A good friend recently emailed me and asked when my next installment would be posted in light of the intensity of the November election that is racing towards us. My confession is that I don’t know who is really reading these posts. I thrive off of interaction—even responses that are contrary or challenging. I love dialogue. I love the classroom. So, thanks to Josh Bottomly’s encouragemnt, here are some more thoughts/concerns about the presidential race.
I’m scared. I’m scared not just about this present race, but I’m finding myself feeling light headed and nauseous about our election process as a whole. Our democracy is being sullied and is degenerating into 15-second video/sound bytes. We are not a thinking people. We are a grossly consumerist society that doesn’t know how to think or talk about what is good for us and so we buy into whatever is most artfully handed to us.
Let’s stop and think about this. Some court cases can last years with the work of many crackpot, expert attorneys and investigators building a case on either side of an issue. We presume that there is thorough inquiry and research and the selection of an unbiased jury—all those things that we call “due process.” It is a less than perfect system of justice, but it is nevertheless intense and its aim is at being thorough and impartial. All of this judicial work is poured into one single court case.
In contrast, with the presidential election we, as a country, are working toward a decision that affects literally the whole of the world and the courtroom is infinitely bigger. The courtroom in this situation here decides the highest-ranking public official in our country and the most powerful political leader in the world—and this decision teeters back and forth on the edge of a knife held in balance by the whims of popular opinion. And what is most frightening is that our public opinion is informed by the media. Who is more powerful today than the president of the United States? Fox News, CNN, MSNNBC, the Washington Post, New York Times, Politico.com and Huffingtonpost.com et al.
What causes the stock market to rise and fall? Speculation. Public opinion. Gut feelings about the hopefulness of a commodity. What causes a presidential candidate to rise or fall in the polls? Speculation. Public opinion. Gut feelings based on the amount of positive press, the good face time a candidate has on internet blogs and the Associated Press.
I had been formerly optimistic that Obama’s sexiness would get him elected. Put him up on the screen next to McCain. It is like putting Roger Federer up next to John McEnroe or Kobe Bryant next to Larry Bird (wow, I just used a sports analogy…the earth must’ve sifted on its axis). I’ve been optimistic because sex sells and for once in my life I was glad that our consumer addiction to newer, faster, sleeker, and sexier might lead us into a new kind of presidential leadership that could be a watershed for White House administrations for years to come. It is not so much that I have high hopes that Obama is going to radically change America and fix all our problems. It is that he will introduce America and it’s representatives to a much more sophisticated and elegant kind of public discourse, one that is able to govern in light of the complexities of our present day and age. His sex appeal is more than his visual image. It is his poise, his eloquence, his tact. Perhaps this is what his opponents misread as “uppity”? Well if a sophisticated use of language, a generous deference to the complexities of any single issue, and a calm and collected posture define “uppity,” then I want to be uppity too.
As Obama has said, we are functioning in a 21st century with a 20th century bureaucracy. What even more fundamentally is Obama’s sexy appeal? It is that he represents a new generation. In my mind and heart it is time for the baby boomers to move on. Health care, social security, their obsession with militarization, the failings of our educational system, the abuse of the environment…all these things are not going to be restructured and renovated by our parents. They don’t have enough time left. These issues are the younger generation’s unfortunate inheritance and we’ve got some work to do. And I want Obama, not to solve everything, but to set the younger generation on a course pointed in a good direction. In this situation it is not a matter so much that newer and sleeker is necessarily always better. I was never a fan of new Coke and I’m just happy in worn jeans and an older hand me down car from my dad to drive to work. I’m a fan of tradition. I am not interested in defying the boomer generation just for the sake of defiance. In fact it is Obama who seems to be aligning himself with the democratic tradition that made America great and the neo-conservativism that got us into this tangle in Iraq that is the aberration Historians for years to come and will see George Bush Jr. as the rogue fanatic, but alas that is a huge topic that would take many more blogs to explore. I’d only like to point you to my favorite essay by T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Here Eliot so keenly says, “to conform merely is to not conform at all.” The best way to work within the tradition of American democracy is to test it, push and pull on it and to interpret it to our present circumstances. Obama is just the right kind of leader who can help us apply our treasured constitutional democracy to the 21st century.
If I haven’t lost the very readers I’m trying to persuade, let me continue back on track here.
So it was with great shock that a dear friend of mine, someone from the boomer generation (who will remain nameless), announced that he was impressed with McCain’s pick of Sarah Palin. How has McCain been represented by the media prior to the Palin pick? He was seen as a cranky, ill tempered, often spacey, gaffe-prone, clone of George Bush. Now that he’s got Sarah Palin he comes across like a sweet, generous grandpa who is asking his younger daughter to help him run the company.
Sex sells almost everything, but I’m scared because when push comes to shove for this next election—when the next president is what we are buying—voters are quicker to run back home to the comfort of mom and dad and grandma and grandpa to take care of us. Sarah Palin doesn’t appeal to voters primarily as a maverick “barracuda” who is out to attack Obama. She appeals as the cool mom who lives in the house down the street. Mom with chutzpa, with attitude. Hillary in contrast is that crazy aunt who might be really smart but is never taken very seriously when she rants at the dinner table on Thanksgiving.
When Americans want to look good on Friday night and when they want to impress out on the street, they get flashy clothes, buy fancy cell phones and drive nice cars. When they want someone to balance their budgets, do the laundry, work on the plumbing and watch the kids, they call mom and dad.
Obama, the smart, good looking, eloquent, straight talking neighbor? Or McCain, the persnickety, gruff, confused, but loveable grandpa? This race has always been a generational divide. McCain picked Sarah Palin, not because of her experience but because she helps him tell American voters the story he wants to tell, the one where he plays the character of that quirky grandfather that you love to love. Conservatives want to believe this story in all its wholesomeness. In this story (with the help of the religious right) its the democrats who are the bully bad guys, the secularists, intellectuals, bleeding hearts, who are shifty and not to be trusted. Each of us come to our decisions with our whole beings engaged in the process. We decide not just with our minds but with our past, our past formation, training, education, and upbringing. This creates in us a bias for better or worse. My fear is that the predominant bias of the voting population makes voters into suckers for so called stability, security, and reliability that McCain wants to sell.
Discerning minds will see right through McCain’s VP choice as an example of McCain’s unreliability instead. The big card that McCain supporters continue to play in defending the Palin choice is the notion that she has more “executive” experience than Obama. It is insane to try to compare eight years of executive leadership of a town of 9,000 to Obama’s years of teaching law, his work in Chicago and time in the Senate. Yes, he is younger and has no “executive” experience, but he has been studying Washington and international politics and has been engaged with it in a very informed way that allows him to be a fresh force of change in Washington. Just a few days ago Sarah Palin made her first gaffe by confusing the role of Fannie Mae as a government agency. What in the world? Is this woman ready to oversee our economy?
Palin has come from nowhere (almost literally). We know nothing about her. She was picked by McCain not because she would be an effective leader but because she makes his ticket (himself) look good. She helps him tell that nice warm, fuzzy grandpa story. If McCain were a reliable candidate, he would not pick a running mate solely based upon that person’s political appeal; he would make a decision that is equally important for the good of the country. McCain, the oldest presidential nominee in the history of presidential elections, should first and foremost assure his supporters that his second in command is thoroughly capable of running our country. How is it that in a society glutted on failsafe insurance policies that we would consider trusting our back up leadership, the one who leads our military, legistlature, economy, and public services to a no name woman? There isn't one insurance company that would underwrite such a plan for a 72 year old president. Yes, there is politicking to be done on the road to the White House. Yes, these candidates have to maneuver and stretch themselves into different arenas of discussion, different nuances to their positions and rhetoric all for the sake of getting elected. But stretching himself to Sarah Palin for the sake of winning an election is going too far.
For those who are defending Sarah Palin with the reasoning that she has more executive experience than Obama: basically you are saying that you would choose Palin to run the country over Obama. Is she is really better qualified? Of course, this is a presidential race between Obama and McCain, but with McCain at such an older age, Palin needs to be a more thoroughly proven leader. McCain has made a high stakes gamble by picking Palin. He has pushed his chips in all or nothing. The stability of our administration isn’t something we can afford to gamble with and this demonstrates not McCain’s brilliance as a politician. It demonstrates recklessness.
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Is Obama Our Harvey Dent?
A few interesting links here.
1st www.barackbook.com
This is funny--not funny in the sense that the RNC hopes it will be--funny because it reveals how desperate the McCain campaign has become. McCain has fallen from my graces. I'd really believed for a while that he wouldn't be that bad of an alternative as a president. I optimistically believed that he'd be an improvement upon Bush, but we can at least credit Bush with running a campaign that didn't resort to mockery in order to win. It is one thing to try to inform the public of the short comings of your opponent. However, it is bad taste and sad to gawk and ridicule your opponent. Also, consider the latest McCain ad that compares Obama to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton in terms of his celebrity status. The suggestion is that Obama is only hype. The add finishes with "higher taxes...more foreign oil....that's the real Obama." Higher taxes? Yes, because we are currently spending over $10 billion per month on the war in Iraq and the budget deficit is almost $80 billion over what the Bush administration had projected it to be last November. Other than higher taxes, how else are we going to take care of that debt? Foreign oil? Every time Obama has criticized the most recent surge of troops he has referenced ideas that that money could have gone into research and development of alternative fuel sources so that we can become less dependent on foreign oil.
