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.
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Monday, March 17, 2008
Writing
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.
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.
Friday, March 07, 2008
He never did like funeral music
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.
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.
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Not during the prayer. I SAID, not during...
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.
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.
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
What it is and what it isn't
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.
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.
Friday, January 11, 2008
She cried — sort of.
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.
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.
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Commuting
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.
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.
Friday, August 31, 2007
Billy Graham and The Future
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.
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.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Benefits of Hindsight: Virginia Tech All Over
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.
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.
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Talk about the weather and the Utah mine deaths
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.
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.
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Kentucky Creation Museum
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.
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.
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
music and media
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 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.
Monday, May 07, 2007
The New Journalism?
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.
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.
Thursday, January 26, 2006
Kobe and the Playground
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.
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.
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