Mike Longinow

Predators Among the Walking Clueless

2010-03-07T14:44:00.000-08:00

She turned in an assignment.

I had told her what to do, and she did it — with flourish.

Now I had a lesson that educators don't often have to deal with. I had come upon a teaching moment so enormous, such a wave crashing on the shore that I was feeling the enormity of the sea about to bury me.

I was numb, groping on my hands and knees across the floor of my mind.

Before me was an image that was beyond provocative. It was sexuality so pointed, so calculated in its choice of colors, body positioning, textures of skin surface and angle that it was a dagger.

And it found its home. I was pinned against the wall, eyes wide, hands flailing, legs unable to help me. For I'd walked right into the trap — bondage to a sexual encounter that was bigger than me, bigger than a mere picture.

The assignment had been for my students, under the premise of John Stewart Mill's arguments about freedom (and his opposition of censorship) to find an example of some type of media expression — a word, a phrase, an article, a photograph, a video clip, an entire package of media — that went too far. Freedom is a buzz word in our country. But we have no idea what it really means, particularly in a world where the foundations of morality are eroding under our feet.

The point I wanted to make was that in this world there are messages so sinister, so damaging, so explosive that they deserve some degree of separation from unsuspecting audiences. Some messages are just too much — a category of media, perhaps even of truth-telling, that deserve control — censorship, if that word can be used in any positive sense.

This student had done her research.

She found an advertisement — two, actually by the same advertising agency — promoting a perfume. And as is the case with most advertisements that have done effective market study, that have a firm grasp of socio-cultural, psycho-social needs in a given audience, this was not about fragrance.

This was an example of what the U.S. Supreme Court, as you'll see in this article by Judith A. Silver, would call obscenity — pornography, actually — under the guise of product advertisement. (The problem, of course, coming down to our acceptance of community standards for what is obscene. We lack community; we lack a sense of what obscene really is.)

Movie Day at the Supreme Court or "I Know It When I See It": A History of the Definition of Obscenity

I'd forgotten how pernicious pornography could be. I'd forgotten how it reaches into the mind, the body, the very soul of a man and grips him in ways that are a force beyond human reasoning.

The Bible doesn't deal with pornography as such. Marshall McLuhan would say pornography is media. But the grip of pornography is not what appears on a page, or in moving images, or in still-frame images. It's so much more.

The stuff we saw first in Hugh Hefner's magazine, but which is now an international industry of proportions none of us really grasp, is an invitation to fantasy. It is, in its own way, Art. Larry Flynt once told National Public Radio interviewer Terry Gross that Hustler magazine was a celebration of women — a tribute to their beauty, to their place in what, in his world, was a high culture of sexual expression, a beauty of unrestrained erotic ecstasy. But what Larry Flynt was describing was an Art of darkness.

What Larry Flynt didn't say, and that no pornographer will admit — except as an aside in an argument to persuade hapless postmoderns — is that the essence of pornography is bondage to a world of fantasy expectations regarding the relationship of a man to a woman. At its best, it is a room with an entrance but no exit.

And the dirty little secret is that there's no there there. Once you're inside, you're part of a vast emptiness, one you can't get enough of.

The look of pleasure on the faces of those women and men in those pictures, the groaning and murmuring of the women and men in those videos. All of it is fiction. Those women, those men — all of them — are actors. Some actually care (existentially) about what they're depicting; most probably don't. They're in a staged moment: lights, make-up, the works. They drive to the set; they drive home. They're people with a soul, with a mind, with a heart hungry for real relationship. Many of them are deeply lonely.

Sex is not all there is. Passion has an end. After every night of orgy and abandon to the flailing, breathless pleasures in the dark, there is a morning after.

The sun also rises.

The good news for us who know the forgiveness in Christ is that when we see that sun, we know the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. His mercies, we know, never come to an end. They are new every morning. And his faithfulness is there. But so is judgment.

A price of pornography addiction (even of dipping our toes in the edges of its vast oceanic expanse) is what it does to our eyes, our expectations of relationship, of interaction with women and men (even, oh Lord help us, children) around us — real and on billboards, on pages, in film.

We who inhabit Christian evangelical culture cannot deceive ourselves into thinking that as believers in Christ we can dabble in the fantasies of the mind and media that are destroying the moral foundation of Western civilization.

It must be pointed out that destruction we see around us is not random. It is not just circumstantial devolution. It's the outcome of predatory behavior. It is the result of systematic attack on us by is an enemy who knows us — knows our sexuality, grasps who we think we are better than we do. And this enemy uses media to lure us into the dark, empty box with no door.

None of this is really new. He's been destroying civilizations with it for centuries. Babylon, Greece, Rome, the tribes and peoples of Europe and South America and Asia — all of them wrestled with the concepts inherent in pornographic bondage of our day.

Pornography hurts women, it hurts men, it hurts children.

Biblical admonitions against what the enemy does through pornography can be seen in passages warning us against extramarital sexual encounter. Two of the more prominent are Proverbs 5: 15-23; Proverbs 7:6-27. They're warnings against foolish dabbling in sex outside marriage.

Then there are the warnings about image (pornography, after all, is about what we see even though it's spread to phone sex and cyber-sex and other means we create to connect with others electronically.) The Bible contains scores of warnings in Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Judges, and in the lives of David and Saul regarding the ways images draw people astray. And it's not just about idols.

God knows us. He points out the dangers of imagery because He knows our tendency to allow images to turn our attention away from the reality of God in the world — a reality bigger, more vast than any depiction the human mind, even in its God-breathed creativity, could ever form.

Now I have the hard task of helping my students understand that the edge of the volcano is not the best place to be — even if we think we know how to get back from the brink.

If they find themselves standing there at the edge, they should know they are foolish if they do either of the following.

First, they'd be foolish to think sexuality in media is either absent or innocent. Attacks on the male psyche are all around us, infecting every man — young or old, rich or poor — in our country and anywhere else that commercial forces are shaping media messages.

How easily we lapse into lethargy and complacence. How clueless we are about the spiritual warfare raging around us. Just because we leave our weapon at home or never learned how to use it doesn't mean there aren't bullets slamming into the dirt and buildings all around us. We act so shocked when get wounded. ("Why would anybody hurt me — I'm such a nice person?" we ask ourselves. Why? Because the enemy hates the work of God in us. Why hurt nice people? Because they're the easiest to take down.)

So secondly, we're foolish to think we can win all by ourselves. We can't.

This is a battle so much bigger than anything we can muster. We must take this to our knees, to our faces in the dust — to prayer that agrees with God that we are helpless against the monster.

Our mindset must be like the man in the gospel of Mark who threw himself before Jesus and screamed at the torment from which he thought he could never be free (Mark 5:1-15). The irony was that this man's bondage was so penetrating, so fearsome, that the very presence of Christ — the Holy One — created in him a fear, a pleading for the Lord to go away. Why do we do that? Something about intense pain makes us incoherent, unable to see hope. All we know is agony, and those who know our torment.

Jesus healed this man. Jesus freed him from bondage to the demons that drove him to gash himself and run from all who would restrain him, from any who tried to help.

So must we. The Savior of the world is our protector in this world of sexually predatory image-makers and images that lure us from the margins of our minds.

Hold On

2010-01-28T09:16:00.000-08:00

The teaching of post-adolescents is a study in flexibility.

To really connect with them, you have to be ready for nearly anything — at any time.

You have to expect disappointment.

Set up a meeting with them, and they might or might not show up. Plan an event (during class, but especially outside class) and you can count on some not being able to be there — unless you impose severe academic penalties for absence.

Innovate, and you will find confusion (legitimate or feigned) and resistance.

The cooler and more insightful you make your assignments, very often the less cooperation you'll get. Sort of an inverse proportion of connection.

Schedule a guest speaker who has enormous renown in your academic discipline — a giant among her peers, someone doing you a huge favor for showing up without charging thousands of dollars — and students will ask if they have to show up. (A variation of "is this on the test?")

True, there are legitimate excuses. Some students really do work 2-3 jobs, commute an hour or more to get to campus, and carry enormous numbers of units each semester to get through their education fast. (Same tuition if you go slow as if you speed it up.)

But those are the exceptions. Many undergraduates in residential settings are doing college as part of a leisure experience. You don't want to know what they're so busy with that they can't do the work you're assigning.