I would prefer the Americans could vote for their preferred nominee instead of against their opponent. That is idealistic of me, I know. I admit I haven't lived up to such idealism. I voted against Bush in the last election in protest against the war. I wasn't very impressed with Kerry. He seemed to be the lesser of two evils. Now I fear that the tables are turned and that most of the McCain supporters are only Obama despisers. I haven't discovered many people who are really that excited about McCain even if they do plan to vote for him.
This is the way that most Americans endure politics. We are suspicious of politicians and resign ourselves to the fact that we will have to always choose the lesser of evils at the polls. For once I'm actually excited about a candidate. What I believe will be the deciding factors in this year's win for Obama is both the swing voters who are riding the fence now and also the surprising appearance of new voters who are coming out just because of Obama. If in some bizarre turn of events Obama doesn't get elected, I fear that this whole new group of political enthusiasts will sour to the American democratic process once and for all.
So yes, here comes my cheesy Obama/ Harvey Dent comparison. If you haven't seen The Dark Knight yet, this won't give away much of the plot. Purists might want to stop reading here and go see the move first (but hey, if you are a purist, you should have seen the movie by now). Harvey Dent is for the people of Gotham what Batman can't be. He is the white knight to Batman's dark knight. He becomes a symbol of hope for a better and safer Gotham. Batman and Commissioner Gordon's whole purpose was to give Harvey Dent a larger public platform so that the city might believe in change.
Obama, the man, cannot live up to what he has become in the minds and hearts of the so-called "Obamacons" or the "Obamaites" whichever you prefer. The McCain campaign is making fun of the hype and this is bad taste not just because it is crude. It is bad taste because he is in effect making fun of us for believing that we could be a better country. McCain is a wet blanket. He counters our enthusiasm with negativity: you are too young, inexperienced and idealistic. And his latest mock add stoops too low by comparing Obama to pop icons. Obama has what Brittany and Paris do not have: our real hopes for a better political landscape. Pop culture does have a bad track record of producing hot air and vanity. However, McCain is mistaken if he believes everything that is embraced by popular culture is worthless. Obama's hype has substance to it. Let me explain...
2nd Teaching Law, Testing Ideas
This article is interesting because it manages to retain its journalistic objectiveness. This is rare these days. Obama is described as an enigma socially and ideologically by both students and faculty. His classes earned cult like status on campus. Some of his students later became his campaign organizers. But Obama's teaching method was aloof, antagonizing and Socratic. "But as a professor, students say, Mr. Obama was in the business of complication, showing that even the best-reasoned rules have unintended consequences, that competing legal interests cannot always be resolved, that a rule that promotes justice in one case can be unfair in the next."
It is impressive that this law professor of twelve years is able to move from academics to politics with so much savvy. Generally speaking scholars have very little public appeal. They are in the confines of the university for a reason. However, Obama still is faced with the challenge of engaging the populous with his bent for complexity. Many accuse him of ambiguity and therefore a lack of substance when in fact it is not that he has no substance, it is that his is a different kind of substance that does not translate seamlessly into our highly reductive political consciousness and soundbytes media. It is a wonder that Obama is able to function at all in this simplistic realm of bullet pointed policy.
Mark Noll, in his book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind details the anti-intellectualism that has pervaded the church especially throughout the 20th century. We have a distaste for complexity and nuance. He quotes N.K. Clifford to support his point: “The Evangelical Protestant mind has never relished complexity. Indeed its crusading genius, whether in religion or politics, has always tended toward an over-simplification of issues and the substitution of inspiration and zeal for critical analysis and serious reflection. The limitations of such a mind-set were less apparent in the relative simplicity of a rural frontier society.”
The evangelical church has become populous. The Gospel is over-simplified in order to maintain its appeal. As it is with religion in America, so it is with politics. Both the evangelical church and American culture at large suffer from an anti-intellectualism that hinders our democracy. I know that "intellectual" is synonymous with "liberal" to many of my brothers and sisters in Christ. I've been warned about the dangers of over thinking. What many don't understand is that it is in fact my love for Christ that has led me to graduate school so that I may love the Lord with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength.
Here is my quick stab at some very delicate issues for American Christians: our founding fathers were themselves radicals motivated by intellectuals. In fact what we consider to be the American notion of liberty and freedom, was originally a philosophy espoused by French intellectuals. Further, democracy was originally a Greek philosophy. Neither liberty or democracy are ideals that originated in the Scriptures. British historian Paul Johnson argues that America is Europe's greatest intellectual experiment. I love America and am fond of the idea of democracy not because it has anything to do with Jesus, but because of the tradition of great ideas upon which America is founded.
So here we are looking to elect our 44th president in a few months and we are considering two candidates. One of them claims to support family values. He is pro-life and against gay marriage, yet he left his first wife (a mother of three who labored to see her husband returned safely from wartime imprisonment) to marry a woman many years younger than him. And we have another candidate who has sometimes confusing and complex positions on topics like religion and abortion (see his "Call to Renewal" keynote address) but who by all accounts is a good, no frills family man. The former is resorting to mocking his opponent and the later is working hard to avoid drama by running possibly the most efficient, cohesive and to the media's consternation, tight-lipped presidential campaign ever. The former is an elderly statesman, a former POW, who continues to make gaffes in the public eye. The later is a younger senator whose debut speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention overshadowed the words delivered by the Democratic nominee. These are very different candidates who represent two very different visions of what America can become.
Obama may seem wishy washy and un-tested since he is so young, however it is exactly this kind of fresh optimism that we need. And further it is not naive optimism either. In fact it is very encouraging that Obama is still optimistic in the face of all he is able to understand and articulate in terms of the complexities of America. Most of the academics I know are very reluctant to act upon their knowledge. It is easier to let their theories exist in the abstract. We have in Barack Obama, a man of a kind of substance many of us won't understand.
1st www.barackbook.com
This is funny--not funny in the sense that the RNC hopes it will be--funny because it reveals how desperate the McCain campaign has become. McCain has fallen from my graces. I'd really believed for a while that he wouldn't be that bad of an alternative as a president. I optimistically believed that he'd be an improvement upon Bush, but we can at least credit Bush with running a campaign that didn't resort to mockery in order to win. It is one thing to try to inform the public of the short comings of your opponent. However, it is bad taste and sad to gawk and ridicule your opponent. Also, consider the latest McCain ad that compares Obama to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton in terms of his celebrity status. The suggestion is that Obama is only hype. The add finishes with "higher taxes...more foreign oil....that's the real Obama." Higher taxes? Yes, because we are currently spending over $10 billion per month on the war in Iraq and the budget deficit is almost $80 billion over what the Bush administration had projected it to be last November. Other than higher taxes, how else are we going to take care of that debt? Foreign oil? Every time Obama has criticized the most recent surge of troops he has referenced ideas that that money could have gone into research and development of alternative fuel sources so that we can become less dependent on foreign oil.
I would prefer the Americans could vote for their preferred nominee instead of against their opponent. That is idealistic of me, I know. I admit I haven't lived up to such idealism. I voted against Bush in the last election in protest against the war. I wasn't very impressed with Kerry. He seemed to be the lesser of two evils. Now I fear that the tables are turned and that most of the McCain supporters are only Obama despisers. I haven't discovered many people who are really that excited about McCain even if they do plan to vote for him.
This is the way that most Americans endure politics. We are suspicious of politicians and resign ourselves to the fact that we will have to always choose the lesser of evils at the polls. For once I'm actually excited about a candidate. What I believe will be the deciding factors in this year's win for Obama is both the swing voters who are riding the fence now and also the surprising appearance of new voters who are coming out just because of Obama. If in some bizarre turn of events Obama doesn't get elected, I fear that this whole new group of political enthusiasts will sour to the American democratic process once and for all.
So yes, here comes my cheesy Obama/ Harvey Dent comparison. If you haven't seen The Dark Knight yet, this won't give away much of the plot. Purists might want to stop reading here and go see the move first (but hey, if you are a purist, you should have seen the movie by now). Harvey Dent is for the people of Gotham what Batman can't be. He is the white knight to Batman's dark knight. He becomes a symbol of hope for a better and safer Gotham. Batman and Commissioner Gordon's whole purpose was to give Harvey Dent a larger public platform so that the city might believe in change.
Obama, the man, cannot live up to what he has become in the minds and hearts of the so-called "Obamacons" or the "Obamaites" whichever you prefer. The McCain campaign is making fun of the hype and this is bad taste not just because it is crude. It is bad taste because he is in effect making fun of us for believing that we could be a better country. McCain is a wet blanket. He counters our enthusiasm with negativity: you are too young, inexperienced and idealistic. And his latest mock add stoops too low by comparing Obama to pop icons. Obama has what Brittany and Paris do not have: our real hopes for a better political landscape. Pop culture does have a bad track record of producing hot air and vanity. However, McCain is mistaken if he believes everything that is embraced by popular culture is worthless. Obama's hype has substance to it. Let me explain...
2nd Teaching Law, Testing Ideas
This article is interesting because it manages to retain its journalistic objectiveness. This is rare these days. Obama is described as an enigma socially and ideologically by both students and faculty. His classes earned cult like status on campus. Some of his students later became his campaign organizers. But Obama's teaching method was aloof, antagonizing and Socratic. "But as a professor, students say, Mr. Obama was in the business of complication, showing that even the best-reasoned rules have unintended consequences, that competing legal interests cannot always be resolved, that a rule that promotes justice in one case can be unfair in the next."
