Meanderings, 17 February 2024
The highlight of this week for Kris and me was Caitlin Clark smashing the scoring record for women’s NCAA basketball. And a charming sidelight was how her teammates and coaches took it all in, including her coach Lisa Bluder, who took some fun credit for the chant of Clark’s adoring fans.
IOWA CITY, Iowa -- Caitlin Clark had no specific plan for how she hoped to break the NCAA women's basketball scoring record Thursday. But after doing so while also setting the Iowa Hawkeyes' single-game scoring record, Clark had to grin.
"You all knew I was going to shoot a logo 3 for the record," said Clark, who now has 3,569 career points, 49 of them coming Thursday. And indeed, every aspect of the night seemed storybook perfect for the senior star.
Clark came into No. 4 Iowa's game against Michigan with 3,520 points, needing eight to break the mark previously set by Washington's Kelsey Plum (3,527) from 2013 to 2017. Clark did it about as quickly as she possibly could. …
Clark could stay another season at Iowa, because of the COVID-19 waiver from 2020-21, or she could declare for the 2024 WNBA draft, where she is certain to be the No. 1 pick. Clark said she will wait to make that decision until after this season.
The Carver-Hawkeye crowd chanted, "One more year!" at the conclusion of Thursday's game.
"I paid them," Bluder joked. "I thought it was a pretty good chant."
Who is preaching to the choir now?
Media criticism, we need more of it:
An ever-expanding pack of press watchers is expressing anger about mainstream media political coverage as the nation enters a make-or-break period for democracy.
Writing for magazines, in opinion columns, and especially in newsletters, these media critics are particularly upset at how political reporters continue to use the same both-sides constructions that served them in the distant past — effectively normalizing the anti-democratic extremism of Donald Trump and the modern Republican Party. They express concern that the mainstream media is underestimating and underreporting the threat to democracy.
They were particularly triggered by last week’s extraordinary overreaction to a special counsel’s gratuitous comments about President Biden’s mental acuity.
So what good is all this media criticism? As it happens, political strategist and media critic Jamison Foser, writing in his Finding Gravity newsletter, recently offered three excellent answers to that question:
First:
Forceful, reasoned media critiques can shift behavior around the margins — a little more coverage of something that’s been underplayed, a little less of something over-played, a reconsideration of a unsupported assumption or an underlying bias. It isn’t particularly efficient, it isn’t going to lead to the wholesale changes it should, but in a closely-divided country changes at the margins can be decisive….
Second:
Changing the news media is not the only goal of media criticism. Another is changing the way people react to the news media….
Third:
[M]edia criticism is often a useful vehicle for carrying other messages. When people criticize the New York Times for, for example, downplaying the threat of Donald Trump banning abortion, we aren’t just ineffectually criticizing the Times: We’re telling our audience that Donald Trump will ban abortion.
I would add a fourth answer: Media criticism gives voice to many frustrated readers — and reassures them that they aren’t alone.
We talk about “gospel” as if it were a set of precepts and doctrines we must adhere to in order to be saved and forgiven of our sins, but gospel is “good news.” This definition is inherent in the Greek word evangelion.
In Luke, Jesus read from the Isaiah scroll to his assembled Nazarene peers. He proclaimed a gospel of good news for the poor, freedom for captives, and the throwing open of prison doors for those held within (Luke 4:12-13).
Yet, 1500 years later, a man named Columbus would erect a flag on a land he conquered and Christians would see this conquest as a proclamation of “gospel.” How much did Columbus’s proclamations and actions reflect glad tidings of good news, especially for the poor, the captive, and the bound? Do we continue to see the colonial project Columbus helped birth as a cause to be celebrated?
This essay is an examination of our notion of “gospel,” exploring our complacent inheritance of and failure to challenge “ungospels.” Ungospels are fables that spring forth from predators in sheep’s clothing, whose motive it is to devour. Ungospel evangelists operate in the way abusers do: by earning trust using deception. They groom their prey and those around them, convincing the world of their good intent. Their false gospel hinges on gaining control, on domination. That domination never proclaims itself as evil. A predator does not plant himself in a congregation and say, “I am here to find people I can abuse.”
On the mission drift of Christian colleges, here and here:
I was also aware of other colleges and universities that had “kept the faith.” I thought Burtchaell was overly pessimistic about the state of Christian higher education. I thought also that he had a too stringent set of requirements for “keeping the light alive.” There were other sorts of church-related colleges, I thought, that could persist as Christian colleges even though they did not live up to his stern criteria.
In 1999–2000 I had a sabbatical that I spent at Valparaiso University, researching and writing a book on Christian higher education that was something of a challenge to Burtchaell’s pessimism. I wrote Quality with Soul: How Six Premier Colleges and Universities Keep Faith with Their Religious Traditions.4 I researched and visited all six: Notre Dame, Baylor, Wheaton, Calvin, St. Olaf, and Valparaiso. I was convinced that the light had persisted and even strengthened in some of them.
