Entries from February 2008 ↓

 I want to wish each and every one of you a merry Presidents Day.  I hope you have all of your decorating done and will have a wonderful Presidents’ Day dinner and enjoy all of your President’s Day customs like. . . . 

Notice:  The Church knows how to throw good holidays, but the government has not got a clue.  This day began as a commemoration of George Washington, that great man and father of our country.  He deserves a holiday, and customs started to grow up around the day, such as having cherry pie and stores throwing sales.  

But then the sentiment grew to throw in Abraham Lincoln, whose birthday was also in February.  And then, what the heck, let’s just celebrate ALL presidents, as if they were all of the stature of these two great Americans.So the holiday became generalized into impossible-to-visualize vagueness.  In doing so, the very reason for the holiday became lost.  (Why should we celebrate presidents and not have days devoted to the other branches of government?  Legislator Day?  Supreme Court Day?)  

And then the real reason to have holidays in our secularized state emerged:  Let’s change the day, marking a specific historic event, into a moveable feast so that it will always produce a three-day weekend!  That way government workers and others will have their day off work as part of a long weekend!

(I just wish someone would authoritatively rule on the place of the apostrophe in the holiday’s name.)  

Here is why this all matters:  This is another example, along with what we are seeing in education and theology, of the shift away from the OBJECT  (content,Christ,  honoring someone) to the SUBJECT (me, me, me).

You know all of that research into “learning styles,” whether a child is a visual learner or an auditory learner or whatever?  Well, we are finding that, while there is an element of truth to it, attending to such things does not seem to matter much in children actually learning more.  The key factor in learning is grasping meaning, a concept that evades any of these sensory approaches.  (While cultivation of meaning is what classical education is all about.)

More vindication of classical education, which cultivates knowledge (grammar) AND understanding (logic) AND application (rhetoric).  As opposed to various contemporary methods which, for reasons I cannot understand, fixate on only one of these dimensions of education and denigrate the others.   This article discusses the fad of   critical thinking, including the admission that educators cannot even define it!  The various approaches are incoherent,with  the most obnoxious version being “just question everything.”  More substantive scholars say that being able to think critically requires (again, see below) CONTENT.  You have to think ABOUT SOMETHING.  Whereas much of the critical thinking curriculum is all process, trying to provoke content-free thinking.   (The classical solution:  DIALECTIC, featuring questions AND answers, as in that great model of classical education, the catechism, which, properly used, helps the student answer the question, “what does this mean?”)

The notable scholar E. D. Hirsch is offering a radical new proposal:  That schools actually teach CONTENT.  Ever since Dewey, the assumption has been that schools don’t need to teach knowledge; rather, they should teach processes.   (Classical education, of course, teaches both.)   Here Hirsch shows how the efforts to teach reading, as in No Child Left Behind, are failing. Gaining comprehension in reading, according to the research he cites,  involves building upon other KNOWLEDGE of what the reading is about.  You can’t just teach comprehension as a process.

Roman Catholic bishops in Italy are telling  actors they had better not do sex scenes.  They are catching flak for interfering in the artistic process, but I salute them.

 Our younger daughter and her husband are having a baby! Here is his or her first picture:           
  

Several observers have noted that in both his rhetoric and in the zeal he inspires in his supporters, Barack Obama is being presented as a  Messiah. Consider these lines from his speeches:

“We are the hope of the future.” We can “remake this world as it should be.”      

We can become “a hymn that will heal this nation, repair this world, and make this time different than all the rest.”

  ”We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”

Similarly, people are putting their “hope” in him.  They are “inspired” by him.  He is “charismatic.”  Notice the religious terminology.I like Obama and far prefer him to Hillary Clinton.  But in a secularist culture–something rare and unnatural in the history of humanity–religious impulses, long suppressed, can lie just under the surface and, with the right catalyst can come roaring back into the void. The old pagan model–revived under Fascism– of a divinized ruler in a divinized state may be the default position in human governments.I guess people who think all religions are essentially the same and equally valid  might see this messianic outbreak as a good thing, but Christians cannot.  (Contemplate again the skull of Valentine, who refused to accept the Roman pantheon and Caesar as god at the cost of his life.)    

UPDATE:  And now people at Obama rallies are getting  slain in the spirit.

Here is someone who got through grade school, graduated from high school, graduated from college with an education degree, became a teacher, and taught in a high school for 17 years  all without knowing how to read! 

The U.S. military is being accused of being a hotbed of  Christian “fundamentalism.”  Horror stories are being gathered, investigations are underway, and lawsuits are being filed.

James Kushiner, of the indispensable  Touchstone Magazine,in that publication’s blog, points out something I was going to comment upon, but he takes it even further: 

In Holland, some have rebranded Lent as a “Christian Ramadan.” Because Ramadan is more familiar to the youth, you see. And who’s fault is that? While we’re it, isn’t canon law simply “Christian sharia”? And a church building a “Christian mosque”? The Bible a “Christian Koran”?

The Crusades were the Christian jihad, which is why Luther so vehemently opposed them.  Is the pantsuit the Christian burqa?  The point, though, is to notice how the paradigm, at least in Holland, is shifting, so that Islam, rather than Christianity has become the religious frame of reference.

On this day in 270 A.D., a priest named  Valentine refused to renounce his faith, despite strenuous efforts to dissuade him and many benefits promised to him if he would only deny Christ.  Valentine refused, so he was first beaten with clubs and then beheaded. 

I wonder if this is another holiday co-opted by the secularists that Christians could reclaim.  (Yes, there are connections to love and marriage in the saint’s tales, though they seem to apply to another martyr named Valentine who married Christian couples despite the Emperor forbidding that practice.  He was also honored on this day, simply because he shared the name of the other guy, though he had no connection as such with February 14, unlike the man who died on that day.)But how could we breathe Christian meaning into this observance?  Celebrate the refusal to back down, whether in faith or in keeping one’s marriage vows despite all pressure?  Celebrate the institution of marriage even though the prevailing culture, like the old Emperor, works against it?  Who are some other martyrs for love?  What would be some good customs that we should start? Anyway, to brighten your day, here is a picture of his relics in Rome, including what is said to be his actual skull that was removed from his body. (We don’t venerate these relics, but they make a wonderfully grisly reminder of what this day is really about.) 

I predict it will be  polyamory. That means committed sexual and quasi-familial relationships between three or more people. Think polygamy, only sometimes with more men than women, and throw in bisexuality. You can do the math.