Shift Happens

This is a great video. I wish all those who are attending high school or college or who work in higher ed could see it!

unChristian

A comment from a classmate last week reminded me of a book I got earlier in the month, began to read, and then put aside when I got pressed for time. In the last few days I’ve gone back to it and finished reading it. It’s called unchristian and is written by David Kinnaman, the president of the evangelical research group The Barna Institute. The book writes up the findings of a fairly extensive research project done with Mosaics (born between 1984 and 2002) and Busters (born between 1965-1983) examining their views of Christianity.

The results of the study weren’t very surprising to me but are a real indictment of 20^th and 21^st century Christianity, both evangelical and progressive. Teens and young adults (in or outside the church) are critical of contemporary Christianity for its being (from the greatest perception down) antihomosexual, judgmental, and hypocritical. Christianity--or better, Christians and their congregations-- are insensitive to others, boring, and out of touch with reality. And these opinions are not coming from teens and 20s who have never experienced what Christianity is offering. More than four out of every five have gone to church at some time in their life, though few would say they have ever experienced God through the church. (I wonder if that figure would really be very different among those who are older. I somehow doubt it.)

So what do we do about the message we’re conveying (and the lives we’re living that don’t reflect the teachings of Jesus)? While Kinnaman offers several suggestions – learning to love those who are not members of the “insiders” club, being genuine and transparent, demonstrating loving relationships both in and outside the church, making faith connect with a changing world-- to me a line in the conclusion becomes the clearest and most poignant solution: “It comes down to this: we must become Christlike again.”

Trial of Socrates in Second Life

This past week, my Intro to Philosophy classes spent their time together conducting modern day trials of Socrates, bringing him up on more contemporary charges like treason and seditious conspiracy rather than impiety and corrupting the youth. Each time we do such a trial, my classes—even those that seem weak during the rest of the semester—really shine. Students who are playing the witnesses seem to have really internalized their characters—their lives and their interactions with both Socrates and Athenian society as whole. The lawyers have clearly combed the Platonic dialogues (which we use in place of depositions) and other literature and events of the day (as well as later scholarship) to prepare their arguments. The students who choose to be jurors are harder to engage, though the individual jury opinions they write up work better in doing this than the group jury opinion I used to have them do.

This year, for the first time, my online Intro class also did a trial of Socrates together by creating avatars and conducting the trial in Second Life. I’d been lucky enough to have a classroom space and trial furniture donated to me by another college—Buena Vista University—that had an island (such generosity on their part). The students learned—to various degrees of competency- to get around in Second Life. Lawyers and many of their witnesses met “in world” several times before the day of the trial for trial preparation.

And then we did the trial. It was slower than when we do it F2F. Because most of the students don’t have mics, we had to do the “speaking” by typing rather than voice and most of the lawyers didn’t seem comfortable doing “cut and paste” typing for the questions they’d previously prepared, but typed things out all over again. And about 45 minutes into it, because of glitches in its new update, Second Life decided to do a “rolling reboot”, which meant that all of us had to either sign off for a few minutes or move to another island and then teleport back to our trial room. But despite that, the trial went well and gave the class a chance to interact in new creative ways. Several members of the class actually created their avatars to look like the witnesses they were going to be during the trial (a Second Life bonus that we’ve never successfully pulled off well in F2F classes). And students also had a chance to argue their case in front of more than just other Mercy College students, since several of the Buena Vista students and faculty participated as jurors, and faculty from institutions as far away as University of North Dakota who belong to ISTE (the International Society for Technology in Education) and came to observe the way in which we did the trial.

Here are a few pictures from various parts of the trial:

The trial setup

Prosecution's opening remarks

Defense Attorney examining Crito

Anytus on the witness stand

Defense attorney examining I.F. Stone


Socrates on the witness stand

The jury

I'll be asking students to fill out a more detailed report of the pluses and minuses of doing a trial this way in an online class but from the comments I've received already they seem to have both enjoyed and learned from it.

