Category Archives: Culture, Society, and Politics

So Much for the Information Age…

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The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a recent article (sorry – subscription required) called “So Much for the Information Age,” from a college professor lamenting his students’ deplorable grasp of current events and world history. This professor teaches journalism at one of our countries’ top universities, yet here is a sampling of what he found when he surveyed his students:

Nearly half of a recent class could not name a single country that bordered Israel. In an introductory journalism class, 11 of 18 students could not name what country Kabul was in, although we have been at war there for half a decade. Last fall only one in 21 students could name the U.S. secretary of defense. Given a list of four countries — China, Cuba, India, and Japan — not one of those same 21 students could identify India and Japan as democracies. Their grasp of history was little better. The question of when the Civil War was fought invited an array of responses — half a dozen were off by a decade or more. Some students thought that Islam was the principal religion of South America, that Roe v. Wade was about slavery, that 50 justices sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, that the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1975. You get the picture, and it isn’t pretty.

I don’t think this is all that surprising, and it probably says much more about our nation’s primary and secondary educational systems than it does about the university world. 

The professor goes on to express concern about our nation’s future, and about how we as a nation have failed our students, by considering them “educated” when they can’t discuss the front page of The New York Times.  

I hope that Christian students are taking a different approach to their studies, and educating themselves whether or not the system is.  After all, we worship a God who made the world, who loves the world, and who loves the people of the world so much that he sent his Son to die for the world.  That same God then calls us to emulate Him and be formed in the image of Christ.  

Since God loves our neighbors and the world they live in, so should we.  And the first step is to learn about the world in which we find ourselves. 

Technology and Sex Selection

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The use of abortion to choose the gender of a child has long been a concern of the pro-life movement, especially in countries like China or India where cultural and legal norms make both gender selection and abortion more acceptable.  A new study is suggesting that some ethnic groups – specifically Chinese, Korean, and Indian – in the United States may also be using abortion to choose the gender of their children. William Saletan of Slate.com has a good writeup of the study and some implications. 

However, the conclusion of the article is a bit confusing, 

If you think of yourself as a techno-progressive—someone who believes, as Barack Obama does, that “maximizing the power of technology” will help fix everything from energy to theenvironment to health care—the increase in sex selection should give you pause. Technology can facilitate regression as easily as it facilitates progress.

OK – I’m good with that.  I thought that “technology=progress=unlimited good” went out with the Victorians, but that’s fine if people are just now waking up to reality.  The rest of that paragraph is a bit odd. 

But if you think of yourself as a pro-life conservative, the data should humble you, too. In the populations in which it has increased, sex selection isn’t a newfangled perversion. It’s a custom, and a patriarchal one at that. If the sex-selection story teaches us all to be a bit more skeptical of both tradition and technology, that’ll be real progress.

Eh?  Perhaps some pro-life conservatives base their position of “patriarchal custom,” but I’m not aware of custom or patriarchy or tradition – much less Chinese, Korean, or Indian tradition – being used as a foundation for pro-life arguments in the United States.  

This recent story – about a Vietnamese man who runs an orphanage for unwanted children next door to an abortion clinic in Vietnam – notes that he receives donations from “Christian and Buddhist organizations.” I have not encountered any Buddhist or Hindu approaches to abortion – either for or against – so I would be very interested in learning more about how non-Western religions regard abortion. 

Public Policy from the Sermon on the Mount

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Which passages of Scripture should guide our public policy? Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is ok and that eating shellfish is abomination? How about Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount – a passage that is so radical that it’s doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application? So before we get carried away, let’s read our bibles. Folks haven’t been reading their bibles.

– Barack Obama, June 28, 2006, “Call to Renewal”

The more I read this passage, the more confused I am.  Obama goes on to make a good distinction between the commandments of a religion based on the teachings of that religion and general laws and policies that must be agreed upon by people of many religions.  But I wonder what he had in mind about basing “public policy” on the Sermon on the Mount.

Does he mean outlawing anger or lust?  Or providing tax incentives for the meek?  Or passing national building codes requiring foundations to be set on solid rock?  It’s not a simple equation from Scripture to public policy – and, I would argue, many of the opponents of abortion and same-sex marriage are not basing their positions on proof texts, as Obama parodies them.  I’m not sure if this is political rhetoric to play up to his crowd, or if Obama legitimately doesn’t understand the Biblical arguments against abortion or homosexual marriage.

Obama has been increasing his religious language in the last few days, and the great website GetReligion.org posted an article calling for reporters to ask Obama more direct questions about how he sees various Biblical passages influencing his policy positions.  I second that motion.

Free Books Online

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Nonprofit websites like Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, and the Christian Classics Ethereal Library have long offered free books for download, including many classics of theology.  Now for-profit publishers are starting to get into the mix.  HarperCollins is offering complete books on their website, free for the browsing.  (It doesn’t look like you can download them – instead, you browse through the book on HarperCollins’ own website.)  Several works of C. S. Lewis are available, like The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics, which includes Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, The Abolition of Man, The Great Divorce, and more in one volume.

(HT: Freakonomics Blog)

The Running Animal

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To move things in a completely different direction, maybe human beings are the “running animal.”  We’re not used to thinking of human beings as physically superior to other animals – e.g. cheetahs are faster, elephants are stronger – but it turns out that human beings are the best long-distance runners in the world. So says Daniel Lieberman of Harvard and Dennis Bramble of Utah. In another article, Lieberman notes that:

Once humans start running, it only takes a bit more energy for us to run faster, Lieberman said. Other animals, on the other hand, expend a lot more energy as they speed up, particularly when they switch from a trot to a gallop, which most animals cannot maintain over long distances.

They also point out that human beings are the only animals in the world that run long distances – like a marathon – voluntarily.  Which reminds me of the scene from Back to the Future 3 in which some cowboys are laughing at Marty McFly’s “running shoes.”  

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