It is impressive that this law professor of twelve years is able to move from academics to politics with so much savvy. Generally speaking scholars have very little public appeal. They are in the confines of the university for a reason. However, Obama still is faced with the challenge of engaging the populous with his bent for complexity. Many accuse him of ambiguity and therefore a lack of substance when in fact it is not that he has no substance, it is that his is a different kind of substance that does not translate seamlessly into our highly reductive political consciousness and soundbytes media. It is a wonder that Obama is able to function at all in this simplistic realm of bullet pointed policy.
Mark Noll, in his book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind details the anti-intellectualism that has pervaded the church especially throughout the 20th century. We have a distaste for complexity and nuance. He quotes N.K. Clifford to support his point: “The Evangelical Protestant mind has never relished complexity. Indeed its crusading genius, whether in religion or politics, has always tended toward an over-simplification of issues and the substitution of inspiration and zeal for critical analysis and serious reflection. The limitations of such a mind-set were less apparent in the relative simplicity of a rural frontier society.”
The evangelical church has become populous. The Gospel is over-simplified in order to maintain its appeal. As it is with religion in America, so it is with politics. Both the evangelical church and American culture at large suffer from an anti-intellectualism that hinders our democracy. I know that "intellectual" is synonymous with "liberal" to many of my brothers and sisters in Christ. I've been warned about the dangers of over thinking. What many don't understand is that it is in fact my love for Christ that has led me to graduate school so that I may love the Lord with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength.
Here is my quick stab at some very delicate issues for American Christians: our founding fathers were themselves radicals motivated by intellectuals. In fact what we consider to be the American notion of liberty and freedom, was originally a philosophy espoused by French intellectuals. Further, democracy was originally a Greek philosophy. Neither liberty or democracy are ideals that originated in the Scriptures. British historian Paul Johnson argues that America is Europe's greatest intellectual experiment. I love America and am fond of the idea of democracy not because it has anything to do with Jesus, but because of the tradition of great ideas upon which America is founded.
So here we are looking to elect our 44th president in a few months and we are considering two candidates. One of them claims to support family values. He is pro-life and against gay marriage, yet he left his first wife (a mother of three who labored to see her husband returned safely from wartime imprisonment) to marry a woman many years younger than him. And we have another candidate who has sometimes confusing and complex positions on topics like religion and abortion (see his "Call to Renewal" keynote address) but who by all accounts is a good, no frills family man. The former is resorting to mocking his opponent and the later is working hard to avoid drama by running possibly the most efficient, cohesive and to the media's consternation, tight-lipped presidential campaign ever. The former is an elderly statesman, a former POW, who continues to make gaffes in the public eye. The later is a younger senator whose debut speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention overshadowed the words delivered by the Democratic nominee. These are very different candidates who represent two very different visions of what America can become.
Obama may seem wishy washy and un-tested since he is so young, however it is exactly this kind of fresh optimism that we need. And further it is not naive optimism either. In fact it is very encouraging that Obama is still optimistic in the face of all he is able to understand and articulate in terms of the complexities of America. Most of the academics I know are very reluctant to act upon their knowledge. It is easier to let their theories exist in the abstract. We have in Barack Obama, a man of a kind of substance many of us won't understand.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
The Trouble with the Internet
Micah, thanks for posting. I was beginning to wonder if anyone had been keeping up with these blogs. I guess we will walk the fine, tender line of your moratorium with Susanna on political debate/discussion. ATTENTION ALL READERS! Here is an attempt at "public-discourse" with charity in reaction to my bro in law. Let love abound! (Oh, and Micah feel free to take your time to respond since you are slaving away prepping for your comps).
First, I am concerned not so much about how Obama is seemingly shifting his time table on pulling troops as I am about how he is re-directing his attention to Al-Qaeda. I fear he might be digging himself into a hole while trying to gain some sort of credibility as a moderate. Is he trying to appeal to conservatives who have been sitting on the fence regarding Iraq? Is he appealing to those who feel that we still need to draw blood for 9/11? President Bush used the language of "the war on terror" to argue for our presence in Iraq. Now I'm a little burned out and tired of interest in any war on terror anywhere. I'd much rather talk about working on social security, health care, the present mortgage/real estate crisis, the environment or education. I really do believe that Obama is going to be our next president. How is he going to continue to fight terrorism when we've already sunk a trillion dollars into the war in Iraq? How can we continue to spend so much on military campaigns and still address so many other pressing concerns? What is his plan?
In regards to the list you posted on Obama flip-flops: I'm not so sure about the confusion regarding Obama's commitment to 16 months. His latest published in the NY Times seems to still be sticking optimistically to the 16 month plan. We'll see if he can pull it off. I personally doubt it. It seems like he came up with hard number just to set in motion the mechanisms needed to get the withdrawal of troops started sooner than later.
I don't know about the accuracy of all these so-called 61 McCain flip flops. There are so many to sort through. I found them while I was searching for this blog post that I read last week that troubled me. I do feel like Obama gets pounced on because he is a freshman senator and the media finds his foibles entertaining. Have you considered the attack on his wife's lack of patriotism? All the sound bites leave out the fact that she said it was the first time she "really" was proud to be an American. That is a bit softer of a statement than how she is portrayed. Of course McCain, on the other hand, gets pounced on because he is old. He keeps talking about Czechoslovakia even though it hasn't existed since 1993, and McCain also had trouble recently with a tough question about his voting record on health coverage for Viagra but not birth control. His comment was, "I've cast thousands of votes in the Senate," then continued: "I will respond to--it's a, it's a...." Is he senile or just a human stumbling under the constant onslaught of media speculation?
One area where Obama and McCain do agree however, is on their frustration with the media. McCain is quoted on CNN for saying, “We are in a situation today where all words are parsed, all comments are diagnosed and looked at for whatever effect they might have.” This is a vital issue for democracy. How can we see these candidates for who they are and not what all the pundits have assembled out of the myriad of bits and pieces of internet info? The "symbolic machinery" of our society is broken. Obama has built much of his appeal around this issue of the limitations of the media. The fact that he writes his own speeches and seems able to intelligently consider the complexity of an issue is impressive--its inspirational and makes him seem trustworthy possessing the kind of character I want in a public leader. Not many of the "pundits and politicos" seem able to communicate complexity or navigate complexity with the kind of frank and honest care that Obama demonstrates. This is the problem with the list of 61 McCain flip-flops I posted above. Such a limited explanation of so much information does not take into account the complexities of each issue. I offer it as another example of what is out there from the other side.
It is definitely possible that Obama might get elected and turn out to be something other than I'd hoped for. That happened when I voted for Bush the first time around. I imagine many of us are surprised by who the politicians we vote for turn out to be. My concern right now is to make sure we do the best we can to learn about these candidates so that our votes in November are as earnest and properly informed as they can be. I thank you for posting some concerns about Obama. He does already have an disconcerting track record. I'm not ready to pull my support for him though.
First, I am concerned not so much about how Obama is seemingly shifting his time table on pulling troops as I am about how he is re-directing his attention to Al-Qaeda. I fear he might be digging himself into a hole while trying to gain some sort of credibility as a moderate. Is he trying to appeal to conservatives who have been sitting on the fence regarding Iraq? Is he appealing to those who feel that we still need to draw blood for 9/11? President Bush used the language of "the war on terror" to argue for our presence in Iraq. Now I'm a little burned out and tired of interest in any war on terror anywhere. I'd much rather talk about working on social security, health care, the present mortgage/real estate crisis, the environment or education. I really do believe that Obama is going to be our next president. How is he going to continue to fight terrorism when we've already sunk a trillion dollars into the war in Iraq? How can we continue to spend so much on military campaigns and still address so many other pressing concerns? What is his plan?
In regards to the list you posted on Obama flip-flops: I'm not so sure about the confusion regarding Obama's commitment to 16 months. His latest published in the NY Times seems to still be sticking optimistically to the 16 month plan. We'll see if he can pull it off. I personally doubt it. It seems like he came up with hard number just to set in motion the mechanisms needed to get the withdrawal of troops started sooner than later.
I don't know about the accuracy of all these so-called 61 McCain flip flops. There are so many to sort through. I found them while I was searching for this blog post that I read last week that troubled me. I do feel like Obama gets pounced on because he is a freshman senator and the media finds his foibles entertaining. Have you considered the attack on his wife's lack of patriotism? All the sound bites leave out the fact that she said it was the first time she "really" was proud to be an American. That is a bit softer of a statement than how she is portrayed. Of course McCain, on the other hand, gets pounced on because he is old. He keeps talking about Czechoslovakia even though it hasn't existed since 1993, and McCain also had trouble recently with a tough question about his voting record on health coverage for Viagra but not birth control. His comment was, "I've cast thousands of votes in the Senate," then continued: "I will respond to--it's a, it's a...." Is he senile or just a human stumbling under the constant onslaught of media speculation?