Some — tragically some of the really bright ones — juts don't care (for a variety of reasons) and the more you try to get them to, the less they do.

There are ways to adapt.

You can reach into their lives and get so creative that you pull them out of their lethargy and turn the lights on. You bring a meat cleaver and an apple to class and chop it on the table up front. You make the teaching pertinent to daily life. You wear yourself out getting personal with each student to awaken their sense of want-to. Jaime Escalante did it in "Stand and Deliver." And he ended up on a stairwell face down with a heart attack. Nobody knew he was there. It wasn't on the test to know.

Or you can go the other way.

You can become Kingsfield in the now-ancient film "The Paper Chase." In that movie, about law school students, the prof at the center of the story cares nothing for the women and men seated in the big lecture hall before him.

When a student comes late to class or answers ineptly, he goes beyond not caring. He publicly disdains the student — as a warning.

A student known as Mr. Hart comes to class unprepared on Day 1. Kingsfield berates him first for not speakng up. Then he humiliates him for not knowing the facts of a case that was in the readings posted on bulletin boards around campus. Before opening his academic jaws, to turn to other students in the class, he holds up two hands. "This is a shroud," he says to the lecture hall. "A burial shroud. For Mr. Hart."

Later, he calls Mr. Hart down to the front of the class — right in front of his elevated podium.

"Mr. Hart, here is a dime. Go call your mother and tell her there is serious doubt as to your being able to successfully become a lawyer."

Kingsfield dares his students to measure up, but expects them to fail. Some will defy his expectations and breach the barricades — clawing to success just to spite him. But they will probably never win his approval. Nobody can. He represents the unreachable heights of academic achievement in the legal profession. It's a legendary arrogance.

But that movie was made in the 1970s — a time when the vestiges of the privilege-only system of American higher education was still part of the academic landscape. It has all but disappeared in an academic economy and online learning world where teaching must become more approachable and where professional privilege has been eclipsed by the encroachment of institutions, in the U.S. and overseas, that offer students what they need fast, cheap and in ways that accomodate their foibles.

Students still have to go to class, pass tests, turn in papers and projects that measure some standard of excellence. But the long-building questions about what makes for achievement have become larger. And there are fewer students to go around. Colleges and universities (and departments) want students — need them. They disdain them at their peril.

So we teach. We adapt. We persuade. We cajole.

And when those students don't show up or don't cooperate in group projects or innovative approaches to learning, we steel ourselves.

To really survive, we focus on the ones who showed up, who did more than we required, who stuck around after class to talk more about what we brought up in the session.

The temptation to stop caring is great.

Do coaches waste energy on the bench-warmers? (I was a bench-warmer.)

Student volition cannot be programmed.

Scripture says Jesus, at times, marveled at how slow his followers were to get it.

But He never gave up on the laggards — like Peter, like James and John, like those with whom He walked (probably very slowly) down the road to Emmaus. Talk about totally missing the point of an illustration.

Like our Lord, who likened it to the pursuit of sheep, we keep at it.

Because when we can't anymore, it will be time to find something else to do.

2009-11-06T19:33:00.000-08:00

Anger has an edge in the United States. Maybe it has that same edge in other countries and their news media don't come forth with it like ours do.

But here, when a man gets angry, and he has access to firearms, violence happens in ways that alarm us in the spontaneous ferocity of what erupts.

Soldiers — unarmed, vulnerable men and women — were shot dead yesterday at close range by an officer whom they were told to trust. The shooter, if he indeed acted alone, was a psychiatrist.

What we don't know on this Friday is whether that doctor had the capability of firing the 40-some rounds that apparently were spent that early Thursday afternoon. Were some of the dead or injured in cross-fire in what became a gun battle?

In Florida, the next day, a man walked into an office area where he'd once worked and opened fire on those he found there. One died; several were injured.

In Southern California this week, a teen died after being shot in crossfire at a football game. In northern California, a week or so ago, a young woman was brutally raped by multiple young men and left shaking, stripped to the waist, cowering under a park bench. No gunplay there. But Oh, the damage.

What is happening to us? Where is the fury, the rage, the cold hatred coming from? And why do we kill? Where is the compassion for the innocent? Where are the heroes who will stand up for those who are so at risk?

I won't blame it on TV, on Hollywood, on video game producers, on the music industry, on the NFL, the WWF or the UFC movement. No single player can take all the credit.

And it's not political. Please let's don't go there.

Is it the economy? Maybe. But only in the way we'd say rain has something to do with crashes on the highway.

No, it's deeper — something that's probably been building for decades. We're not the nation we once were. The rest of the developed world looks at us in pity. They shake their heads and think about how they don't want to become what we are.

And the denial we live in as our Stars and Stripes flap in the breeze only makes the problem worse. Freedom isn't free.

The role God plays in a nation's life and identity is part of the missing puzzle portion that rarely comes up in news media reporting. It's buried deep in analysis of events like Fort Hood and the Florida shootings — if it shows up at all.

God's people must take notice of the need their country has for healing. And they must pray — repenting, as well, for the sin that so easily besets us. O God, have mercy on us.

This happens to other people.

2009-11-05T11:11:00.000-08:00

He was a friend. But I hadn’t seen him in more than 20 years.

The era of Facebook and Twitter and other networking make it possible to connect with people you thought you’d lost touch with. We’ve all been there. You get that invitation to become a friend. You look at the picture. Yikes. Why has everybody changed?

Brian Randone and I had trained for a marathon together. We’d sung together – in the stairwell of the Chicago Avenue subway, in the dining room of Giordano’s Pizza near Water Tower Place.

He was always smiling – one of those guys who had such a presence of the Holy Spirit in his life (or so it seemed) that he could be standing at the counter in McDonald’s, look the clerk in the eye, and start a conversation about God. For me, it wouldn’t work. For Brian, it did. He was younger by several years, but I looked up to him. He just had that something about him.

When I’d been married a year or so, I got a cassette tape in the mail from Brian and it was his voice saying hello, then a bootleg recording began of a song saying, in a variety of ways, “thank you for giving to the Lord.” I think he was in seminary at that point.

I’m not sure when I first saw the news story. It eventually ended up in the Los Angeles Times, but I think it popped up first on AOL news or another search engine, picked up from a TV report or wire service.

I saw the name and thought, “Can’t be.” It sounded the same, but L.A. is a big city – lots of names, lots of people. So I looked real hard at the picture. And my mind tried to peel away the years from that photo to the college-age guy I’d run the streets of Chicago with.

He was under arrest for murder. And the murder, police said, had been beyond brutal. The woman who had been killed died slowly – tortured, the report said. Brian was the one who had called 911 about her death. When police responded, his answers to questions were strange enough that he became the prime suspect.

Reports said Brian had been living with the woman, Felicia Lee, for several months. He’d met her by the pool at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas.

She had been an actor in porn films and had done modeling. In fact, her face and body were all over the news reports -- moreso than Brian's picture. Stuff like that sells ads. But I wanted to know why. How could my friend have drifted so far? Had he?

The news reports said he had been part of a TV reality show about handsome eligible bachelors. That fit what I remembered about Brian, sort of. He'd been a kind of star-studded type in the ranks of single men at Moody Bible Institute where we were students together. I can't remember if he was dating anyone while I was there. But I was only there a year, part of a grad program that later expanded to a larger course of study.

A web site called "True Crime Report" carried updated news about his trial and plea (not guilty). It also carried dozens of comments from people who had known him for years. Some said they couldn't believe Brian could ever do it. Others said it didn't surprise them in the least. The ones who weren't surprised were the ones who had known him most recently — mentioning alcohol, illegal narcotics, jealousy, temper, and overall bad sense of judgment about himself and others. Most mentioned charisma: that same something I'd noticed in him at Moody.

It took me a few weeks to get his booking number and details about how to visit him at Men's Central Jail in downtown L.A. When I got there on a weekday afternoon, I expected short lines because I figured people would be at work. I was wrong. The lines were long. And it was mostly women — older teens and twenty-somethings, some with children. There were Moms, too. The day I was there was a few days before Halloween. One kid was in a witch costume. A girl sitting across from me looked to be in her mid-teens, holding a toddler.

