Christmas Magic

My first memory was of Christmas. I was four years old and we had just moved to Denver, Colorado. Denver frequently boasts a white Christmas, hence my first memory of Christmas was practically storybook--the snow gently falling and a fire crackling in the living room while the smell of inconsumable amounts of food drifted in from the kitchen. I love Christmas! I love the hedonism of it, the pagan influences! I love it all, but it would truly be without meaning without the Incarnation!

Obviously Christmas is more than its scenery. Christmas is a celebration of that moment in time when God intersected human existence in the most humble and ungod-like of ways; in the form of a vulnerable baby. God was born into and walked and breathed and lived and died in our humanity so that we might be born into and walk and breathe and live forever wedded to His deity.

I guess what strikes me most about God as a child is that he became dependent. As a relatively new parent, I can now fully appreciate the dependency of the little ones. Just about every other animal gets along at birth with greater independence than do we in the human race. Think of it! God, the wholly independent one, the first and the last, needed His human parents. He needed Mary to nourish him as a newborn. He needed to be fed and cleaned up after and cared for. He needed Joseph to provide shelter and protection for him. He needed someone to teach him to walk, to speak and to perform all the necessary functions of a human child. I wonder if Mary and Joseph ever looked at each other with bewilderment while they potty trained God's son. Jesus surely would not have made it to manhood without his human parents while we surely would not have made it to God without Jesus.

We do not often think of Jesus in such humble terms. We would rather think of him on the mount of transfiguration, or in his triumphal Second Coming, or perhaps we prefer to think of Jesus as he is depicted in our pictures and stained-glass windows. But while Jesus was thoroughly divine, he was also quite thoroughly a man, and before that an awkward teenager, and before that a boy, and before that a fetus drawing his human life from his mothers body. Amazing is it not, that God became dependent on man when we were utterly dependent on Him. This is the mystery of it! God will not do what we expect. Just when we think we have Him figured out, He surprises us. Consider the Jews before Christ's coming. They were looking for a triumphant king and instead they got a tiny child who would grow to be a poor mystic that would befriend and heal lepers, tax-collectors, common fisherman, and sinners.

And why? The simple answer is so that He could lead us back to God as one of us. Salvation is wholly dependent on the Incarnation. I want this to be a short piece, so I'll just say this: Jesus' full humanity and full deity are required for Him to live sinlessly, to die as a full human representative and also for Him to provide a source of new humanity to the race. Perhaps the best way to say it is simply to reaffirm that our sin problem is beyond our capacity to solve, and it also wholly prevents God from moving toward us so long as we possess this problem. Why is it that God can even look upon us filthy, prideful, God-hating sinners? Because in Christ we are drawn up into the glorious mystery of God's ultimate solution to our sinfulness. We are amalgamated to the life of God in Christ, and as a result God when He looks upon us cannot see our sin because of Christ's substitutionary death, and He cannot see any lingering imperfections in us because of Christ's life and resurrection. We are perfect legally. We are perfect actually. And it all began with the entrance of the divine into the filthy environs of a sheep stable and amid the robust and helpless cries of a fragile infant whose help we desperately needed and still need. Merry Christmas! 

Is Forgiveness Conditioned on Repentance?

Recently my pastor flatly proclaimed, "Forgiveness is conditional. If there is no repentance, then there should be no forgiveness." And I understood his argument from there. He seemed to be wary of offering a blanket clemency for the many who would take advantage of such an offer to continue in their destructive ways.

I promise that I will resist the temptation to analyze and "grade" my pastor's sermons, but on this occasion, the philosopher (albeit amateur) in me came out.

Let me offer a quick reductio of these ideas:

1. If forgiveness is conditioned on repentance...
2. We are not offering an offender forgiveness, but only the possibility of forgiveness. (We have not released him prior to the offer).
3. Repentance is NOT a mere copula (claim to be), but is a movement. It is not abstract and singular, but is a procession away from error.
4. Repentance therefore is qualitative (the quality of one's repentance can be shallow or rich, hasty or tentative).
5. But if repentance is qualitative, then what quality of repentance warrants forgiveness? (If it is a movement away from error, how far away from error must the offender be before forgiveness is granted?)
6. If repentance is a mere copula (a singular and mental declaration to be penitent), then one can repent without a movement away from error, but no man can move away from error without being repentant.
7. Presumably, it is left to the offended to determine when the offender has reached an acceptable distance from his or her error (quality of repentance) to grant the offender forgiveness.
8. Conclusion: This is a works scheme! One is waiting for another to earn forgiveness by subjecting him to an appropriate evaluation process.

This of course hangs on premise 3. If repentance is a mere claim to be, or a singular, abstract and purely mental act, then of course one can repent a million times without really changing in the slightest.

So, as I see it, the pastor is in a real logical fix here. If forgiveness is conditioned on repentance, and repentance is here conceived to be a mere claim to be repentant, then one must forgive another for claimed repentance and not necessarily any real movement away from error. If forgiveness is conditioned on repentance, and repentance is conceived to be a concrete movement away from error, then forgiveness is granted for appropriate works.