One area where Obama and McCain do agree however, is on their frustration with the media. McCain is quoted on CNN for saying, “We are in a situation today where all words are parsed, all comments are diagnosed and looked at for whatever effect they might have.” This is a vital issue for democracy. How can we see these candidates for who they are and not what all the pundits have assembled out of the myriad of bits and pieces of internet info? The "symbolic machinery" of our society is broken. Obama has built much of his appeal around this issue of the limitations of the media. The fact that he writes his own speeches and seems able to intelligently consider the complexity of an issue is impressive--its inspirational and makes him seem trustworthy possessing the kind of character I want in a public leader. Not many of the "pundits and politicos" seem able to communicate complexity or navigate complexity with the kind of frank and honest care that Obama demonstrates. This is the problem with the list of 61 McCain flip-flops I posted above. Such a limited explanation of so much information does not take into account the complexities of each issue. I offer it as another example of what is out there from the other side.
It is definitely possible that Obama might get elected and turn out to be something other than I'd hoped for. That happened when I voted for Bush the first time around. I imagine many of us are surprised by who the politicians we vote for turn out to be. My concern right now is to make sure we do the best we can to learn about these candidates so that our votes in November are as earnest and properly informed as they can be. I thank you for posting some concerns about Obama. He does already have an disconcerting track record. I'm not ready to pull my support for him though.
Saturday, July 5, 2008
An Economics of Trust
[image above stolen from dm stith. click on it and get ready for his new disc]
My last blog entry was on the topic of public discourse. It doesn’t seem to have caused much of a stir with some of the friends and family who read some of these things that I write out and post here. It was a long entry, but I hope the lack of response has more to do with my long-winded hot air rather than anyone’s disinterest in this topic. Whoever you are voting for in November, it is hard to not agree that this will be the most interesting and even most important election within the last forty years. Based on record setting turnouts at the primaries we can see a renewed political vigor within America, especially younger voters. I don’t see how it is possible to be interested in this election and not be concerned about our pubic discourse since this is a democracy that we are participating in. This should be especially a concern for Christians. We have spent so much of our recent past practicing such a heavy handed polemic that there are very few left who will take our questions, thoughts, challenges seriously.
I spent a lot of time on that last blog. It was hard to write and I’m still feeling affected by the thoughts and questions surrounding that writing and I still can’t get a full grip on what is really eating at me. At the risk of getting mushy, I feel a nagging intuition that this is all about love and friendship. How we engage others in public seems to have some bearing on how we engage friends and family intimately and privately? Generosity is still generosity whether it is expressed in public or private. If we can’t extend charity and patience with others publicly, then what does this say about our private interactions? The public smearing and back biting makes me feel lonely. It makes my stomach burn. How brittle, how jagged are we? Is there any tenderness, any meekness, any loveliness in humanity? Are we all really just a bunch of selfish bastards? I often feel that I do not understand where it is I live and who it is that I live amongst. This is often felt as a cold world.
Take the accusations against Obama lately—that he is flip-flopping in regards to the Supreme Court’s decision on hand gun bans in D.C., the developments with FISA and his initial renege on campaign finance, his faith based initiatives and his more conservative stance on pro-choice. Some are ready to stop contributing their money to his campaign. They might still vote for him as a lesser of two evils but they don’t want to actively endorse him. Others cynically want to say something to the effect that Obama is just playing the political games. He is a politician after all; he has to do what it takes to get elected. Critics are quick to accuse, make hasty judgments, to look for mistakes rather than to believe in all that can be shared in common. It is hard to believe that the democratic party will be able to unify around anything there is so much suspicion and distention.
So what does the presidential race have to do with our intimacy with each other? I guess it is an economics of trust. Do we trust Obama? Or if you are GOP, do you trust McCain? Or are we just getting by with a hope for the least of all evils because after all…it’s politics?
Here are some circumstances that cut closer to home in terms of trust: coincidentally my former senior pastor, the one who hired me to my first paid ministry position, resigned yesterday from the church. Susanna is flying back from Austin this evening and she told me that her senior pastor resigned from his post yesterday as well. How convenient. Between the election, these resignations and my own journey of settling into Holland Michigan and Hope College, the resounding theme is one of trust. If we are able to be the kind of people who trust our political leaders, can we trust our religious leaders? If we trust our religious leaders, what does that say about the way we live our lives as people who have the capacity to give and receive love—the capacity to trust intimately?
I’ve been encouraged and discouraged by a passage from Walker Percy that has been sneaking back into my memory. I dug it out this past week:
The scientists were saying that by science man was learning more and more about himself as an organism and more and more about the world as an environment and that the environment could be changed and man made to feel more and more at home.
The humanists were saying that through education and the application of the ethical principles of Christianity, man’s lot was certain to improve.
But the poets and artists and novelists were saying something else: that at a time when, according to the theory of the age, men should feel most at home they felt most homeless.
Someone was wrong.
In the very age when communication theory and technique reached its peak, poets and artists were saying that men were in fact isolated and no longer communicated with each other.
In the very age when the largest number of people lived together in the cities, poets and artists were saying there was no longer a community.
In the very age when men lived longest and were most secure in their lives, poets and artists were saying that men were most afraid.
In the very age when crowds were largest and people flocked closest together, poets and artists were saying that men were most lonely.
Why were poets and artists saying these things?
Was it because they were out of tune with the spirit of the modern age and so were complaining because the denizens of the age paid no attention to them?
Or was it that they were uttering the true feelings of the age, feelings which could not be understood by the spirit of the age? Message in a Bottle 25, 26
I’m encouraged because he seems to articulate my gut level suspicion of who and what we are. My high school friend, the one who the previous blog entry referred to, described me as a snake oil salesman. He said that I preach doom and gloom. His implication is that I am a manipulative liar. It seems that I am in good company. Consider the final perspective of Voltaire: he had initially praised the “infinite perfectibility of the human species.” Then after the bloodshed of the Seven Years War, he writes Candide, a satire on humanist optimism. Voltaire was inspired by Shakespearean tragedy and Shakespeare by Greek tragedy. Read Elliot’s “Wasteland,” or Auden’s “September 1, 1939” or almost all of Rilke. If I’m a snake oil salesman, then I’m in good company. And of course within my own faith tradition: this is nothing new to the Scriptures. They are riddled with a severe concern for humanity.
2 Timothy:
But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God— having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with them.
Romans:
There is none righteous, not even one. There is none who understands, there is no one who seeks God…there is none who does good, there is not even one.
Jeremiah:
The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?
Matthew:
When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.
How is it possible for any of us to be optimistic? There are several religions and even secular philosophies that argue for some sort of fall, that ours is a broken world. How else are we to explain what is most commonly observed as evil? My optimism can only arise out of a deep belief in salvation.
While discussing with a recent graduate on our trip in Montana, this is the place to which our conversation arrived. He had confessed that he had lost most of his faith by the end of college and was ambivalent about whether this was a good or bad thing. We had taken our dialogue in a couple directions but I finally found myself in an existential plea: when you consider yourself, your neighbor and the place in which we live, do you not ache for someone to come and make all that is wrong, right? Don’t we all share a consistent, pulsing plea for help?
God’s Grandeur, Gerard Manley Hopkins
THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
The common argument is that the weak need religion; I’ll counter that by saying it is the honest. Yes, honestly we are all weak, finite, narrow, constrained, and prone to confusion, selfishness and fear. What a relief to not save myself. What a relief to not have the answers, to write my own story or to carve my identity out of stone, to invent the wheel of myself. I gather myself up and lean into the warm breast; I rest within the bright wings.
Friday, June 27, 2008
Mid-Summer Review
What have I been up to this Summer?
Thanks. I’m glad you asked. Summer is roughly half over for me. I’m trying to avoid the panic of feeling like time is slipping through my fingers by considering all the good thus far. Would it be an overstatement if I were to say that if all I had done in May and June is get my hands on three CD, that half the summer has been worth it? I guess that is more for me to qualify. Its up to you to decide if it is silly or not. What you might initially find silly is that I spent some $150 on used CDs at my favorite record store, Zulu Records, while I was at Regent studying in May. I don’t usually have time to listen to music. I haven’t been keeping up with some of my favorite aritsts/bands. My livelihood is music, and so I thought I needed a good shot in the arm of musical inspiration. Some times you’ve got to wade through a bunch of music to find what you are looking for. I also just bought a used 30 GB ipod from a student for $75 and have more convenience to listen in the car or while flying. So far this has been a summer saturated by great music.
I’ll add that after all the money and time I’ve spent, I still come back to my friend David Stith’s music and find it to still be fresh and interesting. A plug: he is finishing recording his first major release with Asthmatic Kitty as I write this. He is working with Rafter, a label mate, in San Diego. It will have contributions from the Osso, Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond as well as Sufjan Stevens (AK is his label for those of you who don’t know). David has removed most of his demos from his website, but you can still download a few tracks for free at www.dmstith.com
Here are three discs that rise to the top of my new pile:
Boards of Canada The Campfire Headphase
Again, I’m prone to overstatement when it comes to music, so here goes: I’ve been waiting my whole life for Boards of Canada and I didn’t know it. Not only does they have the name of a country I deeply love, they create emotional movements that suit me well. It’s not fair to judge music based on its capacity to fit one’s emotions. That makes the music all about me and that makes me seem selfish. I turn again to the way that I describe my affection for Radiohead and other types of music that incorporate strangeness and noise. BOC manages to form emotional landscapes with various beats and noises that aspire to make sense of our noisy, digital, industrial world. They helps us remember beauty in the midst of what seems so painful in our highly artificial, pre-fabricated existence. I was first drawn to BOC by a re-mix they did of Beck’s “Broken Drum” on Guerolito. That song is my favorite of the re-mixes. It compares to Four Tet’s remix of Bloc Party’s “So Here We Are.” I’m a sucker to good beat overlaid with ambient synths and noise artifacts. I thought Album Leaf was a master at this, but Album Leaf has been usurped.