I developed a typology that sorted out the six. Two were what I called “orthodox,” because all members of the faculty and staff had to be Christians of a certain tradition. They were Wheaton and Calvin. The other four were what I called “critical mass,” wherein the administrators of the school kept roughly two-thirds of the faculty, staff, and student body composed of members of the sponsoring tradition. The Christian vision was the guiding paradigm for the life of the school.
I even argued for a third type—“intentional pluralism”—in which the Christian vision was given a “place at the table,” even though most of the faculty, staff, and students were not committed to the formative role of religion in the school. That type fit my school, Roanoke College, at which the presidents during the 80s and 90s seemed to guarantee a “place at the table” for serious Christians in the faculty, staff, and student body.
I thought my book refuted or at least qualified Burtchaell’s pessimism. Further, I was relieved that he was interdicted and could not write a scathing review of my book in First Things. Burtchaell did not suffer fools gladly.
However, one day about a year after Eerdmans published my book, I received in the mail a thick envelope from a J. Burtchaell. Initially he was quite complimentary in his long letter, but then announced the verdict: you are wrong on two types, the critical mass and he intentional pluralism. Both are unstable, and those schools will secularize within a decade or so. Only the orthodox will survive, and they will have to take care.
It’s been a long time since I received the letter. At first, I didn’t accept his verdict, but as the new century has progressed, I was haunted by his judgement that the two types were unstable and would weaken. ….
Nevertheless, the book is extremely important. It reinforces Burtchaell’s insistence that a serious Christian school must have high standards of hiring. It has to have an explicit, orthodox, Christian mission and it has to hire administrators, faculty, and staff for that mission. It has to have a fully informed and committed board that insists on those things happening. Above all, it needs a president committed to an orthodox vision who is willing to insist on a board that understands and supports it, as well as one who insists on hiring according to that vision. Without that there will be a slow accommodation to the secular, elite culture that is so insistent in the “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” ideology. Indeed, if a college or university has swallowed that ideology whole, orthodox Christianity will move out as it moves in. (Some Christian schools have “massaged” that ideology enough that it might not be fatal, but it is still very worrisome. For others, it will be fatal.)
The current winter season (2023-24) began with very warm air temperatures, resulting in slow ice formation. January 2024 did see some periods of cold, but they were not sustained long enough to allow ice coverage to increase with our current year peak reaching between 15-20% coverage during the third week of January. Maximum ice cover for the year usually peaks in late February or early March and, on average, the Great Lakes experience a basin-wide maximum in annual ice coverage of about 53%.
Communities around the lakes have strong economic ties to the ice levels and the changes in ice cover can have big impacts on the people living there. Many local businesses in the area rely on ice fishing and outdoor sports which can only happen if the ice is thick and solid. Some fish species also use the ice for protection from predators during spawning season, and there’s increasing evidence that the ice plays a role in regulating many biological processes in the water. Shipping schedules are heavily impacted by the formation of ice, as well.
The absence of ice can also make the shoreline more susceptible to erosion and increase the potential for damage to coastal infrastructure during the winter months due to high winds and waves. Thick ice often acts to dampen the large wave action and protect the shoreline. Lack of ice cover can also increase lake effect snow.
Mercy! (Accurate or not?)
A Florida school has received backlash after it required parents to provide written consent allowing their children to engage with a Black author’s book. The permission form detailed an activity in which “students will participate and listen to a book written by an African American”.
Chuck Walter, a parent at Coral Way K-8 in Miami, posted a photo of the slip on X, writing: “I had to give permission for this or else my child would not participate???” He tagged the Miami-Dade county public schools superintendent, Jose L Dotres. (Dotres’s office did not immediately respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.)
Walter’s post comes days after another Miami school, iPrep Academy, drew ire for asking for parents’ permission for students to participate in “class and school wide presentations showcasing the achievements and recognizing the rich and diverse traditions, histories, and innumerable contributions of the Black communities”.
The permission slips indicate how some Florida schools are trying to comply with the state’s “Parental Rights in Education” law, more commonly known as the “don’t say gay” law, and the “Stop Woke Act”, both signed by the governor, Ron DeSantis, in 2022. The former prohibits discussions of sexuality and gender in classrooms, while the latter regulates how race and race issues can be taught in schools. Critics have suggested that Florida lawmakers are aiming for erasure or to teach a false history to the state’s children.
The Florida commissioner of education, Manny Díaz, called the situation a “hoax”, posting on X: “Florida does not require a permission slip to teach African American history or to celebrate Black History Month. Any school that does this is completely in the wrong.”
But DeSantis and other Republican lawmakers in the state have created an environment in which teachers are severely limited in how they can discuss race, gender and sexual orientation in all grades, and officials have not provided concrete guidance on how to comply. As a result, some teachers and districts have created policies, like the permission slip policy, to ensure they are acting in accord with the law.
Here, too.
I really do appreciate your Saturday meanderings