I'm not quite sure that pastor helped us much today.

A Few Thoughts on Feminism

I have been exposed recently to some interesting arguments in favor of liberal feminism. 

To be fair, I'm only responding here to various interactions on Facebook and to some reading that was suggested to me. I'll confess that I am a novice in these arguments, and as such my interest is to research these matters further, but I also wanted to set forth some first thoughts on what I have heard and read to date:

1.     Idea: Sex and Gender are not coextensive. Sex organs, and genetics, may be totally unrelated to ones gender identification, which is merely a social construct.

I want to explore the logic of this for a while.

One wonders if being human is also separate from certain physical or spiritual realities that obtain—that we are merely socialized into being "human." No human brain or human organs or human genetics make us human. Certainly no definable spiritual reality is essential to our humanity. Being human is a set of behaviors or capacities that we name to be “human” through a cultural conversation (even a power struggle). So, being human reduces to nothing “in” a person, and nothing that will stand still, but only what flows from the person that is approved in the culture. If these things cease to flow from the person, then the person is no longer human, at least as we have decided to arbitrarily define “it.”

If one were to perform like an animal, then perhaps the person would be an animal. Consider all those human beings driven by their appetites and nothing more. If a person were to perform like a vegetable, then that person would be a vegetable. All of this of course is a philosophical assumption—namely, that our behavior precedes our essence rather than the reverse (thank you, Sarte). Astoundingly, this assumption is never fully defended. It is assumed without the slightest respect shown to the philosophical complexity of this question or that there are notable defenders on both sides.

One also wonders if race is a matter into which we are merely socialized—that it also has no real relationship to the identity of a person, but is performative. One is black because one performs like a black person (whatever that socially means at the moment).

Here is another related question on this point: If gender is independent of sex organs, perhaps functional number is independent of actual number. What I mean is this: Why should we abide by a “one person, one vote” paradigm? Surely we can see that some people count more than others; they are more intelligent, cosmopolitan, progressive, artistic, and generally contribute more than others. If a person performs in a way that is greater than another, then why not give her two votes to every one vote for the plebeians? Surely to the progressive, I count less than others (see the section below on power), so why not push this advantage. Number is also a social construct and can be functionally independent of the fact that I was born as only “one” person! What does “oneness” even mean, in the context of social dynamics?

One also wonders if sex designation itself is also a social construct, or should be. Why believe that any physical trait is determinative or stable, especially with respect to coercive “sex language.” Stop calling her “female” simply because of an additional X chromosome. Even her physicality is open to her interpretive dominion, reinvention and the like. Perhaps she wants to refer from now on to the “X chromosomed” and not to “female.” Or perhaps she wants to refer to “herself” as “himself,” merely to challenge sex and not merely gender language strictures. If the language is so oppressive and so easily confused with gender language, then perhaps we should stop referring descriptively to “male” and “female” and start referring to “humanoid alpha” and “humanoid beta.” Oh wait, that puts one before the other again. Okay, males will be “squeeb” and females will be “almondine.” A new language, freed from the context of dichotomous power, will surely lead us into the garden of egalitarian bliss.

2.     Idea: Traditional majority views of sex and gender exhibit the most virulent oppressive control language, used to establish a sense of sex superiority.

In short, the local patriarchal narrative (as opposed to metanarrative) is another example of language as a matter of power. The interesting thing about this claim is that those who advocate it model a power paradigm in advancing their own views.

In these simple discussions on Facebook, I was cursed at, told I was ignorant, hateful, bigoted, an idiot and, my favorite, that I should be shipped off to a gulag. Check out this link for another example of liberal insanity on this point: http://www.canonwired.com/bloomington/ . And all of this for uttering a view which departs from the de rigeur liberal parrot talk.

The curious thing is that these same people are deeply troubled that I articulate the view I do because I am subconsciously operating according to a patriarchal power paradigm. In other words, I’m simply using gender language to assert my will to power, and that is not very nice. Well, it is actually egregious; so egregious that I should be sent to a gulag. And these people apparently don’t see the contradiction here, which is at the very least amusing. In the final analysis it is deeply troubling. I need to prepare myself for the bitterest persecution if these people ever come to power over me.

But interestingly it is also quite consistent with a view that gives us cultural power dynamics and little more. If there is no truth about marriage or family or gender or even humanity, then we can never appeal to anything other than our own culturally embedded perspectives. And if all there is in a culture is the cauldron of ever varying opinions, then of course one cannot very well appeal to some common understanding. One wins others to one’s “side” by sheer force of will and nothing more! Of course one can advocate this all one wants, but don’t be surprised when I answer your power politics with my own power politics, because you have already told me that language reduces to an instrument of power.

3.     Idea: Gender identification is imposed upon children from parents and culture, and usually based upon genitalia, which is not really fair.

Parents naively believe that certain objective traits of the female species are somehow to be meaningfully connected to this elusive thing called “feminine identity.” Because of this they uncritically raise their girls to be “girls,” whatever that means. The parents somehow know what a girl is, but feminists know they cannot know these things unless they read Judith Butler. Having a vagina does not translate into any appreciable set of emotions, motives, behaviors or attitudes. Culture has merely named certain behaviors and tendencies to be “feminine,” such as the tendency to cherish and nurture life. But a female can surely act in ways that are more like males in this regard, even denying her unique claim as a life-giver. And it surely does not depart from “true” femininity for a woman to deny such cliched culture roles.

