Maybe it is because of the material I am working with in order to put together a course idea.

What I am noticing is that more I read in the dystopian genre, stories of the various travails of those caught in the crossfire of war, and various analyses of media and the social forces that surround spending habits for the wealthiest in the world (which includes all American middle-class), the more I am convinced that there is something deeply wrong with the human condition.

By this I mean that the tendency of humanity seems to go against the grain of what is evolutionarily expedient or efficient to maximize survival. People rather seem to to do the opposite reflecting back on what is good to maximize one’s own survival alone.

In theological terms, it is clear why depravity became such a central issue for so many theologians as an expression of the extremity of sin and source of these kinds of behaviors.

What is also clear is that in these situations there are a very few who do well beyond the call of what is evolutionarily efficient in order to assist those who are suffering the most. But it seems that the fat middle of the majority of those who suffer do not receive the benefit of such acts of selfless altruism. Because such benevolence exists, I am not quite convinced on pragmatic grounds that human nature is completely shattered in its ability to receive the good and dispense it to the needy. However, it is hard not to see that such persons are perhaps sadly not the majority in the world and the net effect of humanity is a gravity towards the depravity as such theologians have argued in the Reformed tradition.

In a very short piece on the Today Show this morning, it was reported that the toll of dead and missing in Myanmar is now up to 60,000. The Kansas City Star published an AP report this morning:

Corpses floated in salty flood waters and witnesses said survivors tried desperately to reach dry ground on boats using blankets as sails. The U.N. said some 1 million people were homeless in the Southeast Asian country, also known as Burma.

“Basically the entire lower delta region is under water,” said Richard Horsey, Bangkok-based spokesman for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Aid.

“Teams are talking about bodies floating around in the water,” he said. This is “a major, major disaster we’re dealing with.”

This is something that makes even Katrina pale in comparison to the devastation these people will now have to suffer for many years to come. In America, we simply do not understand how good things are here in comparison to most of the world, and especially the developing/third world. Following Katrina we heard more stories about people placing blame, crying racism highlighted by Kanye West’s comment “George Bush hates black people”, and more whining than was appropriate or helpful. Yet there we sat as the richest nation in the world completely able to help ourselves in the midst of such disaster.

This is something to keep your respective political complaints about the economy and how Iraq makes you ill, how George Bush is the coming of Satan, Hillary v. Obama V. McCain, etc. in perspective. Pause to understand that you - that is anyone who can read this or has time to - have it better than most in the world despite all of it.

The people in Myanmar do not have the luxury of complaining. It is unfortunate that the government seems to think business as usual is proper. The people do not, or likely will not have the strength to place blame for their situation. Many will now be forced to live in an enviroment where disease is more common than food and clean water is the most cherished luxury of all.

So far it is a blip on our news radar in between Lindsey Lohan’s sexual escapades and The Spears’ family values expressed in drunkenness and teenage pregnancy.

Pray for Myanmar if that is all you are able to do this morning.

Another gem from my favorite preacher.  A groovy little dance bookended by love and righteous indignation sayeth the Lord.  And God has quite the potty mouth.  You must see the last bit for full effect…

Read this.  Like it or not, you are not only going to be an enthusiastic and idealistic minister of the gospel, you are also assuming the role of a COO of a non-profit corporation.  Carol calls it “stuff they don’t teach you in seminary” and to that I say “Aye”.

When you sit in your first session meeting listen, but take the reigns and let people know that you are able to organize and steer the ship into safe harbor if it needs to go there.  Don’t be tentative.  The long time parishioners, deacons and elders can smell blood in the water and some of them want to eat you alive.

Be gentle and operate with love.  But be stern and clear enough about how you want to do business with people.  People will have expectations of you that you will never meet.  They need to figure you out as much as you need to figure them out.  Things “Storm” then “Form” then “Norm” then “Perform”.  So learn to live with a little tension as things equilibrate.  And that will likely take you three years so stick with it until then - at least.  Don’t be a first-year pastor statistic who ends up working a Starbucks with no clue what to do with life anymore.

Remember the Three C’s:

• Be Clear - Don’t be ambiguous with what you say to people.  Be pragmatic with your language.  Think about how things will look if people actually do them.  Most of all, have a clear understanding of why you are doing what you are doing and suggesting.
• Be Consistent - Try not to show favoritism or too much attention to any one person or clique of people and use the same language to express your ideas no matter who is in the room.  This prevents gossip.  If you approach everyone in the same way, the gossip stops about you as soon as two people start talking about you behind your back (which they will do - that’s part of being a leader).
• Be Creative - Don’t let the current conditions stop you from thinking outside of the box, and learn to take some risks with people.  Try not to be overly zealous with your creativity to change things right off.  But be creative within the structures you are inheriting to stretch the resources you have in the best way possible.  Sometimes you meet what you think people’s needs are by creating a few needs with your own vision!  Think what do we want to do, how will we do it, and how will we know we have done it.  Sometimes action will tell you what you identity is.  So don’t let an “unclear vision” bog your decision-making down.

What does it actually look like? Or, let me be more specific: How is a universal healthcare system different from the way that an HMO functions?

