By all accounts, because of the revival that surprised Asbury in February 2023, many will never be the same—and for the better.

The cost of a seminary education by Ryan Burge:

I didn’t go to seminary. I went to graduate school. I *almost* went to seminary, though. And just a few months ago I got invited to be on a panel at Wake Forest University‘s School of Divinity. I realized something very important during that visit - divinity schools are a completely different thing compared to graduate programs in something like political science.

For instance, they had an alumni reception and dozens and dozens of former students actually showed up! That would never ever happen if, let’s say, Michigan State’s graduate program in political science had a reception on campus. One big reason? Almost all the graduates have moved away from the East Lansing area. Every once in a while, some SIU grads will get together at the Midwest Political Science Conference for dinner, but that’s about as far as it goes. Divinity schools have a stronger sense of community than I am accustomed to.

Another thing that I find really interesting about divinity schools is what happens when a new dean takes over. I saw tons of pictures of Edward Aponte’s installation service at Drew Theological School. Dozens of alumni came back and joined the ceremony with full regalia. It was a big event that was live streamed. I didn’t even know who our dean was when I was in graduate school. There was no installation service. The new dean just showed up in June and moved into their office with no fanfare.

(These are the kind of things I notice as a social scientist, by the way. And, yes, it does annoy my wife that I have to point all this out. But I am always looking for little cultural differences.)

But beyond all of that cultural stuff, I think that seminaries are just an incredibly important part of the religious economy. In many ways they are the canary in the coal mine for the health of American religion. If a tradition is training up a bunch of seminarians, one has to assume that it’s because there is demand there. If their enrollments are declining, that’s because things aren’t going well in the denomination.

Well, I have some data about seminary enrollment. It comes from the Association of Theological Schools (ATS), which was founded in 1918 and lists 273 member schools. They put together a really comprehensive report about the enrollment, faculty, cost, and other factors from all their members and publish it each year. It’s a treasure trove of information, which is formatted as a PDF (which is super annoying from a data analysis perspective).

I am going to just give you my first cut at this data in this post. There are tons of other areas to explore in future posts if this one gets some good feedback. The one metric I am going to use in this post is: head count, full time equivalent. This means that only full-time students get counted as one, part-time students count fractionally.

Our theme of education today continues with Charlie Rapple on the “curse of knowledge,” which is that we think we know what others know!

A recent episode of QI introduced me to the “curse of knowledge”. It was not a phrase or an experiment I’d been aware of, but I recognize the concept. It’s when we assume everyone else understands what we’re talking about, when they don’t. Or, perhaps, when we think we’re better at communicating than we in fact are.

QI reprized the 1990 research by Elizabeth Newton, where subjects had to tap out the rhythm of a song for others to guess (did anyone else’s dad insist on playing this game in the car?). From the Harvard Business Review: “Over the course of Newton’s experiment, 120 songs were tapped out. Listeners guessed only three of the songs correctly: a success ratio of 2.5%. But before they guessed, Newton asked the tappers to predict the probability that listeners would guess correctly. They predicted 50%.” Some attribute this to a lack of empathy — an inability to put ourselves in the shoes of the listener. (Cue one of my favorite Billy Connolly gags: “Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you’re a mile away — and you’ve got their shoes.”)

So: the Curse of Knowledge means that we overestimate how well we can convey information. Many of us in scholarly communications are exposed to its symptoms on a regular basis — asking researchers about their work, and then trying to keep up with what they tell us. It’s flattering, really, when the expert in the field assumes you are smart enough to be familiar with the concepts they bounce off as they extrapolate. You can always go and read up on it later (I often resort to writing down phonetic representations of what academics are saying to me, though this approach has its limitations; I once jotted down an aide-memoire for ‘Talcott Parsons’ which, when I returned to my notes, autocorrect had helpfully re-rendered as ‘Talcum Powder’). And I’ve vouched before for the ability of academics to pitch it more accessibly when talking to audiences that are clearly outside the circle of expertise — people are brilliant at explaining their research to children (or in Upgoer Five sessions at conferences, where the challenge is to explain your science in the 1,000 most commonly used words in the English language).

I think the Curse of Knowledge I see most commonly doesn’t arise from overestimating our own ability to convey information, or even from overestimating our audience’s existing knowledge on the topic. It’s more nuanced than that. To some extent, it’s a function of an urge to respect others, not to patronize them and talk down to them. In an age of microaggressions, academics know they must be careful not to treat non-academics as “lesser mortals”. The challenge is particularly acute not on the outer edges of the circle — we are happy to class children as being on the “boundary of ignorance” and thus use plain language when speaking to them. It’s when communicating with the people in the inner zones that we struggle to let ourselves speak in plain language. People in what I am grandiosely calling the Zone of Comprehension and Realm of Familiarity, in particular, fall under the shadow of our “cone of concern”. (I know, I missed my calling as a sociological nomenclator).

Mike Bird on electing leaders with “Christian values” and what could happen:

On Twitter, I sometimes get dragged into the occasional debate about why we need a government with “Christian values.”

Now, at one level, yes, I like the idea of an elected government that promotes ideals and values congruent with the Christian religion. Let me say too, that I believe Christians can serve in elected office and in public service. Also, Christians can and should advocate for things they believe in and value as it pertains to creating a better society.

But … be careful what you wish for. Because it might not turn out the way you think!

Remember this, secularism, the separation of church and state, was created to protect a minority of Christians from the majority of Christians.

Accordingly, the separation of church and state meant that a Catholic monarch could not force his Protestant subjects to attend Mass, Anglicans could not discriminate against Baptists when it came to getting a rental property, and Lutherans could not prohibit a Methodist from serving as a city councilor.

The problem is who gets to decide what Christian values are, what areas of life they matter in, and how they are to be applied or enforced. It is not only messy, it can lead to some dark places.

Remember this, if you want Christianity to be politically hegemonic, which type of Christianity gets to be hegemonic? Which denomination do you put in charge?

Do you want a Christian government requiring people to baptize their babies, to only worship according to the Book of Common Prayer, to burn the writings of John Wesley, summon a synod to approve the government’s plans to make tithing mandatory, or force Presbyterian churches to show screenings of The Chosen? A government that can enforce Christian principles, can also enforce Christian sectarianism.

Consider too that the Christian view of things is not always clear as Christianity has a diversity of views.

Can the government tell us what is the Christian view of war, immigration, marriage, taxation, divorce, healthcare, contraception, etc.? Christians differ themselves on these things, so how can a Christian government attach itself to one interpretation and enforce one particular position? I believe in just-war theory, but I don’t want to punish or persecute pacifists.

You might reply that I want a government that holds to “mere Christianity” not a specific denominational position. But that itself is a theological position! What counts as “mere Christianity” is open to interpretation and dispute. If you want a government to be Christian you cannot escape the theological judgments that a government would have to make and then impose.

Sunset in Naxos