All of this leads to a challenge I issued to the folks with whom I engaged in this dialogue; a challenge that I’m not sure was sufficiently answered. I asked whether or not it might be best to leave a child free to be a gender atomist? In other words, to select freely what culturally determined traits of masculinity and femininity he or she wanted to choose. In short, would it not be best to raise a child in total gender neutrality (whatever that means)? Or perhaps it would be ideal for a child to seek a full understanding of humanity by changing both gender identification and sex identification at various times throughout the course of his/her/its life, and without necessarily aligning the two. How can we fully understand the full spectrum of humanity except by fully embracing both sex and gender differences experientially. The Christian has the added impetus to transcend gender because God Himself is beyond gender. It would even be an advance for men to be able to give birth, and perhaps medical science will ultimately make that more fully accessible to all.

The point here is that if human identity begins with will resistance to power, then perhaps the first place to begin is with any material or spiritual or external constraints against my power. If my physiology tells me that I must be male, then surely I can and perhaps even should rebel? More than that, my parents did me a great disservice by raising me not just to be masculine (whatever that means) but also to be male. They should have raised me differently, and taught me clearly that my sex and gender are not prescriptions of nature or God or any other force. How should they have handled puberty? Poor ignorant parents the world over! Let us have Huxley's farms to raise children, presided over by more enlightened people at universities who have never had children. 

4.     Idea: Gender roles are mere binary constructs within a society, something like a Hegelian antithesis. They derive their meaning purely from relative social tensions. In other words, “masculinity” and “femininity” are created counterforces and neither reflect any objective reality.

The moment one says that “this is femininity” or “this is masculinity,” then one has demonized anyone that identifies as female or male who doesn’t possess that trait. The only conclusion here is clearly that there is no meaningful way to speak about femininity or masculinity. The moment these elusive properties of our humanity are quantified someone is oppressed and excluded who may want inclusion.

But I’m puzzled as to how a philosophy that leads us into a quagmire of uncertainty with respect to sex and gender is any advance in philosophy. At least the traditional Christian view gives us an edgy clarity, a set of boundaries, within which there is some admitted ambiguity and cultural variability. Perhaps the Christian view is analogous to the structure and diversity of language, which is certainly an imperfect and evolving instrument, but would we say that this variability leads to a merely relativistic view of language as nothing more than contextual label making? 

A Broad critique:

The whole argument rests upon the assumption of a kind of postmodern nominalism, in my view. And I might add that I find this problem in many liberal writers. They don’t deal in the realm of first principles. They build their cathedral on the sand of naturalism or postmodernism or nominalism and don’t tell you why such a foundation is reliable. People have the right to start where they want to in building their philosophical project, but at some point an account of their presuppositions would be helpful.

So far as I can see, most feminists are naturalists and postmodern nominalists with regard to language. But surely both of these philosophical assumptions are dreadfully inadequate for the project of establishing any truth claim that the rest of us are constrained to take seriously.

The nominalist tells us that human societies merely “name” the truth realities all about them. They name “femininity” and “masculinity” and “humanity” and the like. They believe this because at base the human mind is the foundation of all metaphysical convictions about truth. Truth does not come to us from anywhere. It comes from us. This I see as the central tenet of liberal thought. Truth comes from me and the people who agree with me! Anyone who disagrees is merely “out of fashion.”

But surely on a clear day the nominalist can see the problem. If we define realities, then these realities are submitted to the endless ideological flux of human inconstancy. What counts as consensus today will be rejected in five years. I graduated from seminary eight years ago… look how behind the times I am! Give these guys who are arguing “gender performativity” eight years and who knows what they will believe. Nominalism collapses to subjectivism and subjectivism collapses to relativism. And relativism is in my view a rational absurdity. But hey, if everyone can believe their own position, then perhaps it is a happy absurdity, so long as one doesn’t spend too much time with those other people!

A Positive Case for the Biblical View of Gender:

There is a design plan for sex and gender. In the order of creation, which Paul brings with all of its clarity and force into the New Testament, there is a meaningful structure. Eve is created after Adam as the “helpmate.” Of course this interpretation of the “helpmate” is met immediately with howls of irrational anger from those of the theologically liberal persuasion. Usually they point out that “helpmate” is used of God himself in other contexts, which is a lovely point, but largely irrelevant when one surveys the whole of Scripture. Let it suffice for my purposes now merely to articulate my understanding of the Bible on this question and then leave any discussion of contrary positions to another day. I would, however, note that presumably in a world without envy or power dynamics there would be no problem with a hierarchy. Eve probably never wondered why she could not have been first, and why she had to be the “helpmate.” A submissive role in no way logically indicates inferiority. 

Second, it must be the case in a perfect world that sex and gender in creation would have been wholly aligned.

