The Ceremony of Writing

At our family reunion last week one of my uncles had a photo copy of a document from 1918,  my grandfather's release from the draft for the armed forces. My grandfather had lost one leg below the knee in a logging accident when he was 12 years old, and was also legally blind in one eye, so he was exempted from the draft for World War I. The exemption was duly signed by the county draft board representative, who was the grandfather of my cousin's husband. My grandfather did not sign it himself: he had my grandmother, to whom he had been married for maybe a year, sign it on his behalf and then he 'made his mark'. She had been able to complete 5th grade, so her handwriting was better. Appalachia in 1918 was a hard place to grow up, and it got even worse during the Great Depression in the early 1930's.

In a time when many fewer people could read and write, signing an important document really was a ceremony. While my grandfather was able to do his own signature by the time I knew him, I don't really know if he was able to write in 1918 or if it was just slow and laborious so he had my grandmother do it instead. But in any case, to write your signature was an important thing in those days. For those who could not write, it could be an embarrassing thing. I can see how 'signing ceremonies', such as the President signing a new bill into law, would be a much bigger deal in those days than it is now.

This reminded me of what a powerful thing the written word can be. Through much of history writing was both expensive in terms of the cost of paper, ink, and pens, but also required education that many did not have. Writing is taken for granted now, and with computers it is being replaced by 'keyboarding'. In many ways that is a shame.  While in college my mother would write to me sometimes, and she still does. But I only have one letter written in my father's hand. I saved it. Since he was born in 1922,  he grew up in Appalachia when the value placed on education there was still not much different than when my grandfather grew up a few years earlier. Good handwriting was not a priority for them. For him to write a letter was unusual but I am glad he took the time to do that. I am sure it was a chore for him, but it was a blessing to me.

Family Reunions

We had a family reunion yesterday up in Tennessee. We had somewhere around 100 folks show up, which I was very pleased to see. It was my mom's side of the family and all of her living siblings except one were able to attend. There were lots of cousins and their children and grandchildren as well. When I was growing up this side of the family had at least one, sometimes 2 or 3, of this sort of get together every summer since the family was less scattered geographically. It was generally at a public park in the early years, then later at my uncles farm. It was where many of us cousins got to know each other better. In a family like this (mom is one of 13 siblings) it was just about the only way to get everyone in one place, by having the event outside!

The fun and food that happened in those events played an important role in cementing family relationships, in keeping the family acting like a family. Several generations could spend a full day together every so often, talking, playing, eating, discussing all kinds of things: family events, religion, politics. Now that the family is scattered, this happens much less often. My cousin, who organized this one, did the work to organize it in part because she wanted her children to get to know her other cousins better, like she had been able to do when growing up.  I think all of us in the family miss that.

I think that also describes part of what we miss in many churches today, especially mega-churches. I frequently ask my children and others of their generation what impacts their choice of a church to attend. One thing that comes up at times is the desire to know whole families and not just their own generation. In most large churches, we organize the groups outside of the large worship events by age, effectively segregating generations. Families are broken down into individuals.

In my last blog I discussed how Obama and indeed most of secular society since the Enlightenment have viewed the individual as the key unit of society and self-fulfillment as the key goal in life. The Bible uses the family more as the basic unit, with Abraham's family carrying the load in the Old Testament and the church as the 'bride of Christ' and the 'children of God' being the New Testament family. Individual sin and repentance is important, that is true; but the thing that holds society together is a family. Families require a lot of giving and caring, not just self-fulfillment. It is very different model than the individual of the Enlightenment view.

The reunion yesterday reminded me of that as we recovered some of that extended-family cohesiveness, at least  for a day. We need to find more ways to do that in the local church, too.

Breakfast!

I just watched a PBS program called The Breakfast Special. I have a couple of favorites on PBS that I like to watch every now then. A Hot Dog Program is one about little hot dog joints around the U.S.. The Varsity is included, but most of the others are small places with something unique about them. There is another one called The Ice Cream Program that visits stores that make their own ice cream, though again they include one big one (Ben & Jerry's, of course).  I really love these shows, which I suppose is solid evidence that I am a little bit off mentally.  I was able to con Sarah into watching the one about hot dogs with me one time, but otherwise it is a solitary venture that I enjoy nonetheless. This one about breakfast was a new one for me. It didn't quite measure up to the fun of the hot dog or ice cream shows, but I still enjoyed it as they wandered around the country looking for unique places for breakfast, so I took notes on the ones that were most appealing.

