Weekly Meanderings, 27 April 2019

Last updated on: April 27, 2019 at 12:05 am by Scot McKnight

Weekly Meanderings, 27 April 2019 2019-04-25T11:41:56-05:00 Scot McKnight

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Kris and I greet you from Greece, where we are on a short study break on the island of Naxos. During the week we will post some pictures. Thanks this week to JS for links.

Congrats to pastor (and, yes, Northern grad, Tyone Hughes for inclusion in this wonderful picture of leaders. (Outlined in Carolina blue.)

Helping kids (and others) to become critical thinkers:

How can we encourage kids to think critically from an early age? Through an activity that every child is already an expert at — asking questions.

1. Go beyond “what?” — and ask “how?” and “why?”

Let’s say your child is learning about climate change in school. Their teacher may ask them a question like “What are main causes of climate change?” Oshiro says there are two problems with this question — it can be answered with a quick web search, and being able to answer it gives people a false of security; it makes them feel like they know a topic, but their knowledge is superficial.

At home, prompt your kid to answer questions such as “How exactly does X cause climate change?” and “Why should we worry about it?” To answer, they’ll need to go beyond the bare facts and really think about a subject.

Other great questions: “How will climate change affect where we live?” or “Why should our town in particular worry about climate change?” Localizing questions gives kids, says Oshiro, “an opportunity to connect whatever knowledge they have to something personal in their lives.”

2.Follow it up with “How do you know this?”

Oshiro says, “They have to provide some sort of evidence and be able to defend their answer against some logical attack.” Answering this question requires kids to reflect on their previous statements and assess where they’re getting their information from.

3. Prompt them to think about how their perspective may differ from other people’s.

Ask a question like “How will climate change affect people living in X country or X city?” or “Why should people living in X country or X city worry about it?” Kids will be pushed to think about the priorities and concerns of others, says Oshiro, and to try to understand their perspectives — essential elements of creative problem-solving.

4. Finally, ask them how to solve this problem.

But be sure to focus the question. For example, rather than ask “How can we solve climate change?” — which is too big for anyone to wrap their mind around — ask “How could we address and solve cause X of climate change?” Answering this question will require kids to synthesize their knowledge. Nudge them to come up with a variety of approaches: What scientific solution could address cause X? What’s a financial solution? Political solution?

You can start this project anytime on any topic; you don’t have to be an expert what your kids are studying. This is about teaching them to think for themselves. Your role is to direct their questions and listen critically. Meanwhile, your kids “have to think about how they’re going to put this into digestible pieces for you to understand it. It’s a great way to consolidate learning.”

Critical thinking isn’t just for the young, of course. Oshiro says, “If you’re a lifelong learner, ask yourself these types of questions in order to test your assumptions about what you think you already know.” As he says, “We can all improve and support critical thinking by asking a few extra questions each day.”

Agnes Howard:

The point of sumptuary laws was to help distinguish people by their class, through the length of a coat or the style of a hat. Puritans wanted to stem greed but also social mobility. Aside from accusing witches and persecuting Quakers, opposing social mobility is one of the most offensive things about Massachusetts’ Bay colonists, at least among the students I have taught, young people raised to prize meritocracy. Most Americans now do not think, as John Winthrop thought, that God makes some people high and others low on purpose. Indeed, to some, social mobility is practically the cornerstone of the American dream.

But I suspect that if present-day judges of Puritanical judgement focused on the purpose of these laws rather than being distracted by opposition to individuality and style, they might have to admit more in common with seventeenth-century folk than they let on. The General Court’s laws on lace and silks meant to keep social levels easily recognizable, so people of the same class could find each other. Or, as the Times article puts it, “wearing the same clothing sends a signal: On the one hand, it links you to people you want to resemble, and on the other it separates you from people you don’t want to resemble.”

On student loan forgiveness, Alan Jacobs has a question that deserves an answer:

For me, the obvious question about the proposal to forgive student loans — as made, for instance, by Astra Taylor here — is this: Why only student loans? Millions of Americans who have never attended college are being crushed by debt. Why shouldn’t something be done for them?

Imagine how this looks to all those working-class people who aren’t sure how they’re going to pay their rent next month, who have made far too many visits to payday lenders. “We’re going to have everything we own taken away while all you super-woke people campaign to have the government pay for your MFA in set design. And you call that being progressive.”

UPDATE: Freddie’s position is the right one to take about these matters. If people who are currently focused obsessively on getting their own loans canceled took their bearings from what he says here, this conversation would be a more productive once.

Faculty lounge evangelicals:

News coverage emphasized the 61 over the 49. Articles in the Washington Post, Newsweek, and Sojourners seemed to suggest that Haines is an out-of-touch administrator pushing Pence against a unified student body, faculty, and alumni base. As Smith wrote, “As a TU alum, who regularly spends time on the campus talking to faculty and students, I was completely taken aback by this announcement.”