Third, sex and gender are ontologically real, as is humanity, and is connected to our imago dei creation. Gender is essential to our humanity, as is relatedness to God and His creation order.

We are like animals sexually, but are unlike them in that we are also created for eros, which requires real spiritual difference so that a higher unity can be forged from that difference. It was not good that Adam was alone, and so Eve was created that there might be a uniquely different being with whom Adam might be joined in the bonds of deep unity. Unity in diversity is the pattern of the Trinity extended to humanity in the creation order. But this essential difference is not merely physiological, but also spiritual. And when this difference is brought together in the bonds of unity, new life is produced. In short, the pattern of the Trinity is recreated—namely, submersion of difference into unity produces an opportunity for more difference, and more unity.

Fourth, one’s gender is not an “accidental” property, but an essential property of one’s personhood. The gospels declare, “highly favored art thou among women” to Mary. Note that it did not say, “highly favored art thou among ‘those who present as women in their cultural understanding of womanhood.’” Mary is seen as a model woman; her womanhood is essential to her ethical modelling. What does a virtuous woman look like? Look at Mary. Presumably the modern feminist would have to say that Mary is merely favored in her “language community” as an ideal woman. But Mary clearly has nothing on the emancipated modern Madonna, prancing about in all her dominating sexual freedom, or on any modern feminist for that matter.

Fifth, there is a deep union of body and spirit, such that equilibrium between the two is the natural state. In other words, the fact that women possess XX chromosomes, certain genitalia, hormones and the like has a real affect upon the spirit, and the fact that God makes people to be spiritually female has a real affect upon the body. Disharmony here would create internal stresses. And sin clearly creates disharmony. Those experiencing such a disharmony should receive grace, but not a cheap grace that pretends the disharmony doesn’t exist or that there must be something wrong with God’s design plan.

Sixth, the Bible seems to claim that women are built not just physically but spiritually to be life givers and life nurturers. Men can of course approximate the quality of nurture that a mother can give, but he is not ontologically designed for life giving and life nurturing (especially the deep intimacy and bonding of mother and child, placental connection, breast feeding, etc).

To deny this association makes one wonder about the motivation in denying it. A woman who denies her God-given identity as a life-bearer and nurturer, and asserts that such language is power language meant to keep her at home knocked-up and subjugated is perhaps being dishonest. What kind of woman would not embrace the unique identity of life-giver as her birthright? If there is no unique identity for women as givers of life, then perhaps their identity can be that of selfishly preserving their own power instead. After all, it is not the men who have taken power from them for so long, but their own physiology. Kids are a much greater threat to a woman’s freedoms than any man. The good news is that technology has liberated her from the tyranny of “female” physiology. Her claims against the bondage of nature have been summarily adjudicated through abortion. Now sex is emancipated from any responsibility to be a life-giver and life-nurturer; it is reduced to a matter of sexual power alone. And that is a victory for feminism.

In Roman society, only men could commit infanticide. Women were subjugated through the power dynamics of that patriarchal culture. Today, it is not power-wielding men throwing away their unwanted girls or handicapped children. It is the women alone who get to make this choice. Can there be any greater victory for feminism! If the demonstration of power is best expressed in disposing of the lives of the most innocent and feeble amongst us, then women (meaning “the marginalized power community newly asserting its power”) have won the day.

Finally, why conclude that the Christian view is constructed to leverage control over women (again, whatever that even means) when many thoughtful and powerful women affirm it? The problem is that they just aren't the right powerful and thoughtful women. 

It strikes me that most of the high-brow feminist argument reduces to something like this:

1. If there is something wrong with the Christian notion of gender socialization (roles), then those people who don’t identify clearly with this notion will feel isolated, marginalized and vilified by society.

2. People who don’t clearly identify with the Christian notion of gender roles do feel isolated, marginalized and vilified by society.

3. Therefore, there is something wrong with the Christian notion of gender socialization and roles.

Now clearly this is a terrible argument, since it affirms the consequent. There is no reason to believe that because people feel isolated and frustrated with cultural norms that there is something wrong with those cultural norms. I feel that I don’t always fit with the cultural norm of monogamy—that I am often attracted to any number of women. There are only two possibilities here; either there is something wrong with the cultural norm of monogamy or there is something wrong with me. I need to learn to align my errant desires to the norm, or I can let my desires align the externals and be polygamous, promiscuous, or both.

Now there is an effort, albeit weak in my estimation to this point, to affirm that there is a problem with the Christian notion of gender socialization, but what it gives us is ambiguity in the final analysis. We are left merely to define our own sex and gender. Fine. But what can these things mean? As far as I can see, we are given little guidance on such a question. Actually, we are moved towards gender nihilism.

And note also that it appears that very few people go in for these arguments. That of course says nothing about their truthfulness or not, but the practicability of an argument—its livability—does matter on some level. Does it not seem that the vast majority (perhaps a very high percentage indeed) of women are proud of being female sexually and are socialized into “traditional feminine” roles without a great deal of psychological, social or relational angst? Perhaps if they had only read Judith Butler, they would realize that they are really just victims of male power.