With an HMO the bar is set pretty low for what kinds of treatments will be covered, what kinds of tests can be ordered, procedures, etc. Step out of network and the world is your oyster. A physician can order any tests they want based on their clinical diagnoses and it is the physician that manages the care of the patient and not the insurance company working within the strictures of a managed care plan.

So if the government now makes healthcare something that all Americans can get, what does that kind of care look like and how would it actually work with a privatized system? Will not the government adjudicate the treatment plan rather than the insurance company? The theory seems to be implausible and seems to transfer the problem of managed treatment from the insurance company to the government.

Think of it this way. We can give a piece of cheese and a loaf of bread to every person in the world once per week with eight glasses of clean water to drink every day. If we can do that (and we sure can somehow with rally low cost it would seem) can’t we officially officially say that we have now solved world hunger since everyone is now eating something within a seven day period and drinking enough clean water every day. Does that really solve the problem? I guess it depends on what you might think a good resolution to the problem actually is. I am not convinced that a managed care system that forces physicians to answer to an agency to administer proper care is all that great - government controlled or otherwise.

Here is a personal story, I have a few, but this one stands out. I had clear Lyme disease symptoms sans arthritis last summer. I had the rash, chronic fatigue, and vertigo. We caught it nice and early before the real bad stuff could take hold. We went to the ER and my blood titer came back negative. Great. We know that to be the case with Lyme. Blood titers have a habit of not proving positive which is why you default with the clinical diagnosis. The ER doc rightly put me on doxycycline for two weeks which is the standard treatment among many infectious disease specialists. But this was only “precautionary” since the blood titer was negative.

So I saw my PCP a week later and to our amazement the rash started to quickly dissipate upon introduction of the antibiotic. The doc was confused that the blood titers were negative and that I had no arthritic symptoms. Also, we are not in one of the Lyme hotspots so probability was not in my favor. So he ordered some more cookie cutter titer tests as a “precaution”. Meanwhile my symptoms were actually worse soon after anti-biotic treatment (which I later learned is called the Jarisch-Herxheimer reaction - another clinical confirmation of Lyme bacteria).

So these test came back negative too. He then tested me for HIV and other things. These were also negative. He was not convinced that it was Lyme even though I presented classic symptoms including the rash. His next stop was an RA specialist and he was not all that approving of my going out of network to see a Lyme specialist (the only two I found were about three hours away). He also said chronic fatigue was a possibility. Of course the message that I continued to tell him was that none of these symptoms existed before the rash in the first place! So yes, the doc may be ignorant. But his demeanor was telling me a different story that I had to learn later…

Screw the HMO. I went to a specialist. The specialist refuses to be a part of an HMO because they would not approve of tests he believes will root out the cause of the problem rather than look at the symptoms. So I took a battery of tests. Two months later he gave me the picture of one one of other possible co-infections. This was bartonella which would also explain my weakened immune system. Photographic evidence this time.

If I had stayed in network I could not have had these tests ordered because the initial titers were negative. They would never approve if it and so, the doc would not even think about it. It goes beyond the question of whether or not my PCP is just ignorant. Without privatized care, we will cripple our ability to perform these kinds of tests enabling us to perform the best treatments - an ability that insurance agencies in the context of HMO’s has crippled well enough it seems.

It seems that improving our current privatized system is the best route to go. Not sure how, but I don’t like the alternatives that liberals tend to espouse.

In God’s Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America Hanna Rosin, Washington Post correspondent, was embedded in the environment of the Patrick Henry College student for a year and reports what she witnessed and learned.

Patrick Henry College is a very small institution, but also newly founded under the clear authority of its president Michael Farris, a Christian homeschool advocate and clear supporter of the link between political conservativism and orthodox evangelical Christianity. The story she tells shows us remarkable resilience and fortitude of the students of this institution Farris can coined “God’s Harvard”. Indeed it’s students will be among the elite of all secondary school graduates much less the creme of the crop among homeschooled teens. The student body which boasts a rather generous helping of homeschooled undergraduates alone supports any assertion that homseschooled teens can compete with the best and brightest of all high school graduates.

Rosin tells tales of highly competitive students who are in the throes of political training at Patrick Henry. these students have unprecedented access to Washington with a clear sense of mission and pride about their task to reform American government to be something in which God can exercise domain and rule. That God is not currently doing so is at the very heart of the curriculum. In any college, one would be thrilled to have such a critical mass of bright and passionate students and this is part of the picture that Rosin paints for us.

There is, of course, another side to the story. This side is the authoritarian nature of the administration with a special emphases on Michael Farris and Dean of Students Bob Wilson. There are very clear limitations on behavior and dress along with unwritten expectations of the role of women along the lines of clear complementarianism. Infallibilism of Scripture is not only preached from the pulpit at mandatory chapel services, but it is a clear expectation to be integrated into all facets of the curriculum. And more than just integrated, but this view of Scripture should hold all other forms of knowledge as a contingency upon its truth. To wit, the biology program focuses on a rather odd anomaly in biology called baraminology, which is a taxonomic system that re-casts speciation in terms of what was likely to have been the case in the literal six day creation of Genesis (see Ch. 8, 183 ff.). History and politics are taught with the indubitable assumption that the founders intended to favor evangelical Christianity as the structure in which government and civility would be administered. So this is not just about abortion and gay rights. These are only symptomatic issues of a wider evangelical worldview that hold the structure of quite literally everything in different terms and under different standards of truth compared to even other evangelical colleges (Rosin points out differences with Wheaton College in a few key places such as science).