That’s probably because Smith has been hanging out in what one observer has called the evangelical “faculty lounge.” This lounge includes professors at religious universities like Taylor, Calvin, Seattle Pacific, and Westmont, which have long been bastions of an intellectually respectable, cosmopolitan evangelicalism. The lounge also makes room for clergy, missionaries, activists, and educated laypeople who, as Fred Clark describes them, “read Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind and nodded along in sad agreement.” Not everyone in the lounge is a moderate or progressive, but many are, and even most who are not have little patience for the politics of Trump and Pence.

Significantly, the visibility of the faculty lounge has made evangelicalism seem less populist than it actually is. Consider the commencement address given at Fuller Theological Seminary nearly fifty years ago by a liberal Republican senator who was becoming an increasingly vocal opponent of the Vietnam War and proponent in favor of environmental legislation. Mark O. Hatfield, nervous about delivering his 1970 address before this conservative evangelical seminary, was deeply encouraged by his reception on campus. One-third of the graduating class, which cheered as he walked into the room, wore black bands on their gowns to signify opposition to the war. Students in a balcony unfurled a banner that read, “Blessed are the peacemakers. We’re with you, Mark.”

Steven McAlpine on news coverage of Christianity:

It’s a terrible way for it to happen, but with the awful scenes in Colombo overnight, Christian persecution just got its moment in the sun for 2019.

And the manner in which it is being reported for what it is – a terrorist attack aimed predominantly, though not exclusively, at Christians -, makes it pretty clear that when it comes to religious persecution, the mainstream media will report an event, if – and only if – it ticks a number of boxes.

That’s in spite of many a social media post bemoaning the lack of relative coverage of Christian persecution, following the Christchurch mosque massacres.

Yes I think there is an aversion to the idea of Christians being persecuted. This is particularly so in the West. It’s a way that the hardening secular culture gives no inch for Christians in the West to complain they are hard done by. It the Anything But Christianity attitude that Os Guiness talks of.

Having said that I don’t think we should overplay this in global terms. For when it comes to reportage, there are a number of factors that need to take place, all of them aligned with proximity and familiarity, regardless of the faith background of those involved. And these terrible atrocities cover them all. On a day when newspapers in Australia report the weird behaviour of our Prime Minister raising his hands in worship in church, it’s probably to be expected that the secular media has little understanding of how religion works. So why the reportage of this event?

John Hawthorne of Spring Arbor and the Mueller Report:

Four weeks ago I wrote this post about the Barr letter summarizing his views of the Mueller Report. This week we finally got to see that actual Report. Like many others, I devoted several hours Thursday night to give a cursory read of what Mueller presented.

The report is laid out in two volumes; the first on Russian election interference and the hacking of DNC e-mails and the second on matters of obstruction of justice. As expected, the first part of Volume I repeated in narrative form everything that had been covered in the earlier indictments of Russian agencies and individuals.

Mueller and his team were meticulous in spelling out what the legal standards they would use to conclude that a crime had occurred. There had to be intent to commit the offense with clear knowledge of the illegality involved and a demonstrable act. There was no evidence that the Trump campaign was aware of the “active measures” to impact the election (although Manafort’s sharing of polling data fits that supposition) or that the DNC servers were going to be hacked.

It appears so far (this may change when the likely Stone redactions are removed) that there was no illegality with regard to the sharing and celebration over the WikiLeaks dump of the hacked e-mails. The same is true with the Trump campaign using/sharing the active measures items from groups like TNGOP (one of the Russian fake twitter accounts).

Yet it is troubling moral behavior even if not illegal. The “win at all costs” mentality which demonizes opponents and believes the worst of others is deeply problematic. Imagine a shady appliance store selling hugely discounted flat-screen TVs. You may not be involved in stealing TVs or in receiving stolen property but you know these prices are too good to be true. You didn’t coordinate (or “collude”) but you knew illegal stuff happened somewhere along the way and just didn’t care.

Why nothing from AOC?, he asks from Down Under.

Forget the furore over the “Easter worshippers versus Christian” Tweets by the former US President Barak Obama, and the former (soon to be again?) Presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, about the Sri Lankan bombings.

It’s the lack of any social media comment by the up and coming star of the Democrats in the US that is the really interesting thing.

New York Democrat Representative, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the future of the party, if many voices are to be believed, has said nothing on Twitter about the bombings, – or on any social media site – despite this atrocity being the biggest single act of terrorist violence in the last decade.

And it’s not as if she is not a constant voice on social media. …

But how do we interpret silence? And more so, from someone who normally doesn’t only not do silence, as social media is concerned, but who is a constant and noisy presence?

Clinton, Obama and Trump showed compassion. The compassion of world figures who have seen much suffering and, let’s face it, have been party to much of the suffering around the world also. They’re not clean-skins, and they probably know it too.

But not Ocasio-Cortez. No compassion. Not publicly. Not for this at least. And I think that’s a signal for how this divide is going to go in the future. I do think it’s a line in the sand, and in a sense a much colder, braver line in the sand than Obama kept drawing and rubbing out.

For there are no such insecurities from the new breed of leaders in our hardening secular world. I doubt whether Ocasio-Cortez will let a few Breitbart or FoxNews reports shame her into putting out something on social to keep the peace. Not for the sake of public compassion anyway.

But let’s not just blame Ocasio-Cortez. She is the future of this Western world – Left and Right.

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