Let me just close by saying simply that I'm not convinced that these feminist arguments are successful (especially since they aren't really arguments at all). 

A New Kind of Christian

I'm encountering more and more people that have been educated out of any need for the Church. What does the Church, after all, have to offer a person studied in various sciences and French philosophy? There are those who just seem too smart to condescend to fellowship with the plebeians clinging desperately to God's grace. They would rather entertain the concupiscent cleverness of their friends while sipping Belgian Ale, where ridiculing the Church, and the pathetic souls within it, provides both sport and aggrandizement. Each in the group is blessed with the spiritual gift of sardonic wit.

The curious thing is that many of these people claim to be Christians. But their Christianity is of an aristocratic variety, propped up by studies in all the nouveau theological and philosophical perspectives; ideas which clearly put to rest any need for any archaic, and one might add ignorant, historical community perspective. Diversity is cherished over unity; unity in fact must always be met with suspicion. A Christian community of drones catechetically parroting the Trinity doctrine is clearly to be shunned in favor of the cauldron of theological turmoil, new ideas, challenges and ad nauseam debates over theological subtleties.

These are the people (themselves members of the bourgeoisie) who think that "organized religion" is a bourgeois attempt at indoctrination and control for commercial purposes. They are the sternest critics of the logic and hermeneutics of the pastor, in those rare cases that they actually go to Church. It occurs to me that perhaps many of them expect the Church to be like the university, isolated and welcoming to their ilk. They expect everyone to be treated as intellectual equals, to wrestle with questions without solutions, to challenge solutions long accepted and generally engage in the institutional equivalent of a grand coffee house or pub, and without any meaningful sense of responsibility to those who have gone before them. Of course such people are going to be uncomfortable in a Christian church, but one also wonders why these people would be comfortable anywhere there is an attempt to promote a settled position in literature, philosophy, religion, politics or even in the sciences. Surely such people, in love with endless change, must find stasis unacceptable. Challenging the status quo has become their status quo. They are at home in a world of questions rather than answers, because uncertainty clearly expresses the tentative nature of intellectual maturity.

One representative of this new condescending "Christian" intelligentsia once said that "No one outside the top 10% or so of scientists really knows what is going on in science." Oh really? Well, pardon me for breathing the same oxygen as a top ten percenter. Really, I can't know "anything" that is going on in science?

A Greek trained seminarian once said, "I can't listen to preaching anymore because I know all the places that they go wrong in their handling of the text." So why should either of these two care about the Church? They should speak to their friends about the constantly changing worlds of true scholarship and have nothing to do with established positions on anything. Embrace the flux of the journey and don't settle into defending anything. Be against everything and for nothing.

Of course this is an unlivable idea, which leads one to find a "home" somewhere. Surely one of the goals of liberal education is to become less liberal, in one sense. The purpose of searching widely for the truth is to find it, and once one has found it, to move forward in that rather narrow direction. It should be noted that it is an interesting exchange when a person who has settled certain philosophical matters and has moved on encounters someone presently immersed in the nouveau. What are they to say to each other when one thinks the questions open and the other thinks them closed? And why should we think that the settled group must always give way to the nouveau? Can I be as convinced that my religion is true as I am that there is such a thing as causation? And if anyone came to challenge my belief in my religion, I might say the same thing I would say to anyone who challenged my belief in causation. I would say, I've moved on from needless skepticism here because my belief makes sense of my experience. Is that fideism? No, because I am talking about a symbiosis between my belief and the world, not merely the state of my beliefs.

Here is an interesting scenario: What if we have a Ph.D. graduate in some new philosophy from the University of Paris engage, as unlikely as this is, a thoughtful and convinced Christian with little education from Salina, Kansas. Why do we automatically assume that the more educated man lives the more worthy lifestyle and is correct in his philosophical and moral choices? Could it be that the uneducated man was exposed to the same ideas in other forms throughout his life and has simply rejected them, and for good reasons. He cannot assess this philosopher's ideas with any degree of philosophical sophistication and would in fact be out-argued by the philosophy grad, but of course that on the surface of it means nothing. Perhaps in reality our uneducated man has sound reasons for rejecting the same ideas under another guise. And perhaps our doctor of philosophy has merely won a debate but has not won the truth.

I don't want to be misunderstood for one who advocates ignorance as an end in itself. All I'm arguing is that there is no guarantee that a broadly educated man will arrive at the truth by sheer virtue of the broadness of his education--in fact, many of them arrive at a deeply obfuscated and incoherent, even insane, picture of the world as a result of such an education (Nietzsche for example). In the same way, a narrow education, but perhaps a deep one, does not preclude the possibility of finding the truth (about God, the self, purpose, etc.), at least I hope it doesn't for my grandfather's sake.

And one last thought: perhaps the world is not so nearly as complicated as it seems. The variety of philosophical ideas out there is probably not as dizzying as the intelligentsia would have us to believe. It may actually not be the case that we require the parentage of intellectuals to manage our way through life with wisdom and success. There are only so many philosophical perspectives that are coherent enough, and time tested enough, to hold persuasive power. The rest is chatter. And it is no sign of wisdom to obtain an advanced degree in chatter.