One called La Herencia in the historic section of St. Augustine (on Aviles Street) looked like a place for a new and different sort of breakfast. They have a Cuban theme and serve some interesting omelettes. The omelette with pork, black beans, salsa and cheese served on top of Cuban bread looked like a good one. The Breakfast Club on Tybee Island looked rather crowded from the lines outside the door that they filmed, but is one I may actually get a chance to try some time since it isn't that far away. The Maple Tree Inn in upstate New York, where they make their own maple syrup from the trees right behind the restaurant and where they are only open during maple syrup season looked like fun, too, though I doubt I will ever make it there at the right time of year. The Best Breakfast in Westerville, OH, looks to have fantastic home made bread and corned beef hash.

None of this is really the my ideal breakfast, though. At the end of the show they asked the various restaurant owners what their most memorable breakfast was, and they all recounted different stories. As I thought about that question I quickly landed upon the time when I was in junior high school and we had made our annual Thanksgiving trip to my grandfather's farm to help with hog-butchering time. The day of actually working on the pig was pretty disgusting, but the next morning's breakfast is probably my most memorable. My grandmother kept her own milk cow and made her own butter and buttermilk, which she used to make the world's most amazing biscuits. There was no shortening in the biscuits except her fresh butter an buttermilk. That particular day in addition to the amazing biscuits, we also had fresh bacon and pork chops (we are talking fresh here--it had been walking around the previous day), gravy, eggs, apple butter and probably some other stuff like fried apples. Amazing. And thus far unequaled.

This perhaps explains why I like Cracker Barrel. I keep looking for a place to come close to that ideal breakfast. Cracker Barrel is really not close, but the down-home atmosphere and just the fact that they generally have at least decent biscuits does bring it to mind. The Moose Cafe outside Asheville has good biscuits, but I am generally not there at breakfast time so I don't know how the rest of their breakfast measures up, though it looks good from the menu. I need to try that place for something other than lunch or dinner.

So what is your most memorable breakfast?

Why MBA is not a Professional Degree

The July/August 2010 of Harvard Business Review has an article that finally faces the truth: the MBA degree is NOT a professional degree in the way that a medical, law, or engineering degree is. The author, Richard Barker, is a professor at the Cambridge business school in England, and it is quite refreshing to see a B-school professor ‘fessing up' to what should be obvious.


Much of his commentary is based on things that have been observed by others before, and applies just as much to schools of education as to business: that there is not a well defined body of knowledge to learn to become qualified, that the key to the education is the process and ‘case studies’ more than defined content, that there is no board to measure and license those who are qualified and to ban/discipline those who do not live up to it. All of these areas are quite different than in the professions, though most of them fall short on the part about holding practitioners accountable. He points out that the content of what a medical or law school teaches is what qualifies the graduates, whereas in B-school most alumni will tell you that the classmates and discussions were more important than the content. You hire a doctor or lawyer specifically for the technical knowledge they have but managers are mostly hired for their leadership skills. Professionals provide input and expertise in a defined area but managers mostly assemble input from various professionals and ‘connect the dots’.  And as the collapse of the financial sector has shown, there is clearly no accountable and very little in the way of ethics.

This by no means means that management is necessarily an inferior pursuit. It does mean that getting an MBA is not what qualifies you to be a manager. For the most part, you should have already demonstrated the insight and leadership skills BEFORE you get an MBA, which is the reverse of professional degrees. An MBA can broaden your exposure to issues that might take many years for you to encounter on the job, but it does not provide qualifications. In contrast, you would never go to a lawyer, doctor, or engineer until AFTER they are trained. You would never trust a doctor who had spent much of his education just talking about case studies rather than gaining technical skills and technical knowledge. By way of contrast , a great many businesses are successfully  led by entrepreneurs who are very effective but not the least interested in an MBA.