The arrangement was a lot like the DMV. Too much work for too few people. When it gets crazy like that, when the lines get long and tempers wear thin, the people waiting cease to be human. They're being treated like numbers, objects, barriers to the peace and quiet needed to get stuff done. So they take on the identity. They act like irritants to an overworked and underpaid staff.
It becomes the law of the playground all over again. Big kids against the little kids.

When you're face to face with people who hate their jobs and hate those who make their jobs harder than they already are, you're smart to say little and know what to do before you get there. Without knowing it, I was breaking all the rules. I didn't know what to do. I needed help. And that's irritating.

So I went 0-2 in the space of four days trying to see Brian. At my second failure, I got on the phone and tried getting some answers. I got few. But I did get the sense that seeing Brian had become less about him and more about me.

When I got home, I put the Moody yearbook down on the floor of my office, put the bail bond card I'd gotten from Jaime (parking garage entrance) by my Bible, and decided I'd pray for Brian a while.

God was at work. It was time for me to get out of the way.

On Michael Jackson: At his departure

2009-06-27T20:44:00.000-07:00

My first 45 rpm record was "ABC" by the Jackson Five.

I walked down to Little's record store on Lake Street in Oak Park near the library, probably in the spring of 1970. And I went alone. This was a big moment.

Record stores in those days were a little like BestBuy's music department — but all confined to one little storefront. And nothing was electronic. It was paper and plastic (well, vinyl). There were rows and rows of bins with long play (L.P.) albums and singles stacked in them. They were organized alphabetically or by genre (rock, soul, country, gospel...) If I remember right, the top 40 singles were stacked on shelves behind the cash register. So the clerk just reached back, picked up "ABC" and put it in a bag for me.

Then, with adrenalin pumping (I wasn't a rich kid, so spending money I'd earned from a paper route felt huge) I plunked down the money and I walked out with my first single.

I was 10.

And to listen to that record, I had to figure out how to insert the thick insert onto the spindle of my parents' stereo unit in the dining room. I did figure it out. And that song was an anthem of my ten year-old world (well, one among a few others.)

Later I would learn that Jackson Five music was something somebody, probably in a high-rise office in New York, had labeled "bubble gum rock." No matter. This was music that grabbed my pre-adolescent mind and heart. I could relate to this kid Michael Jackson.

We were only two years apart (he was older.) And I imagined what it would be like to grow up in Gary, Indiana as he did with all those big brothers. And he was just so poised, so confident — or so it seemed.

Looking back now, given all the white-flight happening in Oak Park at the time, I'm surprised it didn't matter that he was black. I think I hardly noticed.

In my neighborhood, it was all about rep. And rep was partly what you looked like, but mostly about what you could do — usually on the playground in sports or fighting (or both). I wasn't much good at either. But I imagined that Michael Jackson could probably punch out most people on his playground, if called upon; and he could probably get on base when tossed in the schoolyard lineup, or run as fast or faster than anyone in his gym class.

And he could sing.

I could do that, and loved it — though nobody at school knew. Guys didn't do that in my elementary school. But Michael Jackson was lead singer for this group that just had something about it I loved. That made him someone worthy of my respect.

What bothered me a little, back then, was that I didn't see anything in Michael or his brothers that told me they knew God was the real meaning behind the joy and hope in life that I knew was foundational. For a ten year-old, I didn't know much theology, but I knew God was there — and I sensed He was bigger than anything, anywhere.

How could someone who looked, on TV anyway, like he was having so much fun, not know the importance of God in the world? It was a question I pondered then, and that's been on the back burner ever since — with Michael, with others in the entertainment industries.

It's a question I come back to again as I ponder Michael's departure. Did he kill himself? Did he just get sloppy with the meds he took, apparently, to the edge of excess?

People who knew him were saddened but not surprised by the news he'd gone. Comparisons with Elvis crop up often because, well, they're inevitable. There are so many parallels. But I think they're superficial comparisons. Michael was not Elvis.

Journalists will give us the toxicology results in the next few weeks. And someone will tell the world, hopefully through a scrupulous journalist, what was going through Michael's mind in the days and hours before he closed his eyes the last time.

There's a whole generation of kids like me who grew up on Michael's music who need to know the whole story (though I'm staying away from the macabre coverage.)

I'm not out sitting by his star in the sidewalk, but I am grieving. It's like he was a friend. There's something about celebrities and the psychology of fans that creates a false connection. I know all that; I know it's ridiculous. But I feel it anyway.

And what's tragic to me is that, from what I've read, Michael Jackson was a man searching for God's love. He had about him a sense of spiritual journey. Did somebody take the time to sit down with Michael Jackson and tell him how he could have real peace — right there in his world?

Fame, it's said, has a way of leaving the famous isolated and empty. Of course. He never really knew his Dad. That's part of it, too.

But more than that, this was a man who had no one to whom he could turn for real understanding. So he turned inward. And that's a lonely, potentially scary place.

And it hits home to me because I'm still only two years younger than this kid I met in 1970 and whose record I bought at that little store on Lake Street.

I haven't known fame much. Journalism faculty don't get it a lot.

But I've worked as a journalist. And I've observed fame and how it affects people.

Fame is a narcotic, a vapor, a dream. It's a pre-packaged, plastic thing that can be made — under the right lighting, with the other special effects pumped in — to appear supernaturally powerful.

But like vapors and dreams, fame is temporary. And like a narcotic, fame will, over time get in the blood stream and cause damage that's irreversible.

We're not here for fame. Jesus Christ, the only man who can be called truly famous in an eternal sense, was not driven by fame. He held it at arm's length.

And in the end, he left to others the telling of His story. It was better that way.

Yet the enduring power of Christ is that He was the real thing. Everything He claimed to be, actually was. Everything He promised, He did.

I wish Michael Jackson had learned this — about fame, about himself, about what he was and what he could do. I wish he'd met Christ. How different things could have been.

My prayer now is that those who are Michael's peers in the entertainment industry find God in ways that reach into their souls — right there in New York, in L.A., in Nashville, in Chicago. I pray, too, that those who have watched his tragic life as fans (the tens of thousands worldwide, and those of my generation who sense a bond with him) will, with God's prompting, sense they don't have to go the way he did.

There is hope. And it's not in the studio or on the concert stage.

It's in that quiet place, before God, with our arms open wide. Accepting His embrace.

Journalism and the shifting ground under our feet

2009-01-29T09:25:00.000-08:00

Jim Romanesko, the Poynter blogger assigned to sit in the control tower as the planes go down all over the airspace, talked today about how The Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer are in trouble: big trouble.

Romanesko's blog also points us to Roger Simon's observation in Columbia Journalism Review (from a look-back at the McCain camp's bullying of the press) that most Americans are already so mad at the press that beating up on them only increases sympathy for them. Made McCain look like a Steelers tackler kicking a poodle. (Or Kurt Warner.)

Then we have ABC News (owned by Disney, remember) denying that a talk-show format program is bumping Nightline out of its spot in the batting order.

So who cares about news anymore? The people who need it.

And they'll get it, too. Even if they have to pay more. There's a scene in "The Count of Monte Cristo" where the count, seated at breakfast with the young man he'll later learn is his son, tells the boy that he pays well to find out what's happening in every city he visits or has interests. That's fiction imitating life. It was true in Alexander Dumas' day. It was true when our nation was founded, it was true when the newspaper barons built palaces to honor themselves — places like Hearst Castle and Tribune Tower — and it's still true today.

Maybe the notion of daily news for the masses has become a questionable commodity. But we need to take a step back. It's not the news that people don't like. It's how that news comes to them. So some don't like the wood-pulp folded thing in the plastic bag in their driveway. They still want to know if it's going to rain tomorrow and what happened at the Santa Monica Airport where there was all that smoke yesterday. And they want details. Lots of details — like if anyone's hurt or dead. The amateur pilots want to know enough detail that they can stir their coffee with it at Starbucks (if the one down their street is still open. And if it's closed, they want to know why, and if the one by their brother's house is closing soon.)

I don't want to be flip about this. The shifting of land under our feet is scary. I sat through a magnitude 4.5 quake last month and I know.

But I know what a lot of journalism educators do. It's the young people. The cigar-chompers in Chicago who are covening to talk about saving that city's journalism are making a big mistake. They forgot to invite anybody under 30 to sit at the table in front of microphones.

Reality can smell bad

2009-01-17T09:40:00.000-08:00

Homelessness got on board the train this week.