Education in a Changing World, The Conference

I thought I would take some time to give my thoughts/interaction with the fascinating "Education in a Changing World" Conference. I'm going to work hard to constrain this to elegant brevity, or perhaps just brevity. You can be the judge. I'm also going to leave the names of the speakers out, and instead interact with their ideas.

The idea behind the conference was to address the methodological changes necessary to address the educational needs of students in the "emerging" era--that is, the technological/information age. It is, after all, an age in which students can Google the best teachers in various subjects, so why should they require their present classroom instructors? The universe of information is available to them via their iPads, so who needs their physics teacher Mildred, a slightly overweight graduate of Iowa State University?

I'll begin with what I thought was lacking in the conference.

1. There was a fatuous, and unjustified, doctrinal assumption made: In a technologically malleable world, malleable teachers will win the hearts and minds of students.

In other words, the problem with failing students is the methods, or manner, of the teacher. Use iPads and be generally loving and all students, even those from the most fragmented and destructive of homes, will flourish. Take a child from the inner city, raised in poverty, abandoned by his father, pressured by gangs, addicted to drugs, envious, angry and impatient with learning, and simply give him a loving teacher and an iPad and all in the garden will be lovely. Let us be kind and call this perhaps an oversimplification.

Formal institutional education is not the antidote to all human evil. It is not the family. It is not the church. It is not the just society. It is not the cross of Jesus Christ! It is what it is. The megalomaniacy of the various speakers at this conference was almost crippling in its uniformity. According to them, the good teacher (meaning the "friend" teacher who is also a brilliant iTeacher) can unhinge the bounty of heaven for deprived children. Great theater, but also spurious, to say the least.

What if we come to the task of education with an assumption of depravity? If it is true that humankind is in natural rebellion against God's truth, then the advocates of God's truth are not going to be received with enthusiasm, and perhaps most of the time, even if they are loving and technologically savvy. Take a student who is in rebellion against God's right to inform Him, but whose teacher is exceptional, according to the standards of this conference, and that student will still hate the truth. Or perhaps he will be persuaded to love the methods and the teacher while caring little for the truth. Or perhaps he will become, as Lewis suggested, "a more clever devil." Just as a forced redistribution of wealth would not change a thing if the human heart is not first changed, so would a forced redistribution of the riches of excellent education. Tell me that technology is a tool and that my responsibility as a teacher is to care about people and I'm with you. Tell me that on my shoulders rests the burden of saving the souls of every individual I encounter and I demure for fear of blasphemy.

2. The fog of pseudo-intellectualism was stifling!

The charge of pseudo-intellectualism is a serious change. I'm not claiming this because I'm obviously more intelligent than the people delivering talks at the conference. I'm only claiming it because any 8th grader armed with introductory teaching in logic could see that many, if not most, of the keynote speakers violated basic principles of logic. They would probably call such principles merely "one man's story," and thus irrelevant to them, and thus not applicable to their "narrative." Their narrative is no doubt bigger than logic. The fact remains that these conference speakers (most of them) were wholly incoherent. They were engaging and they were passionate, but their ideas made absolutely no sense. Curious that at an education conference we saw before us perhaps no purer example of the general cultural move away from logos to pathos and ethos. And that is why they received standing ovations. Here were their incoherent claims:

a. Standards in education are irrelevant. What counts is the journey of the student, or the student's "story." Then these speakers would go on to say how we are doing things wrong, how we are failing to reach students using the "traditional," especially lecture, methods. In short, "standards are irrelevant, and you are doing things all wrong." But of course, how can they judge that we, or those slow to adopt the "changing world," are doing things wrong unless there is some standard by which to adjudicate the claims of that world and this world? This of course is contradictory to anyone who thinks steadily about it for five minutes.

b. "Worldview" language is passé. That is the language of "industrialization" and "generalization." But then they would go on to say that we need to be able to judge what is good and bad in "narratives." Apparently, we don't need to rely on any worldview presuppositions regarding what counts as good and bad to be able to judge what is good and bad in various "narratives." Of course, this is contradictory to anyone who thinks steadily about it for four minutes.

c. No grades, only process! I sat with one of the workshop speakers who profoundly pontificated regarding the virtues of abandoning grades and harsh exclusionary pronouncements for lovingly leading students into excellence. I almost wept, but he didn't know why I almost wept. It wasn't because of his sagacity, though no doubt his sycophants have conditioned him to believe that the stunned look on my face was a prelude to emotional splutterings acknowledging his "genius." The fact is that I was simply shocked. He said in one moment that we should do away with grades and the next moment that we must "hold students accountable" for their "proficiencies" and "growth" and "skill development." Of course none of this amounts to a "grade." The amazing thing is that he literally cannot see the equivocation and contradiction here. Surely anyone who thinks steadily about it for three minutes can see the contradiction.

