Meanderings, 17 September 2022
Good morning! I had a wonderful week with our new DMin in New Testament Context cohort — good people. We had donuts one day from Stan’s, and if you don’t know Stan’s Donuts (and I didn’t), then you may need to make a stop.
Immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard:
Planes carrying 50 migrants from Venezuela and Colombia landed unexpectedly at Martha’s Vineyard Airport Wednesday afternoon. Island officials and volunteers quickly rallied to find temporary shelter for the group.
“We’re immigrants,” Eliase, who said he was from Venezuela, told the Gazette. “We came here because of the situation in our country, for the economy, for work, for lots of things. I came here walking. We went through 10 different countries until we got to Texas. There, a refugee association put us in a plane and told us there would be work and housing here. I feel good, despite everything. We spent four days in Texas so it’s good to be here."…
A coalition of emergency management officials, faith groups, nonprofit agencies and county and town officials were organizing food and shelter for the migrants, who spent Wednesday night at St. Andrews Church in Edgartown. The Salvation Army, among others, was providing food. …
As word spread of the migrants' plight, a crowd of people — many eager to offer assistance — gathered outside the church. Edgartown Police Lt. Chris Dolby urged people not to deliver additional donations.
Speaking outside the parish hall Thursday morning, state Rep. Dylan Fernandes said the situation was under control "with local law enforcement jumping into action."
“People were served breakfast this morning by the parish and served lunch by the school system. We are a community that helps one another and you can see that here,” he said.
And that’s not all there is to the story. John Hawthorne adds more.
Announcing Fuller’s new seminary president.
I live in central Ohio and the big news here is the Intel ground breaking last Friday, September 9, 2022. This was made possible in part by the CHIPS Act, signed into law recently by President Biden, who spoke at the ground breaking. The talk is of 10,000 new jobs plus 7,000 construction jobs, and who knows how many other jobs that will be attracted by the presence of this tech giant. Everyone speaks how important this is to achieve microchip security, jeopardized by our recent supply chain issues where chips for everything from automobiles to refrigerators were in short supply. Our area colleges are re-shaping curricula to provide the training for the technicians, programmers, and engineers the company will need. This is being made possible by a significant flow of money.
It might be questioned why all these chips have become so necessary and ubiquitous in our lives. But what I’ve been thinking about quite a bit of late is why a similar focus is not being placed on the security and sustainability of our food supply. Some of us grew up in a world without chips, but none of us have grown up or can long survive a world without food.
What concerns me is where food comes from. Do you know where the food you ate for breakfast came from beyond your local grocery? I cannot say I do, but when I’ve been able to find out, I’m often surprised the distance that food has traveled to my table and the processes it has undergone during that journey. What I wonder if we’ve thought about is how “breakable” those complex logistical chains are. We tasted something of that with particular products during the pandemic. Recently, some infants were left without the formula they needed due to allergies when there were problems at ONE manufacturing plant. Part of the stop gap was shipping formula from overseas in huge transports.
Of course, all of this is has a large carbon footprint–from the fertilizer and farm machinery to the transport, refrigeration, processing, and more transport to local groceries. I wonder if it is a dangerous assumption that this will always work.
There was a time when most of our food came from within 50 miles of our home. If we lived in the country as opposed to a town or city, much came from our own land. Even during World War Two, “Victory Gardens” were popular and people grew a sizable part of their food in their backyard, canning some of it to last through the winter.
Speaking of food, here’s some chicken news:
The National Chicken Council (NCC) is a special interest group representing the chicken industry in the United States.[1] According to them, “[Chicken is] one of the most successful sectors in agriculture. In a little over 50 years, the U.S. broiler industry has evolved from fragmented, locally oriented businesses into a highly efficient, vertically integrated, progressive success story.”
That’s their story, and they’re sticking to it.
They’re also paying for it. For decades, NCC has consistently ranked near the top of all organizations that have contributed to campaigns or lobbied in Washington.[2] They have spent many millions to buy the favor of politicians—both Republicans and Democrats—over the years, and that investment continues to pay off in various ways.
