Yearly Archives: 2008

National Politics

Change.org

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You’ll notice a widget in the left sidebar with an opportunity to vote on an idea at Change.org.

The proposal comes from Naomi Aldort. Here is what she wrote:

Children should be raised by parents, not by strangers in substitute facilities. Ours is the first society in human history to deprive children of their very basic need for parental constant care. We do so in the name of money. I suggest that the money spent on day care should be used to support mothers/parents in staying home, and to make financial adjustments that make one salary be viable for families, the way it used to be. 
I am a child psychologist, the author of Raising Our Children, Raising Ourselves and of hundreds of advice columns published internationally. I counsel parents daily and I see the harm to children, parents, families and through them to our whole society, caused by this deprivation of parental constant care. A society which does not care for mothers and children suffers violence, loneliness, depression, addiction, learning difficulties and other emotional hardships we see around us every day. The family unit must be honored as the highest priority. 
Equality for women should not be paying them only when they do men’s type jobs, but also, or mostly, when they do the women’s type job of mothering: the most important job on earth. 
I am available with ideas, guidance and support for transitioning our society back to raising children the way nature designed it. The money saved from daycare, and then from preventing costly adictions, depressions, violence, behavioral and learning issues, will more than cover the costs of giving our children back their mothers. 
Sincerely, 
Naomi Aldort  Author, Raising Our Children, Raising Ourselves www.AuthenticParent.com

I don’t know what impact raising this issue on Change.org might have. For those just joining us, Change.org is the Obama transition team’s website where they have solicited input from citizens about policies in the new Obama administration.

Will it help? unknown. possibly.

Could it hurt? unlikely.

– Rob Shearer

Note: The top 3 ideas in this category currently are “Appoint a Secretary of Peace;” “Repeal the Patriot Act;” and “End Corporate Personhood.” Supporting mothers surely is more important!

Church History

The Renaissance Popes

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I confess to a certain macabre fascination with the Renaissance Popes. Following hard on the heels of The Great Schism (with its scenes of dueling Popes and anti-Popes) came the seemingly secular and corrupt ambitions of the Borgias, the Della Rovere, and the Medici families. I found a striking passage on the topic of Pope Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia –  father to Lucretia and Cesare) in Charles Williams’ The Descent of the Dove:

The traditional figure of the Renascence used to be Alexander VI. It is impossible not a little to regret the rehabilitation of the Borgias. To remember that the family produced saints is one thing; to make their other members nothing more than respectable worldly princes is quite another. The magnificent and magical figure of Alexander had once, for those who could accept it, a particular attraction. And only morons were repelled by it from the theory of the Papacy. Romantics who were not morons were drawn to it precisely because of the theory of the Papacy. Wicked bishops and wicked kings were common enough. But that the concentration of wickedness – avarice, pride, murder, incest – should exist in the See; that the infallible Vicar should possess the venom and be in love with his own uncanonical daughter; that that daughter should be throned in the Chair itself over adoring Cardinals, and that the younger of her two brothers should assassinate the elder, and the awful three – the Pontiff and the two children – should wind the world into their own skein of lust and cunning . . . this was the kind of thing that demanded the implicit presence of the whole future Roman development. The incarnation of Antichrist (romantically speaking) must be in the See of Christ. The Scandal of the Church had to be a scandal of the True Church, or it lost half its lurid glory.

It seems it was not so. Lucrezia was less lovely and more moral than had been supposed, and Caesar, if as brilliant, was almost always excusable, and Alexander himself is no more than a great Renascence statesman, and it was most unlikely that he poisoned cardinals or even died of the venom himself; alas, only Christian rites took place in the Pontifical chapels, even if the tapestries were a little pagan. the myth, however, had this to be said for it – it was contemporary. It was no more a late Protestant invention than the other legend of the Lady Joanna, Pontifex Maxima in the Dark Ages. It was accepted by pious and credulous chroniclers of the day. It was the kind of fable the Renascence liked, and it was enjoyed as a myth of that new discovery of the Renascence – Homo, Man.

By a curious, but delightful, coincidence, the year 1492 has more significance for me as a historian of the Renaissance and the Reformation than it does as an American. 1492 is the year that Lorenzo de’ Medici (Il Magnifico) of Florence died. And it is the year that Rodrigo Borgia was elected Pope Alexander VI.