d. We must use advances in technology for guided "collaborative learning" rather than lecture. Then we attend a conference in which we sit through eight lectures from people who allegedly know more than we do about education, and with minimal to no collaborative input. Dr. Expert doesn't apparently need the help of someone who has thought long and hard about education for 17 years, and who might be just as intelligent as he is. The funny thing here is that the message the format sends is one I agree with (that is--I think there are people who know more about education than I do and we should listen), but I cannot abide the contradiction of advocating "collaborative learning" and "modern methods," then using the same "unidirectional," "pedantic" and "traditional" methods so constantly vilified. It is a contradiction to anyone who thinks steadily about it for two minutes.

e. Education is about storytelling and not propositional statements... but let me interpret the story for you and the truths that I learned that can be applied to you even though this is not your story. Let me give you the transnarrative ideas (the abstract ideas applicable to anyone's story)! Emotionally engaging storytelling was advocated by just about everyone. Here I think my criticism is minimal and centers around the idea pushed by so many that we are about helping students learn and tell stories and we are not about propositional statements, which are boring, clearly. The curious thing is that each of the speakers carefully interpreted their stories and made propositional truth claims applicable to others. Now that is a puzzle if our goal is stories and not propositional truth claims. The either/or language is merely unnecessary and the context of the whole presentation was contradictory to anyone who thinks steadily about it for a minute or so. Advocate stories without vilifying propositional claims.

Let me confess my critical nature. I have come to a place in my life where I am almost wholly impatient with the kind of things I heard at this conference. I know that a lot of it is "conference speak." And by conference speak I mean this sort of thing: "Those people 5 years ago had it all wrong. They said read, but we say speak! They said walk, but we say run! They said return to nature, but we say get an iPad! They had it all wrong. We have it all right. And my book, which details how we have it right, is on sale on iTunes." Much of it is nothing more than the soaring rhetoric of definition by contrast. Highlight where they went wrong. Show two examples of where you went right. Site some carefully selected research to back your shallow claim, then press the matter with pseudo-intellectual zeal, augmented by pathos and ethos, and you win a few people, perhaps even most of the people. And five years later someone is out promoting the opposite position with the same methods and he also seduces most of the people.

On last minor thing: Jesus Christ was wholly absent from these talks. Oh, the window dressing was there, but Jesus had no interpenetrating influence on what these people were saying. Apparently, "education in a changing world" does not require the changeless one! Jesus, after all, didn't employ an iPad, so how legitimate can he be? I thought I was listening to a gaggle of Ted talkers. The homogeneity was perplexing from a gaggle (yes, I used gaggle twice) of people advocating diversity of instruction. Surely we often say as much by what is not communicated as by what is communicated. What does Jesus have to do with technology? What does Jesus have to do with selfless sacrifice in the classroom? What does Jesus have to do with the ever changing world of education, with college entrance, with physics on the iPad? According to the conference I just attended, Jesus has absolutely nothing to do with any of it, and you can be a first rate teacher without reference to the wisdom of Jesus. Steve Jobs and Ken Robinson have a lot more to say about educating the young than does Jesus Christ!

Bryce Canyon National Park

Today brought us to the end of our National Park journey. We drove out of Park City, Utah (which is a beautiful destination in its own right), and headed south for Provo, then further on against the Western slopes of the Rocky Mountains and then back through the mountains on our journey to Bryce Canyon.

Your first glimpse of what you are about to see comes on highway 12 through southern Utah. There you meet two striated massive walls of burnt orange rock (the boundary of what is known as "Red Canyon"), and everything beyond it seems to be the surface of Mars. I can't decide which brings out the richness of the evergreen trees more by contrast, Crater Lake's brilliant blue or this prism of rust and orange and pink and white earth. 

It seems impossible to surpass the beauty of Red Canyon, but shortly thereafter you enter Bryce Canyon. I must confess I had the Grand Canyon in mind, and I was utterly blown away by how different, and how much more complex and brilliant Bryce Canyon is in comparison to The Grand Canyon. It is not a single canyon so much as it is a dazzling labyrinth of color and shadow and caverns and water and light. 

The almost instant reaction on reaching the rim, from all three of my little girls, was "Woooow!" I've never heard them react that way to a TV show or a movie. The shows God puts on are far more impacting. Then they turned their eyes to a trail and insisted that we go on a hike. I know they have been apprehensive about difficult hikes, so I pressed them a bit to be sure, and Charity led the charge down the side of the canyon. We had a couple of falls due to loose gravel, but all told they handled themselves admirably. They got dirty, cried a little after a fall, got up, dusted off and charged forward into the adventure of descending into that flowering garden of stone. 

First view of the canyon

Always ready for an adventure

Looking out to the east

We climbed into the opening mini canyon

My great hiking companions

Add caption

We descended deep into the canyon... awesome!

The open space between the walls at the bottom

They each fell at least once, but were ready to pose at the end

Thor's Hammer

The view looking up is amazing

Grand Teton National Park

First view when entering the park

This is my first time in this part of the world. Yesterday we got our first glimpses of The Grand Tetons, a range of mountains in the northwest corner of Wyoming, just to the south of Yellowstone Park. There is no other way of describing them except to say that they are utterly breathtaking. Here reside probably 12 or more jagged peaks rising 7000 feet above the Snake River valley, with views totally unobstructed by anything natural or man made. Each peak is ornamented by either snow or glacial deposits that clearly never melt fully. The only thing more beautiful than any one of them is the whole scene taken together; the difference between a single flawless melody and a flawless symphony.