You might have heard of “ag-gag laws,” a notorious tactic for protecting the interests of industrialized animal farming operations.[3] They do so by criminalizing investigative reporting and whistleblowing activities at farming operations. In effect, these laws criminalize transparency. Many states have tried to pass such laws, and several have succeeded. Still, there has been resistance: in 2015, the US District Court struck down Idaho’s ag-gag law on the grounds that it violated constitutionally protected rights of free speech and equal protection.[4]
The animal agriculture industry does not want you to know how the sausage gets made. Whenever possible, they attempt to hide their operations from the public. Some of those attempts are surprisingly brazen, their claims so obviously dubious. It’s as if they don’t expect us to do the most basic research. …
There is, surely, only one thing NCC genuinely cares about—maximizing profit for the industry they represent. They are an engine designed to generate money. When they aren’t investing in shaping the thinking of politicians; when they aren’t making ludicrous claims about animal welfare; they are often making projections about profitability.
In 2021, they looked at the per capita consumption of poultry and livestock since 1965, with projections into 2023.[10] They show that per capita total red meat consumption has decreased 23% in the last 50 years, while per capita total poultry consumption has increased nearly 125% in the same period, from 50.4 pounds to 113.3 pounds. Data from the OECD iLibrary show similar trends around the world: per capita consumption of poultry has increased in countries regardless of whether their economies are designated developed, developing, or least developed.[11]
These trends reflect more than consumer demand. They are the measure of a massive system of violence. And the consequences are not discussed often enough.
Looping in education: good idea or not?
The practice of “looping,” or pairing teachers with one class of students from grade to grade, is sometimes informally used to address school staffing issues, but research shows there are benefits to the students who keep their teacher for more than one year.
Austin, Texas-based math teacher Mark Rogers has been looping for about a decade, starting when he agreed to continue teaching his eighth-grade students the following year as ninth graders.
“Everybody knew everybody’s names. I had all their parents’ contact information. I knew what their strengths were. I knew how to help them …” he said. “So we basically squeezed in an extra two to four weeks of instruction in that year just because I already knew them.”
Looping has been used in American schools for decades. As with Rogers’ first experience, most looping is unintentional as students move through grade levels and schools need to fill teaching slots.
But some education professionals believe looping provides benefits for students and should be used more intentionally.
The Eurocentric bias in church history/history of Christianity:
This broader Christianity is “known,” at least among specialists of various sub-disciplines of Eastern Christian studies (Armenologists, Coptologists, Syriacists, etc.), yet despite a few attempts to integrate it with the History of Christianity discipline (e.g. Philip Jenkins), the broader public and the teaching of the history of Christianity in Anglophone universities and seminaries largely continues to follow the exclusionary contours of “Western Civilization,” as if that were a real historical phenomenon rather than a white supremacist fiction. Books by historians of American or Western European Christianity get labeled “History of Christianity” simpliciter; books by historians of Asian or African Christianity after late antiquity get labeled by sub-discipline and generally not reviewed in Church History journals nor read by historians of Western Christianity, nor by a broader Western public (though sometimes in diaspora communities).
The scholarly discipline of the History of Christianity continues to perpetuate the imbalance in global coverage of the Christian religion: the ProQuest dissertation database records almost three times as many dissertations about just the Franciscan movement (1,146) as about the entire almost two-millennia-old Syriac tradition that spanned from Jerusalem to India and China (423), a proportion maintained if one considers only the past five years (187 vs. 60). To be clear, the problem here is not the larger number: There is still a lot to learn about the Franciscans, but how much more about an entire branch of Christianity that spread over a continent?
Some will inevitably ask whether these imbalances are a problem: Is the history of Christianity Eurocentric just because European varieties of the faith are more important historically? The short answer is no. The “rediscovery” of Aristotle, Galenic medicine, and other Greek “classics” in medieval Western Europe was mediated by Arabic-speaking Muslims and Jews, who received Aristotle from Arabic speaking Christian translators (most notably Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq) working in Baghdad. Yet, few non-specialists today have heard his name, though it was known (in the Latinized form Johannitius) to medieval Latin authors themselves. There has been a convenient forgetting.