The Metrolink system in California is a culture unto itself. It's a world of people in suits and business casual with older women or twenty-somethings dabbing makeup, teens with plugged ears punching music players, men thumbing PDAs or tapping laptops. A few talk loudly on blue-tooth devices making business deals so the world can hear — though they get looks from those around them. Metrolink can be loud, but not that loud. Ages range from about 16 to 70. You don't often see young children or infants, and you rarely see people old enough that they can't easily navigate steps. Strollers are rare. Metrolink is supposed to be disability-accessible, but the practical reality is that it's a fast ride for people who move fast. There are exceptions, and when they're aboard, they're noticed — a kind of spectacle for the group to observe.

Some read the paper (really). Others sleep, but in a kind of dignified way. It's a controlled world. You don't mess with the system — not for long. Kids who climb aboard with no ticket get citations from the conductor or one of the many L.A. County Sheriff's Deputies who patrol the train. Ticket-less kids get found out because, well, they just stick out. You know them. When people in downtown L.A. board Metrolink (thinking it's Amtrak), they're spotted right away, too. It's the big luggage (though a few luggage-toting people do take Metrolink to get home from an Amtrak stop in L.A.) People who don't speak English — regardless the cultural background — become a problem, too on the morning Metrolink routes, unless they're bilingual.

This week, about halfway between the Riverside downtown station and L.A. Union station, a woman boarded in a dark hooded sweatshirt and grayish pants. Her face was wrinkled and dry, her shoulder-length hair matted and stringy. Her feet, in worn-looking sandals, were leathery. She looked tired. And she reeked of dried urine — a stench so strong it had the sting of ammonia in it. She carried a small reddish plastic grocery bag with various items, including a black velvety thing with pinkish tassels. Was she homeless? She fit the stereotype. And train riding is all about sizing people up — fast. It helps you know where to sit, or not sit. Once in a seat, your knees are inches from the person across from you. Depending on the girth of the person next to you, it can get cozy — in a bad way. Respiratory illness spreads fast on Metrolink.

The sweat-shirted woman dropped into the aisle seat across from me and within minutes the woman directly across from me rose and trudged upstairs. The man seated across and to the left of me was reading the paper and, as if waking, asked under his breath, "What's that smell?" He looked over at the woman, who had now moved over to the window and was huddled against it, trying to sleep or already out. She looked now like a rumpled pile of laundry. "What's her problem?" he asked me. I didn't answer. The man looked at a woman seated across from the sweat-shirted woman and, with his eyes and by mouthing the words, offered the seat across from me. She rose and moved over and the two gave each other knowing looks and shook their heads.

If the sweat-shirted woman was homeless, and even if she wasn't, there was something about her that was a confrontation of this commuter cultural system. Just by showing up, she was reminding these routine-minded people that there was a larger, very-hard world outside this narrow metal car rolling down predictable steel tracks. This was a woman who — by choice or by circumstances forced on her — was living proof that the world can be unbearable. She was hard to look at, hard to be near, maybe harder to understand.

I noticed that nobody confronted her — not even the conductor, who walked by and sized her up without pausing in his gait. He could have asked for tickets. I'd seen him do so in other circumstances, carding the whole train car to nab someone he suspected was a freeloader.

But nobody tried to help her, either. That's also a rule of commuter life. Those who don't fit the system get left out.

Metrolink is a place where the lives of desperate people get hidden under a veneer of disciplined control. You punch your ticket, you board the train on time, you get off where you're supposed to. But underneath is often the pain of an abusive spouse, kids in trouble, a court system that tramples, a boss that demeans, an economy that sucks the life out of a woman or man. It can produce a kind of silent scream that can be seen in the eyes, in the tone of voice, in the very gait.

But when these board the train with their stooped weariness, if they are part of the accepted commuter cultures, there is a degree of comfort — laughter and a kind of solace, albeit mixed with pain, in these cloth-covered seats of the Metrolink cars. There are card games, there's nut bread or chocolates handed out at holiday times. It's all a kind of coping.

But this woman knew nothing of that. She was asleep in the corner of a world that wanted to forget she was there. She was left alone as the system moved on all around her and the train rolled on, stop by stop, to the end of the line.

How scary is he?

2008-09-07T18:12:00.000-07:00

Fear.

It's what political campaigns thrive on — that raw, unvarnished, inescapable terror we all feel when we've been surprised by information we can't process. The more complex the facts, the better for the fear factor. Those who play the fear card are banking on the tendency we all have to run and hide when we're afraid.

But there are a few of us who are the Dorothys in the Wizard of Oz story. She pulled back the curtain. And there he was, the Wizard — not so scary after all.

The Los Angeles Times, much like its East Coast rival (NYT), has made it clear that it supports the democratic candidate. And the coverage shows it — from headlines to ledes to choices of who to quote to photos. Read it carefully and you'll see there's a methodical attention to showing how stupid (and dangerous) the Republicans are, and how virtuous and downtrodden the Democrats are.

Both sides of this debate are using fear as a tool, though.

I just hope that voters will do their due diligence between now and November and figure out the difference between scary fluff and reality.

Somebody was Wrong

2008-05-30T09:28:00.000-07:00

Poynter Institute for Media Studies bloggers have good eyes.

They're watching what's coming over the hill, and what they're noticing is that newspaper journalism — thought to be not only over the hill but nearly dead — is showing signs of life. Cyber-life. Whoodathunkit?

Poynter points out that the LA Times, a paper I read nearly every day on my train ride into Los Angeles County, is blogging in ways that show this is a newspaper that gets it.

They get that younger readers in today's market, the ones we thought were staying away from newspapers (and news in general) are reading LA Times blogs and blogging back. In other words, journalists are talking to people. And people like it.

I like that. I'd say I'm not surprised but nobody'd believe me. I'm a historian of journalism. People like me can tell you about how journalists know how to talk to people. They have to. Used to be we called this letters to the editor. Or just phone calls. Or people walking in the newsroom, right past the secretary, and right up to the desk. Face to face with the sports editor. Or the editorial writer.

In William Allen White's daddy's day, editors would get called out in the muddy street to draw pistols over what they'd written. Interactivity, we might say.

So blogs are the latest thing, but they're not.

I'm just glad somebody noticed.

Manhattan

2008-05-26T19:13:00.000-07:00

I just taught a course for three days in the basement of the Empire State Building.

The basement. Down a long hallway from the elevator that made Sleepless in Seattle such a throwback to an earlier movie.

I toted my computer into an airless room fitted with track lighting, acoustic engineering, and the feel of a trendy, upscale educational wing.

In that room, morning and afternoon, at the bidding of the World Journalism Institute, I invested in the minds, hearts, and souls of a roomful of students from across the country. Smart ones. Some well-versed in journalism. All of them eager to make a mark far beyond themselves. They paid attention. A few even took pictures of me in my academic gymnastics.

I exhausted myself nurturing in these unblinking eyes the passion I have — passion to make a difference, passion to write with such attention to detail and to the ironies and amazing nuances of life that audiences put down their coffee, read with full attention, and even turn a page if necessary.

Richard John Neuhaus came one day as a luncheon speaker.

Neuhaus told the students that they were wrong to think their journalism can change the world. He said journalism with that mindset is what fueled the worst oligarchies in history.

He described journalism as much less significant than that — a kind of hit-or-miss thing that has limited potential for good.

Ah, the reflections of ideological warriors who speak in cryptic vagueness. There's so much more to the story he was trying to tell. Did the students get it? I couldn't tell from their chewing, swigging of water, and overall lack of fervor for serious questions when he was done.

What Neuhaus didn't mention is how his own magazine, First Things, is part of an ongoing dialogue within the media marketplace that is, in its own way, seeking very intentionally to change the world. He's been a prolific writer for that magazine, and I'm sure holds it to high standards of journalistic excellence.

Can journalism be part of the solutions of our time? Certainly. Will it get credit for the significant pieces it places in the jigsaw puzzle? Mostly, no. But that's not what we as believers in Christ are about.

We're called to be faithful.

And Proverbs 22:29 would suggest that a journalist skilled in his work — really skilled, intensely mindful of the target — will not see that work languish in basements of buildings.

The world awaits — upstairs, on the streets, and up higher.

And journalism educators have no less daunting a task in this 21st century as audiences sit down with their coffee looking for that article that reaches into their soul.