Our day today took us into Grand Teton National Park in the morning. It turned out to be a morning of low clouds and late drizzle that turned to full rain as we left the park (great timing). We had a limited time in the park and so we spent our few hours in the Visitor's Center and then at Jenny Lake, which is a pristine body of water at the foot of Grand Teton, a peak which rises to a height of 13,770 feet. There was a lovely trail through the sage brush and pine trees to the shore of Jenny Lake. The girls insisted that they be allowed to dip their feet in the frigid water. It was a morning of children's joy, crystalline air, a kaleidoscope of wildflowers, jagged snow capped mountains and the fragrance of God's creative glory everywhere.

The highlight of the day was seeing a red fox dart across the road clinching his newly caught breakfast in his mouth. Unfortunately I missed the shot, but I didn't miss the moment.

The Grand Teton, rises to 13,770 feet above the valley floor at 6200ish feet

Spectacular trail along the shore of Jenny Lake

Beautiful kids in beautiful scenery

Jenny Lake

Jenny Lake with Grand Teton

Perfect slightly overcast day

She never fears cold water

This peak dominates the entire scenery here

They had so much fun today

My little adventurer

Aspen lined trail

Aestheticism in Yellowstone

When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty. John Muir

Surely you have asked the same question I want to probe here for a moment: Why? Why does the universe appear to us to be an "infinite storm of beauty?" We are tempted to gloss over such questions, but I think it is of immense importance to answer such a question in a way that is compelling; in a way that gives meaning to our sense of beauty. 

It would be strange to see Elk stopping in transfixed wonder at the scenes all round them. But we don't see Elk, or Bison, or even chipmunks stopping to pen a poem in praise of the Yellowstone River. They in fact seem wholly unimpressed by the same scenes that send us into speechless reverie. We look for life in these places; they look only to survive in these places. They look for length of days alone; we seek depth in today.

Especially for the atheist, we must be totally incomprehensible beings. He also says we exist to survive, or at least that is all nature cares about, and nature is all there is. But if that is true, why do we possess so much superfluous baggage from the evolutionary process? We know about atoms and we weep when we see the things I have seen today. Why? It makes no sense that a universe that cares nothing for intelligence, symmetry, harmony or beauty would create it, and then would create beings capable of enjoying it for what it is, thus magnifying the symmetry exponentially. I suppose they could say that it isn't really beautiful, but only beautiful to us subjectively. But surely to believe that is to destroy all meaning in beauty anywhere.

The naturalist (atheist) must assume that a process that intends nothing and thinks about nothing produced beings who possess intentionality and who think about these things purposively. But then he can't tell us that this capacity is anything particularly important, because after all it was produced by a mindless, random process that merely scatters phenomena discursively through the universe. We may intend things, subjectively, but objectively the universe doesn't intend anything. Our intentions, including our intentions toward creativity and the enjoyment of creativity, are self-deceptions.

Now if that is true, what can be more pointless than my feelings in Yellowstone today?

I believe there is a great artist who made beings like us capable of wonder. I think He placed us in the optimal position in the universe, a place meticulously designed to inspire awe. Not only that, but He made us with the unique capacity of soul to be enlarged by art, and from our encounters with beauty to create it ourselves.

God did not do this merely for functionality either, though much of our creativity serves that end. God made this world for our enjoyment, at least partially. Today I stopped, observed, listened, inhaled the fragrant air, and did nothing else. I was useless today. I did not act. I did not make something of my time. I can add nothing to my resume of this day. And yet, I fulfilled part of the purpose for which I was created today!

Listen to this quote by the British author Rudyard Kipling, on seeing the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, a scene I beheld today:

All that I can say is that without warning or preparation I looked into a gulf seventeen hundred feet deep, with eagles and fish-hawks circling far below. And the sides of that gulf were one wild welter of color — crimson, emerald, cobalt, ochre, amber, honey splashed with port wine, snow white, vermilion, lemon, and silver gray in wide washes. The sides did not fall sheer, but were graven by time, and water, and air into monstrous heads of kings, dead chiefs — men and women of the old time. So far below that no sound of its strife could reach us, the Yellowstone River ran a finger-wide strip of jade green.

The sunlight took those wondrous walls and gave fresh hues to those that nature had already laid there.

Evening crept through the pines that shadowed us, but the full glory of the day flamed in that canyon as we went out very cautiously to a jutting piece of rock — blood-red or pink it was — that overhung the deepest deeps of all.

Now I know what it is to sit enthroned amid the clouds of sunset.

Kipling still didn't describe it all that well

Felicity saw an Eagles' nest

The great Yellowstone River

We came upon a herd of Bison

Bison love the warm earth by the thermal pools

The acidity of battery acid

Nancy captured this elk

And this one

A little bit like Disneyland here, but the show was worth it

Trinity is becoming a tree hugger

The hot springs pour into the river here

Bacteria cause the discoloration

The Grand Prismatic, second largest hot spring in the world