Meanderings, 23 March 24

It’s Spring, but we have fresh snow on the ground. February in March! Buds and flowers with snow.

Photo by Haberdoedas on Unsplash

Prayers for Princess Kate:

Kate, the Princess of Wales, was diagnosed with cancer and is undergoing chemotherapy, she said in a video message released on Friday, two months after she underwent "major" abdominal surgery.

The type of cancer has not been disclosed. She started chemotherapy in late February.

The announcement sparked an outpouring of support and comes as her father-in-law, King Charles, also undergoes cancer treatment.

"This of course came as a huge shock, and William and I have been doing everything we can to process and manage this privately for the sake of our young family," Kate, 42, said in the video, which was filmed at Windsor on Wednesday. "As you can imagine, this has taken time. It has taken me time to recover from major surgery in order to start my treatment."

The cancer was discovered in post-operative tests after her abdominal surgery in mid-January, Kate said.

Good words from Roger about education as transformation:

As most readers here will already know, I was (and am still to some extend) involved in post-high school education for many years. I entered college in 1970, seminary in 1975, university in 1978. I earned two master’s degrees and a doctoral degree and studied in Germany. I began my teaching career at a Christian university in 1982, continued at a Christian liberal arts college in 1984, and became a tenured, full professor at a Christian university in 1999. I held a named and endowed chair in Christian ethics and taught Christian theology and still do. I hold the title of Emeritus Professor in retirement.

My family called me a “professional student,” up until I finally (!) received my Ph.D. One close family member told me to beware of becoming an “over educated idiot.”

Looking back on all that education, really including high school (I graduated from a fine high school), I ask myself what it did for me beyond learning a bunch of information. Simply put, it transformed me. Good education transforms a person, at least a person who really takes it in and allows it to change him or her.

How does good education transform a person—beyond filling his or her head with “facts?” Well, I believe filling one’s head with facts or ideas is really NOT the main value of education.

So what is the main value of good education? What makes education good?

Good education forms a person into a critical thinker. That doesn’t mean a chronic skeptic! A critical thinker is someone who knows how to examine an idea by its history, context and coherence—coherence with other, more grounded ideas and inner coherence as logical consistency. A critical thinker learns to step back from ideas put before him or her and ask questions, even the right questions. A critical thinker is slow to embrace any idea until it is examined. And examining an idea requires a certain “distance” from it.

Moody and Janay Garrick:

An appeals court in Chicago has ruled that a discrimination lawsuit against the Moody Bible Institute (MBI) by a former MBI professor may proceed. It’s the latest development in a six-year legal battle, pitting claims of sex discrimination against those of religious freedom.

For three years, Janay Garrick had taught communications classes at the prominent evangelical Bible school in Chicago, ending in late 2017. She sued MBI in 2018, claiming that “disparate treatment based on sex” and other Title VII civil rights violations motivated MBI leaders to fire her. 

On Monday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit dismissed an appeal that MBI had filed last year, seeking the dismissal of Garrick’s suit. MBI claimed Garrick was fired “because she rejected and publicly decried its core beliefs about church leadership.” 

Attorneys for MBI cited the “church autonomy doctrine,” a legal principle which protects the right of religious institutions to govern themselves. 

The Aussie is asked this question:

“Which side are you on?”

That’s the question I get asked about the Israel-Gaza conflict on social media, by friends, family, and my students.

I tell them, “Honestly, neither!”

Like many of you, I watched the news about the October 7 attack with horror at its premeditated brutality, 1400 deaths, kidnappings, rape, and murder … of civilians and tourists. Then, the subsequent Israelis’ bombing of Gaza revealed a disproportionate and indiscriminate response resulting in now close to 30, 000 deaths, famine, destruction of schools and hospitals. I feel revulsion at both the actions of Hamas and at the Israelis’ counter-offensive.

This is not both-side-ism, I’m not trying to level the moral playing field, as if to say, “They are both as bad as each other.” What I’m saying is that I honestly believe that no party in this conflict is defensible in their actions and ethos because … deep breath … both parties are committed to the annihilation of the other.

Yet it’s hard to speak to people about this at times because people on both sides live in alternative factual universes. Some people can’t bring themselves to acknowledge the Hamas atrocities just as others can’t bring themselves to acknowledge the Israelis brutality against Gazans. Or, if they do, they have a way to rationalize it and explain it away. It’s near impossible to morally reason with people who believe one side can do no wrong and the other side has no rights. It’s tribalism, in-group, and living in an isolated news bubble.

Wyatt Reynolds and Pretendians:

“You should always be proud of being an Indian. But never tell anyone.” This was essentially all my father told me about our Native heritage. Later, he would tell me a bit about his mother dying and made sure my siblings and I were recognized as citizens of the Chickasaw Nation. I only ever saw one picture of my grandmother until I was in college. Everything else I would learn about my Native American story would be largely without my dad’s help. I tell you this because of the strange similarities and differences between my own story and that of Elizabeth Hoover, who the New Yorker recently profiled. Hoover is a tenured professor of environmental science, policy and management at the University of California, Berkley who was recently outed for having lied about being part of Native American communities. She received her doctorate from Brown and her bachelor’s at Williams College. At both institutions, she claimed to be both Mohawk and Mi’kmaq. The New Yorker piece left me dissatisfied for a few reasons, and made me want to tell a different story of this process, my own.

The phenomenon of “passing” or living as a different identity than whatever one was born as has been incredibly common across history. Even in the last fifty years, a New York Times film critic lived as a white man despite having been born to a black parent in Louisiana, and an award winning “Afro-Cuban” novelist hid behind this assumed identity, keeping the truth from even his partner. This practice has almost always been in the direction of racialized minority passing as white. It is only in the last few years that we have seen white people present themselves as racialized minorities. Why? The same reason the reverse happened for so long: one believes life will be easier this way. The term “pretendian” has come to be a catch-all for non-Natives who lie or fake about their lives and connections to Indigenous communities. Perhaps the most famous examples are Senator Elizabeth Warren and Andrea Smith, an anthropologist who taught for many years at UC-Riverside and other universities. This mode of falsehood has become particularly popular in the realms of politics and the academy.

My friend is writing about Revelation: for good reasons!

Next week, I'm taking a break from Revelation to observe Holy Week and prepare my Easter teachings. But I wanted to do something different this week. One question that keeps popping up in conversations is why.

Why am I teaching and writing about this bizarre book at the end of the Bible?

It’s quite simple. I believe that Revelation was written to confront much of the idolatry we are witnessing today, and I want to take a few minutes (and two thousand words) to explain myself. …

The problems started when I began reading church history and realized that no one in the Early Church, the Byzantine Church, or the Medieval Church made mention of any of the ideas foundational to these speculative readings. I also learned that this type of speculative reading first appeared as recently as the 1830s.¹ This means that before the 19th century, Christians neither taught nor believed what I had received through my faith tradition.

This was the start of a lengthy deconstruction and detangling of dispensationalist eschatology (study of the end of days) from my faith. And with that detangling came a “revelation” that my eschatology only worked if I was a part of one particular political party. I noticed that the faith I had been given was all tangled up in a web of right-wing politics that placed Republicans on one side of the book (the good side) and Democrats on the other (the enemies of Christ).

By my mid-twenties, I had shaken those ideas loose, but I had not learned how to replace them with something better. Old habits are hard to break, so as I read Revelation my brain would default to my old speculative ways of reading.

I suddenly realized why my pastors wouldn’t preach the book. They simply didn’t know how, and when they sought better sources, they were often accused of having suspect theology. As a result, I would not preach through it. I would teach on the seven churches from chapters 2 and 3, but I would venture no further.