Thick skin comes with a price.

Uncool

2008-04-27T22:11:00.000-07:00

Journalism faculty who try too hard to be the coolest, trendiest dudes on the campus are bound to run into problems.

The best, most honorable deeds, after all, don't go unpunished.

And there is a point of diminishing return on investment when it comes to some students.

I've been at this teaching thing now for 18 years. And I still haven't quite learned this lesson.

But I'm getting there.

Writing

2008-03-17T20:54:00.000-07:00

Journalists know how to write well and do it — fast, and all the time.

That's the theory, anyway.

But when they don't, they give the whole profession a bad name — or I should say, a worse name. A quick stroll through the front pages of most dailies and around the blogosphere will tell you there are a lot of people working for publications and media organizations who aren't very good writers. Or they aren't trying very hard.

Maybe we can blame it on the layoffs of copyeditors and the piling of work onto the backs of those whose seniority kept them in the newsroom.

That's discouraging for someone trying to teach students to write like the professionals — people being paid to write but who are producing stuff that's too often lazy, under-reported drivel, derivative stuff.

A student asked me today to what to do if the job description says the publication or media organization wants years of experience before they'll look at a candidate.

I told her what the media organization wants is somebody good — really good. And someone at that organization figured a few years' full-time experience would bring good work — good reporting, good writing.

But if they're smart, they'll get past the numbers on the resume and look at what's in the portfolio. If it's great writing, and they want their media organization to grow, they'll invite that just-out-of-college person in for a chat.

Writing is a function of hard work. And in some media organizations there's an inverse proportion between years of service and willingness to dig in and put words together that are stunning in their insight, never-seen-before facts, and did-you-hear-this novelty.

Maybe youth is wasted on the young. But editors waste their opportunities if they neglect looking at the power of what's coming to them from the schools they've not yet hired from.

He never did like funeral music

2008-03-07T21:39:00.000-08:00

Larry Norman’s not gone. His music, so we’re seeing in the media response to his death, is too tightly woven into the generations he influenced. Funny how death brings life.

If anything, Larry Norman has been rediscovered in ways that remind us of the hard questions he raised — ones that won’t go away.

Norman’s web site said he died Sunday at 2:45 a.m. with his younger brother Charles and Charles’ wife holding his hands, waiting for his heart to slowly stop beating. He was 60. He had been struggling since the 1970s from a steadily weakening heart and the effects of head injuries from an airplane cabin accident. Media reports said debris that fell on him affected his brain. And then there had been diabetes.

“I feel like a prize in a box of cracker jacks with God’s hand reaching down to pick me up,” Norman said in the last moments of his life. Allen Fleming, a friend of Norman’s typed the words into Norman’s laptop as he lay dying.

The message ends with a kind of poem — or another lyric.

Goodbye, farewell, we’ll meet again
Somewhere beyond the sky.
I pray that you will stay with God
Goodbye, my friends, goodbye.

________

The enormity of Norman’s musical and cultural influence cannot be traced in gold or platinum as might be the case with other rock pioneers. Part of what kept Norman from selling more recordings was his discomfort with labels — the kind recording companies make and the kind media tend to create.

Larry Norman burst on the music scene in the 1960s with nearly white blonde hair — grown down past his chest — a furrowed brow, and a perpetual pout. His tight, thin lips protruded when he sang in a nasal growl. His sound was a mix between Elton, Guthrie, Mick, and Dylan. Norman’s was bluesy folk and sometime-rock at a time when these were tools of cultural vernacular used by youth banging the bars of cages set up by adults around them.

Norman’s first two solo albums, “Upon This Rock,” released on Capitol in 1969, and “Only Visiting This Planet,” released on Verve in 1972 have been called the first significant Christian rock albums in the United States. Their energy was the quiet, simmering fury of chords and lyrics calling young people to take their faith to the streets. Know the Bible, prove it; do something about it, his music said.

Larry Norman’s war was against sin and hypocrisy — rigid complacency — in the rapidly growing evangelical church in the post-World War II era. He made an appeal to non-Christians, too. Bloggers and a reported outpouring of emails to his web site indicate many came to know Christ from listening to Larry’s music. Frank Black, of the Pixies, was working on an album with Norman at the time of his death. “Larry was my door into the music business, and he was the most Christlike person I ever met,” Black said in a statement Monday. But what set Larry Norman apart was his challenge to a regimented culture of Protestant evangelism, worship music, and the “pleasant valley Sunday” that the Monkees had sneered about in his time.

Larry Norman’s reputation came as much from his singing and songwriting as from his spoken words. He had a reputation from the beginning for talk during concerts. Rather than banging out songs seamlessly,one to the next, Norman interjected comments. They could take a while. Concert-goers would be challenged to leave a changed people: more humble, more sensitive God’s voice, more mindful of the pain in those around them.

“Why should the Devil have all the good music?” went the refrain of one Norman song. It was a piece filled with a smirk and a growl at those who failed to see past external appearances in the hippie era.

They say to cut my hair/ they’re driving me insane/
I grew it out long to make room for my brain/
They say rock-and-roll is wrong/
we’ll give you one more chance/
I say I feel so good I want to get up and dance

______

As in all of life, those who were closest to Norman were the first to find out he’d gone. Mark Joseph, who wrote a book about the fading of Christian rock, was among the
first to note Norman’s passing on Bullypulpitnewst.com, a blog run from Southern California. Joseph’s obituary for Norman ran on huffingtonpost.com on Tuesday of the week Norman died.

National Public Radio, that Thursday, posted an unsmiling photo of Norman from what looks like the 1970s, along with an interview with Charles Norman. In that interview, Norman’s brother recalled growing up with a big brother bold enough to rock with gusto, grow his hair long and write about sin in ways that transcended metaphor.

In one song, Norman wrote,

Gonorrhea on Valentine’s Day/
And you’re still looking for the perfect lay/
Why don’t you look into Jesus/
He’s got the answers

“Stuff like that that shocked uptight Christians,” said Charles Norman in the NPR interview. And he was right. Many Christian bookstores — primary outlets for Christian music in the era when Norman was exploding on the music scene — refused to carry his albums. Not that this bothered him, outwardly anyway. Rejection became a kind of ongoing theme of Norman’s life. His style, it seemed, almost invited it.

Randy Stonehill, a friend of Norman’s who came to faith through Norman’s life and music ministry turned down a Christianity Today interview, but used his own web site to tell the world that one tragedy of Norman’s life was his inability to maintain relationships. Norman was married twice, the second time to Stonehill’s former wife. Larry Norman’s trajectory through ministry, like that of many artists, was one that put passion before people. His was a great heart — but one that took a beating and did some beating of its own.

The odd thing about Norman's death was the utter silence of those who were so integral to his early career. Where was Tom Howard? Steve Camp? All those who had mixed and mingled with him at Jesus festivals through the 60s and 70s?

No comment. Too hard, maybe. No need.

Media reports by the Associated Press, the (Portland) Oregonian, the (San Jose) Mercury News, Entertainment Weekly and Christianity Today played down the broken heart angle. But it was there nonetheless. In the end, Larry Norman’s heart couldn’t take any more — a kind of metaphor of the songwriter’s life. He’d been about putting heart and soul before people in auditoriums, stadiums, rock festivals, and sound-stage coffee shops around the world.

Maybe the deafening silence from most evangelicals at his passing came from Norman's penchant for leaving places. His emergence on the music scene as a Christian rocker came after leaving the San Jose psychedelic band People! From there, he came and left a lot. It made him a loner — though one who had real musical talent, perhaps genius. But genius in isolation can look like dementia, an aberration.

Some media reports caught the nuance that Norman was a man without an ideological country. Rock-and-roll writers and pop culture critics generally ignored him. So did the Christian media. His music would have had as much appeal — maybe more — than such noted pioneers as Roger Daltrey, Robert Plant and Jimi Hendrix. Norman toured with some of them in the 1970s. “He really could’ve been a star if he were singing about something other than Jesus,” said Willman. And Willman’s writing sounds an almost mournful tone about such a decision.

Rebels have a tough life. They thrive on an anger that works best at low simmer. But if they live with that anger, it tears them up — maybe kills them. At best, it drives them from others. So it was with Larry Norman. He toured a lot — right up to the end, even in his weak condition. He released records on his own label or small ones run by others. But it was work in the back side of the desert, a work apart.