As a culture we have tried to make teachers and managers into a content-based skill like engineering, but it just isn’t so. In both cases the attributes for success have more to do with personal traits than with a degree, and much of it cannot be taught. Both teachers and managers should have a ‘real ‘ degree in an area of expertise, but becoming a teacher or manager is more about dealing with people, insight, and connecting inputs across various disciplines than about mastering a body of knowledge. The reverse of that, of course, is that many professionals have mastered a key body of knowledge but have poor interactions with people. There are a great many doctors and lawyers who are very knowledgeable but very inept as well.

Ministry degrees, like the Master of Divinity, have the same issue. For all our pretending otherwise, the M. Div. degree does not qualify a man for ministry. It can enhance the knowledge of one who already has the right insight and people skills, but it does not provide qualification. While academic theology may have to do mostly with particular areas of learning, pastoral ministry and teaching is more like management and teaching. Divinity schools would do well to follow the example of many MBA programs, not accepting candidates until they have already been in ministry for several years.

Nudges, Marriages, and Feminists

I just finished reading the book Nudge, in which a couple of academic economists explore the idea of 'choice architecture' and what they call 'libertarian paternalism'.  The basic idea is that many of the decisions that are made in both public and private spheres end up nudging us to choose in a particular direction, even if unintentionally, and that we can use that fact to help improve the choices people make by intentionally 'nudging' them in a better direction. However, they support doing so thoughtfully so that we intentionally seek to maintain freedom of choice rather than mandating things. They open the book with the example of how the way food is displayed in a cafeteria influences which foods are purchased, and that we can influence the choice of healthier food in schools by the way the food is displayed. This doesn't coerce anyone's choice but does give healthy food greater exposure. The way we design buildings and cities also nudge decisions on transportation, housing, etc. and such decisions must be made.

We use government in this way much of the time, via tax deductions and tax credits, subsidies, and rebates. It goes beyond nudging to mandates when we legally require things.I like the author's emphasis on seeking to maintain freedom, the libertarian part of it, as well as the idea that choices which must be made may as well seek to help us. Of course, we will not all agree on what is 'good' and what 'helps'. In many cases, though, like the default option for work or government benefits, this idea can be put to good use. For instance, many companies now automatically enroll you in the 401k savings plan if you do nothing, whereas in the past the default if you did nothing was to leave you un-enrolled. This is a 'nudge' and seems to me a good one.

However, the more the decision involves morality and values, the more diificult this use of 'nudging' gets to be. One chapter in the book proposes changing the societal approach to marriage, proposing that governments no longer sanction any marriages, that marriage be 'privatized'. The change would be that the government would only sanction civil unions, and marriage would be a private or religious matter exclusively.  The authors contend that this would improve the freedom of religious groups as well as non-religious folks, as religious groups could be free to exclude whomever they choose and have standards as high as they want without concern about what impacts it might have on things like government benefits.

In many ways that is a place we have already arrived at, though not officially. The June 21 issue of Newsweek magazine,  which has Sarah Palin on the cover, has 2 articles that impact this issue. The first article is about Sarah Palin and the renewed energy of women of the religious right and the other is an article that argues against marriage by 2 self-vowed 'secular, urban' women who rail against the evil of marriage. Palin's work is described as a different sort of feminism, one that 'gathers up the Christian women traditional feminism has left behind' and admits that 'mainstream feminism has had an antireligious bias for a really long time.' The other article is the voice of that 'mainstream feminism' which argues that 'marriage is ...no longer necessary' and that 'the idea of marriage has become so tainted...that we're hesitant to engage in it.'