Wolf Parade At Mount ZoomerI picked up a used copy of their previous disc, Apologies to the Queen Mary, at Zulu Records when we were in Vancouver. I’m pretty sure I bought that record mostly because of its drum sounds and secondly because it sounded like a rough and raw rougher version of Modest Mouse—if you can actually get any more rough and raw. It was mostly the sound of the WP record that was interesting, but once I got it on my ipod and listened to it, I realized it was not going to be an easy listen. Hopefully its intensity will grow on me in time, but when Steve down at Full Circle records here in Holland said this new WP record is more chill, I knew it would be interesting even before I read any reviews or listened to any snippets on the itunes store. This is one monstrous record. It gets low marks by Pitchfork because the reviewer didn’t think the album holds together. I guess there are two different song writers who contribute songs independently from each other. In my opinion these different writing personalities do not work against each other, instead they form a record that will get lots of listening time out of me because I can’t imagine it wearing thin any time soon. Oh, and it was recorded at Arcade Fire’s church studio and the drum sounds are as interesting on this record as they were on Apologies to the Queen Mary. And Steve was partly right. This record is a chill version of WP, but I’d add that it is a much more creative effort in terms of thoughtful arrangement. Not only does the whole disc have a lot to explore, but so does each song. Lots of great guitars moving all over the place and did I mention the drums are amazing. The vocals keep swelling in at just the perfect places too—not over sung, pushy vocals—easy and modest.
Sigur Ros Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaustI can’t really talk about this record yet except to say, Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thanks to the kind, gentle Icelandic souls who make this music. Oh, and there is a track that is recorded live with a full orchestra and choir. Thank you!
Other than rabidly listening to music I have been working on a few courses to finish my Masters degree, helping Susanna with some landscaping projects, traveling to Montana to participate in a faculty workshop on Senior Seminars, going out of my mind with two puppies that can’t seem to avoid chewing on pens and pooping indoors, and studying the trajectory of Barack Obama. Vancouver with Sam and Andy was a highlight for sure. Susanna joined us for our last week there and we ate gelato almost every night.
My trip to Montana was also significant (photos here). I did some fly-fishing with author David James Duncan. I’m not a very good fly fisherman because it requires the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree to practice with all that you need to know about bugs and weather and fish. David gave me some pointers and I actually caught some fish—in the pond that is stocked on the ranch, not in the river while wearing my fancy waders and standing in the water. It was kinda like the bunny slope of fishing. In David’s words, it was so easy to catch fish in the ponds that it was “stupid.” I watched him spot a 24-inch, four-pound trout, sling out his fly line and hook that fish like he was shooting it with a bow and arrow. This is now my best fishing tale. To fish with a favorite author is one thing. To share a moment like this, the kind that he has written about so well, makes me ridiculously fortunate. Later that night I was working on my cast as the sun was disappearing. David walked down to the pond in order to get away after having hosted a reading and discussion. He generously offered me his time and we had an important conversation. I’m going to send him a copy of Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet because I think it explores some of the same themes and utilizes some of the same style as the novel he described to me he is presently working on. Susanna made sure we ordered a used copy off the internet, so I doubt that it won’t show up for another month. Ack! It is good to have a thrifty wife.
Susanna is in Austin for the week to catch up with friends and attend a wedding. Sam and Andy have been over to the house several times to study. It is an incredible help to work with others. I can stay on task better. It’s like there is better energy in the room if that doesn’t sound too New Agey-ish. We’ve been reading the New Testament together starting with our time at Regent. Last night we worked through Philippians, Colossians, 1 & 2 Timothy, Titus and Philemon. I wish I spent more time reading the Scriptures out loud like this with others. Honestly it is hard to enjoy the summer because I need the structure of the workweek to get my butt in gear and so I wallow in frustration with my poor work ethic. Reading the NT aloud with Andy and Sam ranks right up there as the best parts of my summer.
I’ve actually been working quite a bit. I’m just not working on what I’m supposed to be doing. I’ve been distracted by a manuscript on arts ministry. It is the fleshing out of my notes from the seminar I did with David Taylor at the Arts Symposium in Austin back in April. My working title is While in This House We Groan: Nurturing the Arts in the Local Church. Let me know what you think. It is a reference to a passage in 2 Corinthians.
“The Discipline of Healthy Discourse: A Possible Gift of the Presidential Races”
June 26, 2008
Within the last few months I’ve had a slow steady stream of classmates from high school pop up with “friend requests” on my Facebook page. This is all rather surreal. On the newsfeed section I can see the Facebook activities of students from Hope College, students from Casady School in Oklahoma where I taught middle division, students from OCS where I first taught high school, friends from grad school who now live in the UK, Colorado, California and some who remain in Canada, friends from church back at Bridgeway in OKC...all these people lumped together with people who sat next to me in Speech class and Algebra, competed with me in PE, football and basketball and played in band and sang in Chorus. It is not that I don’t want to connect with these long-lost friends, it is that in trying to come to terms with who they are now almost fifteen years later, I find myself pondering who I am now fifteen years later. If anything, these people pop up in our lives in a way that brings continuity to our stories. They help us bracket ourselves, to step outside ourselves and see ourselves better as if from their perspective. Isn’t this why so many of us are afraid of school reunions? In some way the gathering of people from long ago acts as a kind of milestone or bench mark and we find ourselves wondering if our stories are getting more interesting and heading in a bright and shiny direction or if we are digressing and falling into a slump.
They were good people, for the most part. I don’t want to sound bitter about high school. It is not so much who those classmates were that I’m concerned about. It is who I thought they were, how I interpreted them in light of who I was at that point in my own growth, and how that reflects back on me. “Nothing is either good or bad but thinking makes it so,” (Hamlet). And we can follow this reasoning with, “to the pure in heart everything seems pure,” (The Apostle Paul). If that is true, then the antithesis must be true as well: to the dark in heart everything seems dark or to the shy and insecure everything seems intimidating. The lens through which we view the world often says more about us than it does about the world.
Memories of these classmates invoke memories of the 14-18 year old version of myself. I am now three or four stages removed from that young idealistic, teenaged Joshua Banner. I am sure that he would be both encouraged and discouraged by who I am today. I don’t want to be too hard on myself though. Memories are strange. We have very little control of them. We unconsciously edit our memory and we tend to hang on to the best and the worst. The ordinary humdrum of our past fades away; thus memory is mostly an exaggeration. If history is written by kings, perhaps we might say that the extremes of our past—the best and the worst—are our own personal tyrants.
There is one main capacity that I hope I’ve grown in: love, of course. Specifically, my hope is to have grown in an ability to love others in healthy dialogue. One of these high school friends has been sparring with me on the 2008 elections. He began with a question about my support for Senator Barack Obama. “What are you thinking?” he asked me in a wall post on my facebook page. And thus we were off to the races. I confess a bit of a hesitation about some of the strong language I used in confronting his frustration with my preferred candidate. In the course of a couple exchanges, it seems that very little of our ideas and convictions translated. At this point in our dialogue I feel a bit lost and confused in our own little gridlock.
So here we have two people, estranged from each other by close to fifteen years who are also further estranged from each other by their own political biases. I guess it is too much to expect that we might actually have a healthy dialogue. There is too much water still left to go under the bridge.
As I continue to ponder this failing exchange with an old high school friend, I continue to experience a deep sense of bewilderment and I continue to wonder why? Why am I surprised at my bewilderment? What is at stake here? I didn’t make it to my last high school reunion. I’m not sure if I’ll make my next one either. Will I ever see this guy again? Does it matter? Something seems to matter to me here, but what?
During the last presidential race I wrote and e-published an essay I titled, “Teaching Sixth Graders in a Time of War.” Something I heard on my way to school one morning on NPR set me off into the swill of despair. I wanted to do something tangible. I wanted to talk with others. I wanted participate in our democracy prior to the voting booths. I wanted healthy dialogue. So, during my prep periods I wrote out my thoughts on why my vote for John Kerry was a protest vote against the handling of the war in Iraq. I felt so strongly about the use of my time that I showed it to my boss at the end of the day.
The reaction to my essay from others: one friend told me I was “full of shit;” another questioned my faith. I ended up writing three more essays in response to these and other responses. That whole experience was bewildering too, but it was good for me. I learned more about my own positions. I was able to listen to others. Our exchanges got heated at times, but overall the discussions leant themselves to more trust and more understanding. Democracy worked.
I found myself rehearsing the words of the prayer attributed to St. Francis after the election—especially in light of the election’s results:
O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.
I worked this notion of giving and receiving into my graduate studies. I worked it into my curriculum with the sixth graders. It changed the way I think about the creative process especially when writing music or recording; It has come to affect my understanding of prayer, friendship and sex, how to be a neighbor and a citizen. Dialogue is a deep practice of listening that forces one to surrender her agenda, to allow for awkwardness in a conversation rather than rushing in with the next, most insightful adage. We give up the fight for the last word. We defer; we consider others better than ourselves; we serve by listening. If we all joined together with the intent to give rather than to receive, there would always be abundance. No one would be needy. This all fits nicely with the Sermon on the Mount. It gives us a better grasp of what Jesus meant by “meekness.”