At the end, like many of his musical generation, Norman spent more time watching and listening than speaking. Like a good prophet, he sat back and watched as events came together as he’d predicted.

Within days of his death, a report by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life suggested a large number of Americans were reporting that their pursuit of God was something they didn’t want crammed into a box — boxes Norman had spent his younger years decrying. One of the fastest areas of growth in American religious experience was one that defied survey description. Norman would have liked that trend.

Norman’s web site said a funeral would be held the Saturday after his death at The Church on the Hill in Turner, Oregon. “My plan is to be buried in a simple pine box with flowers in it,” Norman had said just before he died.

In a kind of foreshadowing of what his end might be like, Norman wrote, in “Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music”

I’m not knocking the hymns/
Just give me something that moves my feet/
I don’t like those funeral marches/
I’m not dead yet

Later in the song, Norman wrote,

They nailed him to the cross/
And they laid him in the ground/
But they should’ve known you can’t keep a good man down.

As Norman’s own funeral took place — squarely in the season of Lent — the notion of resurrection seemed a fitting descriptor for a life that made spiritual redemption a cornerstone of musical journey.

Has the world figured out all that Larry Norman was trying to be and do? Probably not.

Nor does it need to. The next generation of fury and counterculture has raised enough questions of its own.

And this is as it should be.

Not during the prayer. I SAID, not during...

2008-01-26T13:54:00.000-08:00

Photojournalists get such a bad rap.

They're not paparazzi. They're not vampires. They do have souls.

No, not all of them behave scrupulously at all times.

But do they deserve to be kicked?

Javier Manzano of the Rocky Mountain News was doing his job in the Colorado capitol building last week, shooting routine images of a swearing-in ceremony. He was unceremoniously stopped in the process.

News media across the nation — including the New York Times — have put the spotlight on Manzano and his decision to ignore warnings to cease shooting and be reverent.

My experience in journalism, and with journalists, convinces me that most really do care about the civic life they cover and the reality (even the sanctity) of the moment. Their job is to tell the story — official and unofficial — whenever it comes in front of their lens. If they're good, they're ready when the real story emerges from layers of spin and hype that glosses so much of what poses as news today.

It shouldn't surprise working journalists that Manzano got down on the floor in front of Rep. Douglas Bruce and House Speaker Andrew Romanoff and shot a frame or two of Bruce in prayer (maybe especially after Bruce said to go away.)

Bruce's decision to kick Manzano in the knee when he heard the camera shutter was one that might symbolize all the pent-up frustration that politicians feel toward journalists who won't color within the lines. Journalists are so darn ubiquitous.

Manzano declined comment after the photo session.

News coverage of this event has centered on both Manzano and Bruce — presumably because there's a sympathetic audience for both. My sympathies are with both, but for different reasons.

One reason Manzano wouldn't back off, I think, is that Manzano got the fact that prayer — for all its shallowness in socio-political life — is still part of the civic process. Actually, a lot of us believe it ought to be even more part of the process (albeit in private, in an earnest seeking of God for wisdom.)

Bruce was part of a political process that deserves public scrutiny. But he'd made it all the more compelling by jerking the state legislature around to do this swearing-in thing just when he wanted it — even if it was inconvenient for the whole.

What Manzano did, though, by shooting images of a praying man when that man said not to (maybe he asked nicely, the reports don't make that clear) is to promote a stereotype of photojournalists as blood-sucking creatures who disdain the life of the Spirit (at least that's what those who took a glance without really reading about it would conclude. And we live in a nation of cynical media glancers.)

I don't think Manzano should have backed off. But there are ways to do one's job so everybody wins. Maybe impossible here, but I suggest it's worth pursuing.

My sympathies are with Bruce because he's now made a name for himself as a guy who not only doesn't understand journalism within the democratic experience and socio-political life, he's also shown how much he doesn't grasp the place of prayer in that mix.

All of us lose it — occasionally in front of a bunch of people.

What's sad is that this guy exploded not only during prayer, but in front of cameras.

Jesus got angry at people who made His Father's house (the temple in Jerusalem), a place He called a house of prayer, into a circus of greed and commodification. But He didn't attack during prayer. When Jesus prayed, he prayed. When He took people to task, He waited until he could look them in the eye and make the lesson clear — sometimes so profoundly that they'd think about it for years afterward.

Douglas Bruce has labeled himself in a way that will make him a caricature of public servants for quite a while. And he's hurt the reputation of those who really do make prayer part of their calling to serve a constituency.

Of the two, I think Manzano will weather all this with less damage — even if he might have a sore knee for a while.

Maybe Douglas Bruce will think about knees more carefully now, even to the point of getting down on his own, experiencing what real prayer is all about.

If he does, politics in Colorado will be the better for it — as will the life of the media marketplace around him, that won't be going away anytime soon.

What it is and what it isn't

2008-01-15T21:05:00.000-08:00

Journalism is as necessary as the pavement over which we drive, the rails over which we run, and the satellite transmissions that connect us to each other around this planet.

It's not the connection it was in centuries (or even decades) past.

Perhaps it never will be.

But like the democracy over which it guards, it is a collective entity that we ignore at our peril.

May journalism educators never lose sight of that bigger picture as we grind out our teaching, mentoring, correcting and inspiring.

History is a moment away. We can change it.

But pity the educator who believes that the process can be made more than institutional routine without the guidance of the Creator of all Truth.

She cried — sort of.

2008-01-11T16:12:00.000-08:00

The ABC News video clip of Hillary Clinton, seated at a table, brandishing the microphone with the flick of a wrist — like the rock star some have made her out to be — is making waves across the country. Probably around the world.

Why?

Is it the pause, with that half-grin, half-sob, and a wisp of moisture in her eye?

Is it centuries of sexism rising from the depths of the American female psyche to burst onto the presidential campaign in quiet fury?

Is it because we're surprised that someone's talking candidly in a horse race that's been, well, exhausting?

I think it's because we suddenly caught a glimpse of reality — from a woman who, right there in front of us, has been figuring out who she is. It ain't about Bill anymore (if it ever really was), and it can't be about New York because, well, she's not really from there.

In that moment, at that table in New Hampshire, we saw something. And it was real — not pre-packaged, not scripted, not calculated (though if you look this clip up on YouTube a few times, you'll see how smoothly she moves from almost-lost-it to gotta-get-back-on-message. She's no dummy.

Don't expect to see the campaign pivot on that moment. It takes more than momentary candor in front of adoring crowds to make one fit for leadership on the national and international stage. We've got some hard watching and listening to do as this campaign season surges forward.

But we were seeing in the massive reaction (albeit brief, it's a long way to November) the symptoms of a nation yearning to put its heart and soul back into democracy. Young voters are showing up in droves at caucuses that used to be collections of oldsters. And like visionary young people tend to do, they're making their elders sit up and pay attention.

If predictions are correct, it's young voters that are going to swing this election. And it's about time. We live in a nation that has youthful vigor and brilliant outside-the-box brains driving its economy and best steps toward sanity and recovery at many levels. (And please get this: the young people I'm talking about aren't all white suburban kids. Some of the smartest have bilingual and bi-cultural abilities, in some cases learned overseas.)

Journalists, for all the flak they get, are pretty good at being watchdogs. And they were smart enough to have their cameras on and audio running when truth peeked out at them from Hillary Clinton.

Let's hope it happens again — in more places, with more people.

Commuting

2008-01-10T21:16:00.000-08:00

The act of travel by train in California is a physical agility drill. It requires navigation skills, money to cover parking and fares, and a healthy sense of the inevitability of delay.

To reach one's destination, one must be willing to fight car and truck traffic to and from the station, there will likely be six flights of stairs to do (three and three down) before reaching the direction you need to go.

But the result is a hardy Californian. Or realtor signs in yards as people give up on commuting and just move closer to where they need to be.

Or they just move away -- to where the trains actually work or the driving is cake.

Billy Graham and The Future

2007-08-31T13:49:00.001-07:00

If you don't know much about Billy Graham, you're not alone.

But to understand why Evangelicals aren't scary people, it might be good to get to know about him before he's gone. He was one who had a knack for unifying the Evangelical movement in the late twentieth century. But if there are others like him in years to come, they will look and sound significantly different.