It is interesting to me that secular, urban homosexuals are arguing they should get married while secular, urban women are arguing that they should avoid marriage. Neither of them are arguing on the basis of virtue. Both are arguing on that basis of what makes them more financially successful and more self-satisfied.  There is very little discussion of what it means to be human, since being human means little more to them than 'maximizing our marginal benefit' in economic terms, which includes maximizing their personal power and liberty. I said above that in many ways we are already there because 41% of births are out of wedlock, divorce rates remain high, and benefits in both jobs and in government are readily available to both singles and homosexuals who live together or have children (whether adopted for homosexuals or out of wedlock for heterosexuals). The feminist article admits that for dual income marriages, there is no tax benefit to marriage. The battles today about marriage are really more about status and power than about economics and benefits, and it is interesting that the secular feminist argument and the homosexual argument so completely contradict each other. To me, one key weakness of the Christian discussion of marriage for the past 2 centuries, since the onset of Romanticism, is that we talk about marriage mostly in terms of self-fulfillment, not in terms of virtue, living out our humanness as God created it, or learning how to put other's needs ahead of our own desires. The feminist article admits that couples who marry for love find that '90% of couples have lost the passion they originally felt. And while couples who marry for love are less 'in love' with each passing year, one study found that those in arranged marriages grow steadily more in love as the years progress-because their expectations, say researchers, are a whole lot lower.' I think it has more to do with different expectations rather than lower expectations. Expecting to put someone else's needs ahead of your own and being surprised that doing so makes you a better and happier person seems like higher, not lower, expectations to me. The secular, urban feminists haven't figured that out.

All of this points out how very selfish and self-centered we are. The most difficult thing about marriage is that it demands putting our self-centeredness aside so often. The basic idea about Nudge that I like is the call to consider what is best for others, yet it quickly degenerates into defining 'best' as nothing more than maximizing our selfish desire for power or pleasure. And I think this is why Palin is touching a lot of Christian women. They see in her example with her Down Syndrome child and her out-of-wedlock grandchild a person who is still striving to do the right thing as a mom, and a lot of moms seem to relate to that. I am not a Palin political supporter because she still seems uninformed about a great many matters of state and policy. But I do see how she represents for many women an alternative to the selfish, secular, urban women of the political left.

Musings on Korea

I just spent a week in Korea, my second visit there. Since I knew to avoid the kimchi this time and the hotel was more conveniently located, it was a good visit. Finding a Starbucks within a few blocks of the hotel was nice, too.

It is interesting to observe a culture in which there do not seem to be any significant racial minorities. Everyone in all walks of life, at least that I encountered, seemed to be Korean. There was not a clear divide, as there is in many countries, in which immigrants make up the taxi drivers, the hotel housekeepers, the janitors and farm workers. There also seems to be a strong service commitment in the culture: the taxi drivers often wear a tie, the hotel has several people near the front door to greet, help with luggage, give directions, call a taxi or anything else, much more available than in the U.S., and tips for service are not part of the culture.

I stayed in one of the cities in the metro-Seoul area, the city of Suwon. It is an old city on the south side of Seoul with an old fortress that is a well known landmark, and it also has a large Samsung manufacturing site. All the places I went seemed to be quite safe with lots of people around and usually lots of traffic. There are a lot of churches as well, and you see a lot of crosses on the top of steeples and roofs as you walk around. There continues to be a great deal of construction going on. In one area we drove past, something like 30 or so high rise condo buildings are going up at once. These are 20-30 stories each. It is like a whole, new city being built at once.

One of the most interesting things from this trip was the discussion on the current tension with North Korea about the sinking of a navy ship in April. I was surprised to learn that quite a large number of folks, which was estimated at something like 25-30% of the South Koreans by the folks I talked with, think the sinking could have been caused by the South Korean government. Some think it may have been an accident in war games and that the government is covering it up. Others think it may have been a deliberate attempt by the government to influence the elections that took place soon after the sinking. Many of the citizens clearly do not trust their government on this sort of thing, and most especially they do not trust the military. The view of this is much less clear cut in Korea than the way it is presented in the U.S. news media.

It was also interesting to me that there are very few semi-tractor trailers on the road. You see lots of trucks, but they are smaller than semi’s. I had to think about that for a bit, but since South Korea is about the size of Indiana, you can see how smaller trucks would work fine if all the trucking you needed to do were within the confines of Indiana. The only semi’s I saw were sea-going containers headed for a seaport to be loaded on a ship. However, there are buses everywhere. I used a bus to and from the airport, which is about 1.5 hours from Seoul at Incheon. Buses are a well used means of transport and take the place of the semi’s on the road.