However, there are many times when the Apostle Paul and even Jesus himself do not come off as wilting lilies. “You brood of vipers!” (Jesus) and “I will not spare one of you!” (Paul). Jesus rarely defended his authority, and when he did, his defense was cloaked in difficult allusions to the Father. Much of what he presented about his authority was difficult to understand. Paul, on the other hand, was traipsing around Asia Minor visiting churches, getting himself imprisoned and writing numerous letters working to maintain his authority. He lost many of his key leaders during his ministry. It all must have been exhausting and the result is some stern language in his epistles that reveals his frustration. Yet, Jesus was still very firm. He was unflinchingly firm in the face of Pontius Pilate’s interrogation and in the face of angry mobs trying to trick him into blaspheming. These two men are at the core of the New Testament writings and they continually tell their followers to obey the first command, to love your neighbor, and yet that love is not passive or weak. It is the definition of a more true kind of masculinity, a kind of strength that our chauvinist society can’t understand. So, how does that kind of strength play itself out through the practice of healthy dialogue? How do we love by listening well and do this with strong convictions?
In the context of our post 9/11 public discourse, “fundamentalist” seems to be synonymous with “terrorist.” We are quick to disregard any religious fervor if it smacks of dogmatism or rigid idealism. This is a label that progressive Evangelicals are trying to shake like the plague. At one recent faculty meeting I heard a professor rant, “Fundamentalism is wrong!” Later he admitted that by making such blanket statements he is susceptible to his own brand of fundamentalism, but nevertheless his call was for us to stop being too nice and for us to speak out our convictions--what we believe to be right and wrong.
So, we find ourselves in the same kind of gridlock I’m now in with my old friend from high school. How can any of us believe an idea and offer it in dialogue in a way that does not alienate the others who disagree? In short, we seem to have cornered ourselves into believing that any conviction equals fundamentalism. This is definitely the reason why there is such a push to remove religion from public policy and discourse, but isn’t such a sweeping elimination of religious language and thought its own kind of secular fundamentalism then?
Dialogue can only be nurtured in the context of love. Love is the only way that we can avoid the gridlock of our respective ideologies. Love is the difference between the tyrant and the prophet. Love shows us how to lower our guard and to look past our fears of each other. Love restrains us from bombast. Love is heuristic. Without it we will be left with strife, jealousy, backbiting, gossip, slander, dissention, hate…all those things that keep a democracy from working.
Much of what is postured as rhetoric and wit in our society mostly amounts to scoffing. It doesn’t even amount to good, healthy satire. Satire at its best enables the foolish to see themselves as they are. At its best, satire intends to see the righting of what is wrong. Scoffing, instead, is a cutting off--a death wish. G.K. Chesterton was an expert at this. “How can angels fly?” He asked. “Because they don’t take themselves too seriously.” We all need to laugh at ourselves from time to time, but we Americans have trouble with this. God bless John Stewart and Stephen Colbert and even perhaps Al Franken (maybe Al Franken).
In his book God Laughs and Plays, David James Duncan defines fundamentalism as a closed conversation. Fundamentalism is white knuckled and it can’t get outside of itself. It doesn’t look into mirrors; it doesn’t engage in the revision process. It is not that we revise the Scriptures or our creedal confessions; it is that we revise our understandings of them. All of us hold fundamental beliefs even if we aren’t fundamentalists. We live and breathe and exist because each of us holds to certain fundamental presuppositions about the universe. With out these fundamental beliefs we would not be able to wake up in the morning and attend to our work nor would we be able to sleep at the end of the day. We assume that the sun will rise and that it will provide us with sufficient warmth, that gravity will never fail, that we will always have access to water and that people will understand us when we use language. All of these are faith assumptions that neither of us can completely explain, but we still function according to their truths. These assumptions help us get on with our lives and work.
When we white knuckle our convictions, we close ourselves off and we become fundamentalists. We reduce ourselves to the mentally absurd by white knuckling ideas that we can neither explain or control. We confuse faith for empirical certainty. We then unnecessarily distance ourselves from our neighbors. We become suspicious. We expect the worst of others. We police their beliefs; we are quick to publicly censor and condemn. There is then no need for dialogue—only lecture or monologue. The Christian faith has survived two millennia because it is deeply rooted in its convictions yet is still able to endure scrutiny. Wherever it thrives, it does so by its dynamism not by its pogroms, inquisitions and witch hunts. Christianity is not static, dead doctrine. Ours is a living, breathing, life giving faith community that seems to flourish best not when it is linked to political powers but when it is instead suffering under persecution. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.
If the lens that we see the world through can say more about ourselves than the world, then the same applies to the way we hold onto our convictions whether they are agnostic or Christian. In a dialogue the first order of business is how we hold our convictions and not just those convictions themselves. Dr. James Dobson is a case in point with his recent comments about Barack Obama. At one point in our not so distant past, such public fencing by a leader in the Moral Majority might have led to disaster for a democratic candidate. My optimistic hope is that most evangelicals can see Dobson’s comments for the caricature that they are. I’m not even concerned that evangelicals vote for Obama. Most won’t and Obama won’t need many of them in order to win the election either. I’m concerned about our public discourse; I’m concerned with healthy dialogue.
What disturbs me so much about my exchange with my friend from high school? I’m disturbed by the same thing that disturbs me about Dobson’s reduction of Obama’s faith: a lack of understanding, an inability to listen, a stand off, zero exchange, zero democracy. Dobson accuses Obama of distorting the bible in order to serve his own purposes and adds, “What [Obama is] trying to say here is unless everybody agrees, we have no right to fight for what we believe.” Obama is not trying to make an argument from Scripture at all. That is the difference. He is saying that if we are to legislate policy informed by our faith, it needs to be translated into a context that the various constituents of our country can share. At the same time Obama adamantly defends the need to retain religious vocabulary in our public discourse. “If we scrub language of all religious content, we forfeit the imagery and terminology through which millions of Americans understand both their personal morality and social justice.” Obama is not reducing Christianity to universal appeal. He is calling Christians to fully be Christians and to carry their faith into the public discourse in way that extends itself to our neighbors. This is a very different public posture than Dobson's. Obama is calling us to open ourselves to dialogue and understanding. Dobson, instead, would rather strong arm government and have it surrender public discourse to his version of Judeo-Christian faith. One is charitable and open; the other is fundamentalist, closed and white knuckled. Fortunately, it seems that the latter is losing traction.
I’m not naive about the work ahead of Obama once he is elected—and I am pretty confident he will be. My Dad is pessimistic about Obama’s ability to affect the change that everyone is so enthusiastic about. I can understand this. In the wake of his “Yes We Can” campaign, I’m not optimistic about quick fixes to our economy, health care, social security, education or our dealings in Iraq and Iran for that matter (or North Korea or China….). Obama represents a shift in politics that I hope will be a watershed for public discourse and the political process. His speech in reaction to the controversy over Rev. Jeremiah Wright demonstrates that he has a sophisticated and generous ability to enter into the complexities of our society. In such a bifurcated nation as ours with its many culture wars and with such poor international relations, we need this kind of leadership and mediation. We can’t function much longer without it. In Obama’s self-written speech that has been compared to both King and Lincoln, he put himself in the shoes of Rev. Wright and saw issues of racism from the Reverend’s generation. He put himself in the shoes of others who don’t understand Rev. Wright’s world. He explained for us the subtle nuances that make up the confusion about the Reverend’s words and he accurately described the limitations of our media coverage. These nuances can’t be appreciated or considered through the medium of sound bytes and the squabbles of talking heads paid to conjecture in a way that keeps television ratings high. We need more than 15 second blips and bleeps about what he said and what she said. We need healthy dialogue. We need political leaders who do not underestimate the American people, who respect our ability to listen and think well.
It is this kind of generous dialogue that I was hoping to engage with my high school friend. It’s the kind of dialogue I hope you and I are able to engage between now and November. Perhaps this is one of the great gifts that these awkward and agonizing presidential races offer us every four years: a chance to relearn the discipline of healthy dialogue that we can then carry into every other area of our lives after January 2009.
Within the last few months I’ve had a slow steady stream of classmates from high school pop up with “friend requests” on my Facebook page. This is all rather surreal. On the newsfeed section I can see the Facebook activities of students from Hope College, students from Casady School in Oklahoma where I taught middle division, students from OCS where I first taught high school, friends from grad school who now live in the UK, Colorado, California and some who remain in Canada, friends from church back at Bridgeway in OKC...all these people lumped together with people who sat next to me in Speech class and Algebra, competed with me in PE, football and basketball and played in band and sang in Chorus. It is not that I don’t want to connect with these long-lost friends, it is that in trying to come to terms with who they are now almost fifteen years later, I find myself pondering who I am now fifteen years later. If anything, these people pop up in our lives in a way that brings continuity to our stories. They help us bracket ourselves, to step outside ourselves and see ourselves better as if from their perspective. Isn’t this why so many of us are afraid of school reunions? In some way the gathering of people from long ago acts as a kind of milestone or bench mark and we find ourselves wondering if our stories are getting more interesting and heading in a bright and shiny direction or if we are digressing and falling into a slump.