For those who don't know, Billy Graham's a preacher. A good one. A simple one. And simplicity, any ad or marketing expert will tell you, is power.

Graham's simple message has been in three parts: The first is sin (a word we all know in American pop culture but won't admit isn't all that good for us.) The second is confession (which psychologists have confirmed is good for us.) The third is peace with God through Jesus Christ. (This is what will turn some people away from this blog and from Graham — but it's a key to understanding who he is.)

Graham's basic message has been that we all know we need God, that we'll never really be at peace with ourselves until we deal with what separates us from God, (our sin and God's holiness don't mix) and that when we accept Christ's death in our place on the cross (Christ paid the penalty our sin deserved), we begin a relationship with our Creator that changes us forever.

Because Billy Graham's voice can be heard on the radio, and some of his preaching has been televised, some would call him a televangelist. But they'd be getting it wrong. The label doesn't fit Graham. Televangelism has become a tawdry, nearly shameful appendage to American Protestant faith in the United States.

No, Graham's a preacher — in the Southern Baptist style, but with an insight into people that has made his preaching a riveting listen for decades (in person, on the page, and through media.)

To really understand Graham's ministry one can't do it without knowing media. Graham tapped media power from his earliest days. He recounts, in "Just as I Am," how he once pleaded with a radio announcer named George Beverly Shea to sing for a program Graham had been roped into doing in Chicago. It was the beginning of a preaching-and-music combination that hit home with millions of listeners for decades.

Graham burst on the American scene at a time when the nation was going through a period of soul-searching after World War II. It's been said that some of the same raw energy that produced Elvis Presley in the music industry produced Graham (some photos of Graham crouched next his pulpit, hand thrust forward at his listeners, suggests he could have moved like Elvis had that been his choice.) But the energy within Graham (Time magazine remarked on the power of his lungs) made him a stadium phenomenon who transformed the face of American Evangelicalism.

One of the bigger differences between Presley and Graham is that the latter is still with us and has an ongoing influence over those who will replace him (if anyone really can.) The living have a way of guiding the path of their legacy in ways the dead never can.

To their credit, many publications — both Christian and secular — are doing tributes to Billy Graham. They should be. But with any outpouring of media attention, some will invariably get it wrong. Those looking for clones are the worst of the bunch. Book-length analyses of Graham's ministry and influence on this country, mostly, do the best at avoiding the skimming that so misses who Graham really is and was.

There are enough books about Graham (some, like "Just As I Am," written by Graham) to fill shelves of libraries. Wheaton College, where Graham did part of his undergraduate studies, has an entire building dedicated to Graham (complete with an archives and multi-media museum.) John Pollock's "Billy Graham: Evangelist to the World" takes one of the more flattering approaches to this preacher's life, but there are others more critical. David Frost's "Billy Graham: Personal Thoughts of a Public Man: 30 years of Conversations" is an interesting glimpse into Graham's mind.(What's notable is this book's length — or lack thereof. At 173 pages, it's a fraction of "Just As I Am" which weighs in at 742 pages.)

I'm not the first to point this out, but the longevity of Billy Graham as a public figure largely devoid of the stain of sexual or financial scandal — after such an enduring time in the American popular-culture spotlight is nothing less than astounding.

The shock value comes from the nearly direct proportion between the popular profile of American Evangelicals — particularly when they make close contact to the American presidency and Washington politics — and their loud and disastrous downfall. The recently departed Jerry Falwell stands as an exception.

To his credit, Billy Graham is not making any public attempts to muscle any one person into position as the carrier of his mantle. His son, Franklin Graham has in some ways stepped in on his own. Other evangelists and Evangelical leaders like Luis Palau, T.D. Jakes, Rick Warren, Tony Evans and Greg Laurie have also picked up on the Billy Graham evangelism mandate. They are a kind of 21st century face of Evangelicalism launched by Billy Graham.

Are they him? No. Do they need to be? No.

In fact, the very question, suggested by the cover of "Today's Christian" in June is misguided.

That cover, with a photo of Graham taken recently, says "In Search of the Next Billy Graham: As the Great Evangelist Steps Down From Ministry, Many Christians are Looking for a New National Preacher. Meet the Top Candidates."

They list Franklin Graham (only after Graham's daughter, Ann Graham Lotz — a fine preacher in her own right). They also note Palau, Jakes, and Rob Bell (a Michigan pastor and author), Joyce Meyer (a prominent speaker, teacher, evangelical media personality and author), and Joel Osteen, another prominent speaker, televised preacher and best-selling author.

But the compiling of lists doesn't get at the enormity of what it meant, and means, to be Billy Graham. The success we see in this man's life is more than the sum of its parts.

Billy Graham, as a preacher and Evangelical leader, was an outgrowth of a national movement that had roots in something that was once a phenomenon in this country (and others) called revival. Many preachers over the years have been part of these grassroots events from Jonathan Edwards to Dwight Lyman Moody to Charles Finney to Billy Sunday (a former pro baseball player in the early 1900s). Revival, at its core, is an overwhelming awareness by a group of people of their need for God. It's a kind of soul-hunger. It begins with being apalled at one's wretchedness before God's holiness, and ends with confession of sin to God, and acceptance of His forgiveness.

The willingness of God's people to pray and seek his face, as Scripture says, is the formula for the movement of God in revival. The people involved in it aren't the point, though some become memorable after the fact.

Billy Graham, as a twenty-something preacher attending a Christian liberal arts college in the Midwest in the 1940s, simply said "yes" to God's call. That was for preaching, as well as for Christian journalism and other initiatives aimed at taking Christ into all the world. Graham's call also involved the pastorate, a college presidency, newspaper advice columns, devotional writing, radio ministry, feature film production, and evangelistic preaching to crowds numbering in the hundreds of thousands on every continent (in-person and by television).

But for every Billy Graham there are hundreds or thousands who have made a difference in smaller ways, away from the cameras.

Graham knew this. And one of his bigger initiatives away from the pulpit was the training and encouragement of evangelists in countries other than the U.S. The Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization (1974) was a history-making moment that Graham helped orchestrate. The event had an uncanny prescience.

And what we need to understand is that the fire that once burned within American Evangelicalism is now a fire burning in South Korea, in Latin America, and in parts of Africa. Within the next few decades — unless birth and conversion demographics change — the United States will be a nation more in need of evangelization than one that does the evangelizing.

And the next Billy Graham, if there can be another quite like him, will be a native speaker of another language.

We shouldn't be surprised. It's all about God and His work anyway. And God, C.S. Lewis has said in more places than one, is not what we would expect.

Benefits of Hindsight: Virginia Tech All Over

2007-08-29T20:19:00.000-07:00

The report is in.

A panel of eight people, one of whom is Tom Ridge the former U.S. Homeland Security director, has told the world that Virginia Tech got blind-sided by Seung-Hui Cho.

Medical personnel on the university campus could have paid better attention.

The campus security people could have treated the initial two shootings as a signal to cancel classes and send out alerts.

But that's now.

On that wintry morning, nobody knew how bad things could be.

This was college, after all. Morning classes, commuters scrambling to find parking, residential students deciding whether to cut that morning or skip breakfast to be in their desk on time.

And somebody in the mix was angry. Really angry. Maybe sick, too.

But even if Seung-Hui Cho was a mentally deranged young man, the dark fury within him was something that didn't develop overnight. One of his professors at Tech refused to have him in class because she sensed how sinister the darkness was in this young man.

And though there were danger signs, no one intervened.

The problem was not entirely with Virginia Tech.

The problem is partly a mistaken belief in mass education found within too many colleges and universities in the United States and the Western world. Henry Perkinson spoke of it in "The Imperfect Panacea: American Faith in Education, 1865-1940." So did Lawrence Cremin in his 1965 Horace Mann Lecture.

It's a belief in education apart from a concern for students as people with souls.

Done at the scale found at Virginia Tech, it can leave students lonely and detached — set apart to find their way in a landscape of ego-driven survival. In a Social-Darwinist perspective, this is as it should be. The strong survive, the weak get shoved out of the way. And what emerges are the brightest, the strongest, the most capable of leading our nation (if we believe Plato's theories of scholar-statesmen leaders.)

But this is education that misses the point.