Overall, I continue to be impressed by the amount of construction and development going on, despite the current economic issues; and I found it interesting that in a land with much less ethnic and racial diversity, and that appears to an outsider as much more uniform in thought, there is still a strong suspicion of the motives of politicians.

Slobs and Preppies

Here we go again….there are 2 kinds of people in the world, slobs and preppies. I am sitting here thinking about Timothy Keller’s book The Prodigal God, which of course is about two kinds of people in the world, elder brothers and younger brothers. Those are the two brothers in the parable of the prodigal son. One of them is a preppie, the other one a slob. You may have other terms for them, like one is Party-er and the other a Do-gooder; one is a Pharisee and the other a sinner; one of them is liberal and the other a conservative; one is Ford guy and the other a Chevy guy. They are all related to each other.


I wrote last year about how irritating this ‘two kinds of people’ thing gets after a while. I think that maybe it is better to think that there are two kinds of people in the world: those that think there are two kinds of people in the world, and those who don’t. Unfortunately I was reminded again of how poignant this little device can be last Sunday morning. You see, I generally go to the early morning service in the sanctuary at our church, but every so often I go to the ‘contemporary’ (aka, ‘rock n roll’) service to help out with the offering and such. Last week I was at the contemporary service.

I am always amazed at the effort some folks put in to looking like slobs. Especially the guys in the band. There they are in front of the crowd with jeans full of holes, a shirt that is too small and looks like it was rolled up in wad for the past week, a stubbly beard, and hair that hasn’t been combed in who knows how long. These are not poor folks who can’t afford clothing without holes or don’t have access to a shower and a laundry. These are folks who work hard at looking like slobs. I don’t get it. Somehow it is ‘cool’ to look like the younger, prodigal son after he hit bottom.

Which reminded me of the prodigal son. Or rather, it reminded me of one section of Keller’s book in which he comments about how traditional churches chase away the younger-brother types by our elder-brotherness, which in turn raised in my mind the question of what church is supposed to be about anyway. Is church supposed to be designed to attract the younger brother, party going, slob types? Or is it supposed to attract the elder brother Pharisee types? Or neither?

My current vote is for ‘neither’. The reality is that we seem to be doing one or the other, with the ‘traditional’ service being to attract the elder brother types and the ‘contemporary’ to attract the younger brother types. Neither of these types want to venture outside their own comfort zone. Neither wants to be made uncomfortable. Both seem to me to go to church at least in part to demonstrate their own style rather than to worship God.

I think the idea of ‘seeker sensitive’ church doesn’t serve the purpose of church and doesn’t make much sense anyway. I am Calvinistic enough to think that there are no seekers without God first seeking us. But we should not be chasing people away either. We should instead be true to what worship is supposed to be, which is to cause us to recognize our own need for God and then respond by worshipping God. So, the goal of church is not to attract younger brothers; nor is it to attract elder brothers. Both brothers are in it for themselves. Both see their approach as best and both seek to put God in a position of owing them something.

The hard thing about church is to cause the Pharisee elder brothers to recognize their Pharisee-ism, repent of it, and respond in humble worship while also causing the partying libertines to recognize their libertinism, repent of it, and respond in humble worship. Instead we often just reinforce both of them by playing to their style. Maybe we should make everyone switch to the other service after they choose the one they want? As someone said, ‘to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted’ is what we should be trying to do. Not easy. It is certainly done best by the Spirit.

I actually enjoyed a couple of the songs we sang in that service, despite the band’s appearance. But I can’t say I left with a sense of having encountered God there. Some people appeared to have done so. Still, I wonder how we reconcile these ‘2 kinds of people’ in our church services.

I am re-reading the book Nudge as well. In it there is a blurb about a product called Clocky, a robotic alarm clock that ‘runs away and hides if you don’t get out of bed’! Such a product is needed because there are two kinds of people in the world: those who get up when the alarm goes off, and those who don’t. We need to get one of those for Daniel!