They were good people, for the most part. I don’t want to sound bitter about high school. It is not so much who those classmates were that I’m concerned about. It is who I thought they were, how I interpreted them in light of who I was at that point in my own growth, and how that reflects back on me. “Nothing is either good or bad but thinking makes it so,” (Hamlet). And we can follow this reasoning with, “to the pure in heart everything seems pure,” (The Apostle Paul). If that is true, then the antithesis must be true as well: to the dark in heart everything seems dark or to the shy and insecure everything seems intimidating. The lens through which we view the world often says more about us than it does about the world.
Memories of these classmates invoke memories of the 14-18 year old version of myself. I am now three or four stages removed from that young idealistic, teenaged Joshua Banner. I am sure that he would be both encouraged and discouraged by who I am today. I don’t want to be too hard on myself though. Memories are strange. We have very little control of them. We unconsciously edit our memory and we tend to hang on to the best and the worst. The ordinary humdrum of our past fades away; thus memory is mostly an exaggeration. If history is written by kings, perhaps we might say that the extremes of our past—the best and the worst—are our own personal tyrants.
There is one main capacity that I hope I’ve grown in: love, of course. Specifically, my hope is to have grown in an ability to love others in healthy dialogue. One of these high school friends has been sparring with me on the 2008 elections. He began with a question about my support for Senator Barack Obama. “What are you thinking?” he asked me in a wall post on my facebook page. And thus we were off to the races. I confess a bit of a hesitation about some of the strong language I used in confronting his frustration with my preferred candidate. In the course of a couple exchanges, it seems that very little of our ideas and convictions translated. At this point in our dialogue I feel a bit lost and confused in our own little gridlock.
So here we have two people, estranged from each other by close to fifteen years who are also further estranged from each other by their own political biases. I guess it is too much to expect that we might actually have a healthy dialogue. There is too much water still left to go under the bridge.
As I continue to ponder this failing exchange with an old high school friend, I continue to experience a deep sense of bewilderment and I continue to wonder why? Why am I surprised at my bewilderment? What is at stake here? I didn’t make it to my last high school reunion. I’m not sure if I’ll make my next one either. Will I ever see this guy again? Does it matter? Something seems to matter to me here, but what?
During the last presidential race I wrote and e-published an essay I titled, “Teaching Sixth Graders in a Time of War.” Something I heard on my way to school one morning on NPR set me off into the swill of despair. I wanted to do something tangible. I wanted to talk with others. I wanted participate in our democracy prior to the voting booths. I wanted healthy dialogue. So, during my prep periods I wrote out my thoughts on why my vote for John Kerry was a protest vote against the handling of the war in Iraq. I felt so strongly about the use of my time that I showed it to my boss at the end of the day.
The reaction to my essay from others: one friend told me I was “full of shit;” another questioned my faith. I ended up writing three more essays in response to these and other responses. That whole experience was bewildering too, but it was good for me. I learned more about my own positions. I was able to listen to others. Our exchanges got heated at times, but overall the discussions leant themselves to more trust and more understanding. Democracy worked.
I found myself rehearsing the words of the prayer attributed to St. Francis after the election—especially in light of the election’s results:
O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.
I worked this notion of giving and receiving into my graduate studies. I worked it into my curriculum with the sixth graders. It changed the way I think about the creative process especially when writing music or recording; It has come to affect my understanding of prayer, friendship and sex, how to be a neighbor and a citizen. Dialogue is a deep practice of listening that forces one to surrender her agenda, to allow for awkwardness in a conversation rather than rushing in with the next, most insightful adage. We give up the fight for the last word. We defer; we consider others better than ourselves; we serve by listening. If we all joined together with the intent to give rather than to receive, there would always be abundance. No one would be needy. This all fits nicely with the Sermon on the Mount. It gives us a better grasp of what Jesus meant by “meekness.”
However, there are many times when the Apostle Paul and even Jesus himself do not come off as wilting lilies. “You brood of vipers!” (Jesus) and “I will not spare one of you!” (Paul). Jesus rarely defended his authority, and when he did, his defense was cloaked in difficult allusions to the Father. Much of what he presented about his authority was difficult to understand. Paul, on the other hand, was traipsing around Asia Minor visiting churches, getting himself imprisoned and writing numerous letters working to maintain his authority. He lost many of his key leaders during his ministry. It all must have been exhausting and the result is some stern language in his epistles that reveals his frustration. Yet, Jesus was still very firm. He was unflinchingly firm in the face of Pontius Pilate’s interrogation and in the face of angry mobs trying to trick him into blaspheming. These two men are at the core of the New Testament writings and they continually tell their followers to obey the first command, to love your neighbor, and yet that love is not passive or weak. It is the definition of a more true kind of masculinity, a kind of strength that our chauvinist society can’t understand. So, how does that kind of strength play itself out through the practice of healthy dialogue? How do we love by listening well and do this with strong convictions?
In the context of our post 9/11 public discourse, “fundamentalist” seems to be synonymous with “terrorist.” We are quick to disregard any religious fervor if it smacks of dogmatism or rigid idealism. This is a label that progressive Evangelicals are trying to shake like the plague. At one recent faculty meeting I heard a professor rant, “Fundamentalism is wrong!” Later he admitted that by making such blanket statements he is susceptible to his own brand of fundamentalism, but nevertheless his call was for us to stop being too nice and for us to speak out our convictions--what we believe to be right and wrong.
So, we find ourselves in the same kind of gridlock I’m now in with my old friend from high school. How can any of us believe an idea and offer it in dialogue in a way that does not alienate the others who disagree? In short, we seem to have cornered ourselves into believing that any conviction equals fundamentalism. This is definitely the reason why there is such a push to remove religion from public policy and discourse, but isn’t such a sweeping elimination of religious language and thought its own kind of secular fundamentalism then?
Dialogue can only be nurtured in the context of love. Love is the only way that we can avoid the gridlock of our respective ideologies. Love is the difference between the tyrant and the prophet. Love shows us how to lower our guard and to look past our fears of each other. Love restrains us from bombast. Love is heuristic. Without it we will be left with strife, jealousy, backbiting, gossip, slander, dissention, hate…all those things that keep a democracy from working.
Much of what is postured as rhetoric and wit in our society mostly amounts to scoffing. It doesn’t even amount to good, healthy satire. Satire at its best enables the foolish to see themselves as they are. At its best, satire intends to see the righting of what is wrong. Scoffing, instead, is a cutting off--a death wish. G.K. Chesterton was an expert at this. “How can angels fly?” He asked. “Because they don’t take themselves too seriously.” We all need to laugh at ourselves from time to time, but we Americans have trouble with this. God bless John Stewart and Stephen Colbert and even perhaps Al Franken (maybe Al Franken).
In his book God Laughs and Plays, David James Duncan defines fundamentalism as a closed conversation. Fundamentalism is white knuckled and it can’t get outside of itself. It doesn’t look into mirrors; it doesn’t engage in the revision process. It is not that we revise the Scriptures or our creedal confessions; it is that we revise our understandings of them. All of us hold fundamental beliefs even if we aren’t fundamentalists. We live and breathe and exist because each of us holds to certain fundamental presuppositions about the universe. With out these fundamental beliefs we would not be able to wake up in the morning and attend to our work nor would we be able to sleep at the end of the day. We assume that the sun will rise and that it will provide us with sufficient warmth, that gravity will never fail, that we will always have access to water and that people will understand us when we use language. All of these are faith assumptions that neither of us can completely explain, but we still function according to their truths. These assumptions help us get on with our lives and work.
When we white knuckle our convictions, we close ourselves off and we become fundamentalists. We reduce ourselves to the mentally absurd by white knuckling ideas that we can neither explain or control. We confuse faith for empirical certainty. We then unnecessarily distance ourselves from our neighbors. We become suspicious. We expect the worst of others. We police their beliefs; we are quick to publicly censor and condemn. There is then no need for dialogue—only lecture or monologue. The Christian faith has survived two millennia because it is deeply rooted in its convictions yet is still able to endure scrutiny. Wherever it thrives, it does so by its dynamism not by its pogroms, inquisitions and witch hunts. Christianity is not static, dead doctrine. Ours is a living, breathing, life giving faith community that seems to flourish best not when it is linked to political powers but when it is instead suffering under persecution. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.
If the lens that we see the world through can say more about ourselves than the world, then the same applies to the way we hold onto our convictions whether they are agnostic or Christian. In a dialogue the first order of business is how we hold our convictions and not just those convictions themselves. Dr. James Dobson is a case in point with his recent comments about Barack Obama. At one point in our not so distant past, such public fencing by a leader in the Moral Majority might have led to disaster for a democratic candidate. My optimistic hope is that most evangelicals can see Dobson’s comments for the caricature that they are. I’m not even concerned that evangelicals vote for Obama. Most won’t and Obama won’t need many of them in order to win the election either. I’m concerned about our public discourse; I’m concerned with healthy dialogue.
What disturbs me so much about my exchange with my friend from high school? I’m disturbed by the same thing that disturbs me about Dobson’s reduction of Obama’s faith: a lack of understanding, an inability to listen, a stand off, zero exchange, zero democracy. Dobson accuses Obama of distorting the bible in order to serve his own purposes and adds, “What [Obama is] trying to say here is unless everybody agrees, we have no right to fight for what we believe.” Obama is not trying to make an argument from Scripture at all. That is the difference. He is saying that if we are to legislate policy informed by our faith, it needs to be translated into a context that the various constituents of our country can share. At the same time Obama adamantly defends the need to retain religious vocabulary in our public discourse. “If we scrub language of all religious content, we forfeit the imagery and terminology through which millions of Americans understand both their personal morality and social justice.” Obama is not reducing Christianity to universal appeal. He is calling Christians to fully be Christians and to carry their faith into the public discourse in way that extends itself to our neighbors. This is a very different public posture than Dobson's. Obama is calling us to open ourselves to dialogue and understanding. Dobson, instead, would rather strong arm government and have it surrender public discourse to his version of Judeo-Christian faith. One is charitable and open; the other is fundamentalist, closed and white knuckled. Fortunately, it seems that the latter is losing traction.