Cheryl Wheeler

We went to see Cheryl Wheeler perform last night at the Towne Crier, up in Pawling. Although I think Wheeler's name is most often recognized by people because of her song "Addicted" which Dan Seals sang and made into a hit, her songs that touch me most are those that paint portraits of individuals-- songs like Alice, which captures the feelings of a widow living in Minnesota whose kids want her to retire but who keeps working because "the more I travel the more I want to see." Sunday night's show was great! Not only did Wheeler do a lot of her sometimes funny, sometimes irreverent, sometimes poignant songs-- as well as the wonderful Gandhi/Buddha that we hope to use at our wedding-- but the satirical commentary and touching stories that she put in between them both added to the music and alone would have been worth attending the show. I think she may be my favorite contemporary folksinger!

A War of Gifts

It's been about two years since there's been anything new to read in the Ender Wiggens science fiction saga. But last week Tor books finally came out with Orson Scott Card's short novel A War of Gifts, which not not only deals with new members of the battle school squad that Ender is in, but also introduces the theme of how and when it's appropriate to practice religious observances from a religious tradition not shared by everybody. The story line is pretty straightforward A boy raised in a very conservative form of Christianity is, though a conscientious objector/pacifist, forced to atttend battle school and, while there, gets upset about the fact that (against school rules) several of the other members of his squad are exchanging Santa Claus presents during the month of December. I got the book as soon as it came out and read through it in two brief settings, thoroughly enjoying the way in which Card dealt in sensitive, nuanced ways with issues of religious fundamentalism and religious tolerance.

Jezebel

I've just finished listening to a wonderful discussion from Tom Ashbrook's On Point radio show. It was called "Defending Jezebel"and it focused on how Jezebel's story is really one of tolerance (represented by Jezebel) in a fundamentalist world (represented by Elijah, who is zealous and willing to kill over and over to protect God's reign in the land). Despite the ramblings of a few of the call-in guests, there was a discussion on the wonderful reanalysis of a character that's often pictured only as a model of sexual harlotry (even though nowhere in the Bible is she ever presented as sexually promiscuous)! I've ordered Leslie Hazleton's new biography on Jezebel and can't wait to read it when it comes. In the meanwhile, anyone interested can hear the discussion here.

Convocation on Worship, Part 1

Last evening I attended the first of a two-part Convocation on Worship South Church had that was led by Janet Walton, the creative liturgist/theologian/worship planner from Union Theological Seminary. I’d gotten to know Janet a little back in the 70’s and 80’s. I was down at UTS/Columbia doing the first year of my doctorate when Janet was finishing up the last year of hers. Once she finished she began as staff at Union, transforming worship in wondrous ways by adding more creative use of space, more female voices, more interconnection of body and spirit. More recently, she’s invited performance artists, musicians, and visual artists in to bring their unique voices and contributions into worship exploration and dialogue.

Because of this, I was so psyched for last night’s meeting, thinking that Janet would begin to dialogue with us about new ways to imagine the interweaving of worship, justice, art, and everyday life, ways that might engage the 20 and 30 year olds that seem to be to be so absent from our congregation these days. Instead what we got was South Church patting itself on the back for how well it was doing when, at Joe’s invitation (perhaps at Janet's previous suggestion to him?), those attending spent almost all of the hour and 30 minutes we were to be with Janet telling her what they loved about South Church.

We only heard from Janet in the last 6 minutes of the time, giving her just enough time to ask us a few provocative questions. For example, she asked: South Church is well-known for its social justice ministries, one of the reasons Janet said she was willing to come spend time with us. So, we both care about embodied justice and the journey and exploration is everything (as Joe had said earlier in the Session) then why wasn’t she hearing more about how worship reflected upon and prepared people for this kind of work during the week? And if we say (as Joe again said in another comment earlier) that we want to be anti-imperialist, then why was all the worship leadership done by only a few people and always up in the chancel area? They’re both good questions, questions that have bothered me for a long while that I think we’ll have to answer if we’re ever going to make a successful transition to a congregation alive in the 21st century. I walked away from the gathering disappointed that we hadn’t put our time with Janet to better use by diving into such questions and exploring their ramifications for the ways in which we worship. I'm hoping maybe Part 2 in December will be better, since it'd be impossible to use Janet's time with us in a less productive way than we did last night.