Arthur Chickering, in the 1970s, argued that education must be tied to a sense of identity. A student who doesn't know who he is will become a person chasing a dream. Fulfillment of that dream will be impossible. Educators who ignore a student's relationship to God in the quest to learn are doing that student a grave disservice.

The capstone course in Moral Philosophy, a mainstay of early nineteenth century American higher education (secular and parochial) was important for many reasons. It was often an interaction between the college or university president and senior students — a life-to-life mentoring that, if done well, could have enormous formative benefits for students. It was also a reminder to young people that the world outside academe was one that had implications far beyond the hubris of intellectual achievement. Right and wrong were crucial. At many schools, even state universities, God was acknowledged a judge of what was right or wrong in life.

The separation between the moral life and the life of the mind in American education is an ongoing tragedy of the American experience. Other nations look at the decay of the United States as a world leader and look to our schools as a symptom of the larger crumbling of our foundations.

Talk about the weather and the Utah mine deaths

2007-08-23T11:44:00.000-07:00

The news of Findlay, Ohio has the attention of our nation's news media (and some overseas bureaus in the Midwest.)The Thursday, Aug. 23 edition of the Los Angeles Times ran a color photo by AP photographer Madalyn Ruggiero of four rescuers guiding an inflatable raft through an intersection of the city. No pavement, just water.

Rain? So how is that news?

Well, when it doesn't stop, we have problems.

We also have problems when we dig holes in the ground and the earth burps.

One lesson we learn from Findlay and from Huntington, Utah, is that we are not in control. Not Doppler radar, not the National Weather Service, not the most sophisticated measuring equipment can completely prepare us for what this planet will do either in the swirling atmosphere or in the ground under our feet.

Newscasters like to leave us with a sense of hope —— the encouragement that we're okay. The problem is, we're not. (And we don't hear that much in today's news. Makes for bad ratings.)

It's said the only sure thing in life is that there's no sure thing.

But that's only partially true.

There's a song about this. (There usually are.)

This one was written by a group of musicians called the Sons of Korah thousands of years ago. They wrote it in the mountainous regions of what is now Israel or Syria.

Unpredictable as the sky or the very ground under us (or over us) can be, they said, "God is our refuge, an ever-present help in trouble."

Things will change. That we can count on.

But in all life's uncertainties, we have the assurance that God is constant.

And He is there for us when we call on Him.

Does that make all the suffering easier? No.

But it gives us peace inside — where no external reality can touch us.

Kentucky Creation Museum

2007-05-24T15:57:00.000-07:00

Funny how we fight over the speculative.

The opening of the Creation Museum in northern Kentucky (not far from the Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky airport) is going to include a protest by a group calling itself DefCon. That's not a cold war-era relic group. It's a group of people who claim that what's going on inside this little museum is really scary for the rest of us thinking people (Check out a Kentucky version of the story at www.kentucky.com/181/story/78875.html, but don't miss the New York Times' version of it last week.)

What's at stake is the right to believe.

Ken Ham, founder of Answers in Genesis — the non-profit group that built the museum, notes the irony of those who attack what's in his museum under the notion that it's a threat to popular conceptions of pre-historic life on this planet.

The museum is getting it wrong, says Lawrence Krauss, a faculty member in physics and astronomy at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. In an interview with the Lexington Herald-Leader, Krauss said DefCon, which he's part of, fears that impressionable young people will come out of this museum and need re-education.

Last I heard the jury was still out on what the national curriculum should be on anything in this country — including the origins of human or any other life.

Fact is, scientists begin their research with hypotheses that — though based on some elements of fact — are essentially faith premises. If they're intellectually honest, they admit this and approach their research (and that of others doing inquiry in their field) with humility. They're ready to admit that their results are flawed and trace those flaws all the way back to their hypotheses, if necessary.

Ken Ham and those in his group have built a sanctuary for their point of view as to how life began on the earth. The basis for their scientifict scrutiny — and before Krauss and his group dismiss it as unscientific they're obliged to ask honest questions — happens to be a predisposition that forces beyond human reason or established empirical evidence were behind it all.

To shut Ken Ham and his group down smacks of the kind of treatment Galileo faced long ago when he dared ask questions that stepped outside the bounds of established thought.

music and media

2007-05-23T12:50:00.000-07:00

We did it.

The issue that nobody is talking much about — at least not directly — finally slid under the spotlight in Southern California a few weeks ago.

The issue is whether Christian artists, to really make it professionally, have to shed their Christian label and become "mainstream."

The discussion happend at Biola University.

Don't look for that school's name in the Chronicle of Higher Education unless you're looking for sardonic humor. American higher education generally looks at schools like Biola with arched eyebrows and a veiled grin — maybe a chortle.

But it's a school that matters in the grand scheme of a Christian subculture within the United States. It's also a school that takes seriously its interaction with popular culture. Nestled in the lower end of Los Angeles County and within an easy drive's distance from Disneyland, Knott's Berry Farm and some fairly serious surfing, this campus is a place where students come for a Bible-based education from faculty who play Peter, Paul and Mary during exams and dissect films like "Pulp Fiction" for glimmers of God's face.

The event where the music conversation happened was the 2007 Biola Journalism Conference. An event organized by Biola Public Relations students and aimed at the entire campus of about 5,300 students.

During the two-day event, speakers from Entertainment Weekly, the Chicago Tribune, and promotions agencies across the Los Angeles region talked about the ways Christian music has moved from Jesus Freak stuff in the 1970s to a YouTube, MySpace, touring band phenomenon that packs out stadiums and has created a new breed of 21st century circuit-riding preachers.

So is Christian music dead? No. Is it derivative stuff? Some of it, yes. Is this Christian vs. non-Christian controversy new? Not really. There's been conflict for centuries between artists who were Christians over the real motivation for their work and its meaning(s). Christians who write really innovative stuff and play it with artistry that knocks the socks off anyone else are scattered all across the world and don't all show up in the music racks at Christian book stores. Some have never been to the Gospel Music Association Awards — or even know what it is.

What was worth looking at in this conference was the "emperor has no clothes" analysis of the contemporary Christian music franchise.

Chritian song writer and author John Fischer, lead speaker in the event, thundered at the gathered crowds about how Christians have made an adjective out of what should be a noun. Christian music is like other Christian stuff — a commodity bought and sold inside the safe walls of the castle we know as evangelical Christian culture. It's a castle with its own language and slang, its own clothing (even a dress code), its own books, films, kiddy toys, knick-knacks, jewelry, greeting cards, car and home keys, even home furnishings.

It's a multi-million dollar industry.

And the ugly little question that this conference raised is whether all that is a good idea and how Christians studying journalism and public relations should be thinking about it all.

The conference ended with questions rather than firm answers. And that's not a bad thing.

The New Journalism?

2007-05-07T09:06:00.002-07:00

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Death and the fear of it brings us together. Terror has a way of opening doors that had been closed in the humdrum routine of life togehter.

Perhaps the only thing worse than the threat of violent death is misinformation about its possibility. So when students at Virginia Tech, in fear of what early seemed to be multiple attackers on their campus, were confined, terrified and alone despite being together, they reached out. They used their phones, email, and their Facebook and Myspace pages. Are we surprised by this? We shouldn't be. It's not the tools that are important. It's what people were saying to each other.

Is what we saw happening between those students journalism? I don't think so. Was it communication? Of course. Will the journalism in the coming decades combine what we saw on that campus? Most definitely.

Kobe and the Playground

2006-01-26T13:09:00.000-08:00

Kobe Bryant and the coverage of his 81-point feat shows us that sports journalism and the NBA have each shown themselves to be willing to drop to least common denominator. First it was the feud between Kobe and Shaq. Before that, it was the rape trial (and I'm showing my lack of research on this one, because there are MANY other "before that" items.) The point, though, is that the function of sport in the United States has taken on a socio-cultural pervasiveness that speaks to both the hunger of people to really know each other in American society, and the willingness we all have to dissect and denigrate things we either don't understand or don't want to.

Kobe is a great athlete. The question, though, isn't athleticism in the sport of basketball. It's team play. The critics are right in saying that what Kobe is doing to the game of basketball (should we call it a religion? an institution at least?) is to lower it to a "gimme the ball" rite of passage that coaches beginning in middle-school are trying to get kids to unlearn. C.S. Lewis called pride and an overemphasis on self one of the most pervasive and difficult problems in society. He was right. Kobe should read Mere Christianity.