Finally, the ethical administration of the behavioral code is brought out in Rosin’s stories of a few students that she followed intently. Chapter 7 “Den of Sin” (p. 167 ff.) recounts one such conflict in which one student informed the administration of behavior infractions of other students whom he had befriended.

Someone was getting expelled. No, five people were getting expelled, or maybe three. A couple of them were Farahn’s friends. Rumor was that the boys had been caught drinking, smoking, abusing prescription painkillers, and possibly cheating on exams. No wait, they had not been caught. They had been turned in by one of their roommates. He had written a long letter to the dean of students (p. 168).

The problem here is not so much that students get caught and punished for such behaviors. The problem is that the institution made as part of its rules that students should hold each other accountable if they catch another breaking any rule to any degree. Rosin’s tale shows that this has created among many of the students a culture of distrust and paranoia rather than one of moral fortitude.

Indeed, Rosin points out such details with the tone of a mother who feels bad for these children; that in spite of their brightness and passion in what they do, there is a stir of conflict that rages beneath the surface. The college’s position is to use biblical infallibilism to hammer any such conflict into submission with perhaps a follow-through of a hug and even an “I love you” from the Dean. But with he influence of Tim LaHaye and other Christian Right conservatives who support Farris unflinchingly there is a clear pejorative tone to Rosin’s narrative even in terms of the homseschooling environments from which many of these students came.

Experimental communities almost always implode. One faction wants to hold on to the purest version of the mission while another begs for a little fresh air. The men fight for power, while trying to protect an image of unified authority. But eventually, their adoring subjects catch on (p. 257).

For PHC, such an implosion was the resignation of four professors who did not support the same premises of Farris in their classrooms. Indeed, it is clear that for Farris, this version of “God’s Harvard” hearkens back to the ante-bellum Harvard itself, perhaps more so of Yale. But this is even more radical in its understanding of the evangelical nature of government and the role of the student. This is an interesting and thought-provoking engagement of a new kind of evangelical college that seeks to dissociate itself from the controversies of Falwell and Robertson, but maintains a clear kinship in its very mission.

Read an excerpt here.

One of the courses I teach is a senior capping course for several different majors as divergent as psychology to medical imaging. The course is to contain a major research thesis that encompasses depth in the discipline, critical thinking and engagement of liberal arts, and an engagement of values. The other part of the course is to bookend the undergraduate experience by reflecting on a course all students take during their first year which introduces them to the importance of values as a way to bridge their intellectual development with their service as contributing members of society. It really is kind of an early 20th century liberal arts curriculum in terms of the shape of society today.

This year I had no time to develop the course and built it as I drove it. I killed them with Simone Weil who was unintelligible to them. I also killed them with postmodern discourse on apocalyptic literature. They liked Brave New World in this vein. So I am rethinking it again.

I always approach a course like this from a philosophical premise. When I taught an introductory course in religion, it was through Habermas’ use of Husserl’s concept of lebenswelt. I want to do a similar thing, but through Simone Weil’s notion of “reading” the world.

What I want to do is approach value by way of West meets East. The Western side will engage media and consumerism as a critique of what shapes values on a more or less global scale. For the East part, I want to focus on the plight of people who struggle in the midst of real oppression and for that I want to focus on Sudanese refugees who have not gotten much press at all in the West (unless you watch BBC World which my students on balance have not even heard of).

I am wondering how to tie these two aspects together seamlessly so that it is relevant to what they will be doing with their research - and this will be a stretch since they research topics as divergent as the ethics of proper shielding in medical imaging to the social effects of windmills in Somerset County, PA. SO here is my short list of readings in order of the curriculum starting with the West. I would love to know if anyone has a thought or two to add to this!

1.  West - One of the following:

• Mediated: How the Media Shapes Our World and the Way We Live in It
  (Thomas de Zengotita)
• Coercion: Why We Listen to What “They” Say (Douglas Rushkoff)
  
• The High Price of Materialism (Tim Kasser)
• The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (Barry Schwartz)
• The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need (Juliet B. Schor)
• Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (Neil Postman)

I am definitely going for a Neo-McLuhan theme here.

2.  East - One of the following, but probably the first title:

• Slave: My True Story (Mende Nazer with Damien Lewis)
• They Poured Fire on Us From the Sky: The Story of Three Lost Boys from Sudan (Benjamin Ajak, Benson Deng, Alephonsian Deng, Judy Bernstein)
  

3. Then read either Brave New World again or Fahrenheit 451.

4.  Then I want to close with something that illustrates the reconstruction of society according to what is good, just, and beautiful but I am not sure where to go with this.  Weil’s The Need for Roots was way over their heads.