I’m not naive about the work ahead of Obama once he is elected—and I am pretty confident he will be. My Dad is pessimistic about Obama’s ability to affect the change that everyone is so enthusiastic about. I can understand this. In the wake of his “Yes We Can” campaign, I’m not optimistic about quick fixes to our economy, health care, social security, education or our dealings in Iraq and Iran for that matter (or North Korea or China….). Obama represents a shift in politics that I hope will be a watershed for public discourse and the political process. His speech in reaction to the controversy over Rev. Jeremiah Wright demonstrates that he has a sophisticated and generous ability to enter into the complexities of our society. In such a bifurcated nation as ours with its many culture wars and with such poor international relations, we need this kind of leadership and mediation. We can’t function much longer without it. In Obama’s self-written speech that has been compared to both King and Lincoln, he put himself in the shoes of Rev. Wright and saw issues of racism from the Reverend’s generation. He put himself in the shoes of others who don’t understand Rev. Wright’s world. He explained for us the subtle nuances that make up the confusion about the Reverend’s words and he accurately described the limitations of our media coverage. These nuances can’t be appreciated or considered through the medium of sound bytes and the squabbles of talking heads paid to conjecture in a way that keeps television ratings high. We need more than 15 second blips and bleeps about what he said and what she said. We need healthy dialogue. We need political leaders who do not underestimate the American people, who respect our ability to listen and think well.
It is this kind of generous dialogue that I was hoping to engage with my high school friend. It’s the kind of dialogue I hope you and I are able to engage between now and November. Perhaps this is one of the great gifts that these awkward and agonizing presidential races offer us every four years: a chance to relearn the discipline of healthy dialogue that we can then carry into every other area of our lives after January 2009.
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Prime the Pump
There is much that I could say now at the end of this school year 2008. There is too much to say and if you know me, I’d really like to sit down to write it out and say it all in one blog entry. However, that would be asking too much from you my readers and I honestly don’t have the capacity to come to terms with all that is swirling around inside and around me. So, I’ll try to be brief and just prime the pump for some more blogging in the near future and throughout the summer. I haven’t had very much time to really be my full self this past school year—meaning, that I haven’t been very reflective. I confess that I haven’t protected my time for contemplation and I’m now reaping the consequences. The consequences are a lack of focus and a kind of numbness, an anxious unsettledness and an exaggerated state of scatter-brained-ed-ness. I’ve been living and working beyond my own internal means. Writing is an extremely helpful way for me to come to terms with all that has happened this year.
That is not to say that I’m rotting on the vine. There are times when we are pushed beyond ourselves and the fruit of our lives becomes a result of not what we might have in the present moment to give, but a result of who we have become in the broad scheme of our lives. This hasn’t been a time for manufacturing new ideas, art and teachings. This has been a time to trust the Spirit that led me here and to allow the Spirit to inspire and sustain what I’ve already got. I’ve been calling it a season of convergence. And maybe there is something true about the reason why Jesus was in his early thirties when his ministry became strikingly public.
If I sound like I’m beating around the bush thus far, it’s because there is too much for me to get into. It is easier to paint in broad strokes. Let’s just say that I’ve always been a restless soul. My twenties were hard. I experimented with a lot of things: teaching high school and middle school, graduate school, preaching, song writing, recording, worship leading, some graphic design. Oh, and lets not forget the good jobs: lawn care, outdoor sporting good retail salesperson, insurance agent office administrator…et al. Susanna and I are almost done with our third year together. We’ve moved to a new place and begun a home together for two of those years now. We both are employed in places that value our gifts and allow us to dream and be creative. We are forming deep friendships—sigh—finally. And right now as I sit here the Spring in Holland Michigan is more than delightful. Oh, and our two puppies are pretty much the best things we have ever spent money on. Check this.
All of my last few drops of emotional awareness were spent at our last Gathering service a week ago. The music was led by all nine of our graduating seniors. I think “electric” is the best word to describe the evening and I use that not to refer to the sound of our music but to allude to the energy in the room. It was electric thankfulness and it was intoxicating. When we sang the Doxology at the end of the evening, I spent my last tears. This evening I’m smiling and still thankful, but it will take me a few weeks, the summer perhaps, to be able to come to terms with what has really happened this year. Convergence is the best word for now.
I’ll conclude by observing the things I am looking forward to:
On Friday the 9th of May, I will be flying to Seattle with Sam Pedigo and Andy Kadzban, recent graduates who will be sticking around next year to be my interns. We will spend a night or two in Seattle and then head up to Regent College in Vancouver, B.C. to take New Testament Foundations together. I have only three more classes left to finish in my Masters of Christian Studies degree program. I hope to be done this time next year. Sam and Andy are taking the class as an exploration of Regent as a school they might want to transfer to after their time with me. Susanna is teaching a creative writing class at Earlham College in Indiana starting next Monday the 12th. She will join us in Vancouver on the 24th.
We will then return to Holland on the 31st of May. On June 2 I’ll head out with a group of professors and students to spend a week in Montana on a rustic ranch participating in a workshop developing Senior Seminar curriculum. One of my favorite authors, David James Duncan, will be joining us for a couple days.
I then return to Holland on June 8. The rest of the summer will be spent studying, writing, gardening, going to the beach, walking my dogs and working on music both for next school year in chapel and my own music. I hope to finish the Ordinary Neighbors record that Susanna and I have been working on now for over two years.
We have a couple groups of friends who have been threatening to make the trip up to see us this summer. If that is you, let’s stinkin’ get it on the sinkin’ calendar. If it is not you, please please feel free to come visit. If you are a Hope College student around here this summer, you are welcome too anytime! Seriously, people need to come hang out with us.
Here is to a great SUMMER!!!!
That is not to say that I’m rotting on the vine. There are times when we are pushed beyond ourselves and the fruit of our lives becomes a result of not what we might have in the present moment to give, but a result of who we have become in the broad scheme of our lives. This hasn’t been a time for manufacturing new ideas, art and teachings. This has been a time to trust the Spirit that led me here and to allow the Spirit to inspire and sustain what I’ve already got. I’ve been calling it a season of convergence. And maybe there is something true about the reason why Jesus was in his early thirties when his ministry became strikingly public.
If I sound like I’m beating around the bush thus far, it’s because there is too much for me to get into. It is easier to paint in broad strokes. Let’s just say that I’ve always been a restless soul. My twenties were hard. I experimented with a lot of things: teaching high school and middle school, graduate school, preaching, song writing, recording, worship leading, some graphic design. Oh, and lets not forget the good jobs: lawn care, outdoor sporting good retail salesperson, insurance agent office administrator…et al. Susanna and I are almost done with our third year together. We’ve moved to a new place and begun a home together for two of those years now. We both are employed in places that value our gifts and allow us to dream and be creative. We are forming deep friendships—sigh—finally. And right now as I sit here the Spring in Holland Michigan is more than delightful. Oh, and our two puppies are pretty much the best things we have ever spent money on. Check this.
All of my last few drops of emotional awareness were spent at our last Gathering service a week ago. The music was led by all nine of our graduating seniors. I think “electric” is the best word to describe the evening and I use that not to refer to the sound of our music but to allude to the energy in the room. It was electric thankfulness and it was intoxicating. When we sang the Doxology at the end of the evening, I spent my last tears. This evening I’m smiling and still thankful, but it will take me a few weeks, the summer perhaps, to be able to come to terms with what has really happened this year. Convergence is the best word for now.
I’ll conclude by observing the things I am looking forward to:
On Friday the 9th of May, I will be flying to Seattle with Sam Pedigo and Andy Kadzban, recent graduates who will be sticking around next year to be my interns. We will spend a night or two in Seattle and then head up to Regent College in Vancouver, B.C. to take New Testament Foundations together. I have only three more classes left to finish in my Masters of Christian Studies degree program. I hope to be done this time next year. Sam and Andy are taking the class as an exploration of Regent as a school they might want to transfer to after their time with me. Susanna is teaching a creative writing class at Earlham College in Indiana starting next Monday the 12th. She will join us in Vancouver on the 24th.
We will then return to Holland on the 31st of May. On June 2 I’ll head out with a group of professors and students to spend a week in Montana on a rustic ranch participating in a workshop developing Senior Seminar curriculum. One of my favorite authors, David James Duncan, will be joining us for a couple days.
I then return to Holland on June 8. The rest of the summer will be spent studying, writing, gardening, going to the beach, walking my dogs and working on music both for next school year in chapel and my own music. I hope to finish the Ordinary Neighbors record that Susanna and I have been working on now for over two years.
We have a couple groups of friends who have been threatening to make the trip up to see us this summer. If that is you, let’s stinkin’ get it on the sinkin’ calendar. If it is not you, please please feel free to come visit. If you are a Hope College student around here this summer, you are welcome too anytime! Seriously, people need to come hang out with us.
Here is to a great SUMMER!!!!
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