Oh.. and there was this Italian sailor who sent back an odd report after sailing off west into the Atlantic in a trio of raggedy Spanish ships.

– Rob Shearer

Homeschooling

Homeschoolers save Tennessee taxpayers $300 million per year

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I received a catalog of mailing lists available for rent this past week. I noted that there are three commercial homeschool mailing lists available for rent with 600k+ household names & addresses,

Since we all know that homeschool families average 14.3 children, that means there are already 8.5 million homeschooled children [a bit of sarcasm there, gentle readers!].

Seriously, the mean family size for homeschool famlies IS higher than the general population – an average of about 3.1 children in one large-scale study of 20,000 homeschoolers.

So if we take the number of households from the commercial mailing lists (600k) and multiply it by the average children per household (3.1), we have a rough estimate of 1.86 million homeschooled children in the entire United States.

I actually think that estimate is still on the low side. Homeschoolers are notoriously paranoid concerned about being counted, compiled, or registered by anyone. So, the 600k families whose addresses are available for rent certainly does NOT represent all the homeschooling families in the US.

Two million homeschooled students is certainly a reasonable estimate/guess.

Four years ago, the National Center for Education Statistics published an estimate of 1.1 million homeschooled students, based on data from the 2003 National Household Education Surveys Program conducted by the federal government. At that time the number represented 2.2% of of the school-age population.

If the number has reached two million nationwide, then the percentage being homeschooled is probably around 4.0% of the school-age population of the US.

You could guesstimate the number of homeschooled students in each of the 50 states simply by calculating 4.0% of the school-age population for the state.

The US Census Deparment 2006 estimate for Tennessee was 1,044,713 persons between the ages of 5 and 18. Four percent of that number would be 41,788. So, it’s fairly safe to say that there are 40,000+ homeschooled students in the state of Tennessee.

Taken as a group, the 40,000 homeschoolers in Tennessee represent a larger enrollment than 130 of the state’s 135 public school districts. Only Memphis, Nashville, Knoxville, Shelby County, and Chattanooga have enrollment numbers over 40,000.

The state spends an average of $7,639 dollars each year for each student enrolled in the public schools.

So, collectively, the parents who are educating those 40,000 students at home are saving the taxpayers of Tennessee $300 million EVERY YEAR!

You’re welcome.

All we ask is to be left alone, so we can keep educating our children.

Homeschooling

Homeschooling goes mainstream

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Online article by Milton Gaither (associate professor of education at Messiah College and author of Homeschool: An American History) from Education Next, a publication of the Hoover Institution.

The whole thing is worth reading, but three paragraphs stood out for me. One on the “hybrids” that are being created by homeschoolers, one on the explosion of innovation in high school, and the final paragraph suggesting that homeschooling innovations may be useful models for public school reform.

First, the paragraph on “hybrids:”

Home schoolers have for some time been creating hybrids that blend elements of formal schooling into the usual pattern of a mother teaching her own children at home (see Figure 3). One of the simplest hybrids is the “Mom School.” Pioneer Utah home schooler Joyce Kinmont explains, “a Mom School happens when a mother is home schooling a child who wants to do something that can be done best in a group, so she invites other home-schooling families to join her. The mom is the teacher.” Related but slightly different is the home-school cooperative, wherein a group of mothers (and sometimes fathers) pool their expertise, each teaching a subject she knows well to all the children in the group. Sometimes such co-ops are held in the homes of respective group members, but often they meet in area churches or other buildings.

And here’s the intriguing description of the explosion in innovative programs for high school students:

While large numbers of home-schooled kids transition to traditional schools in their teen years, home schooling for older children is a high-growth market, and there has been an explosion in innovative programs for them. Home schoolers have challenged and are increasingly overturning laws barring them from participation in high school sports and other extracurricular activities offered by public schools. Journalist Peter Beinart found that Wichita’s 1,500 home-schooling families had created “three bands, a choir, a bowling group, a math club, a 4-H Club, boy- and girl-scout troops, a debate team, a yearly musical, two libraries and a cap-and-gown graduation.” “Home-schooled” children were meeting in warehouses or business centers for classes “in algebra, English, science, swimming, accounting, sewing, public speaking, and Tae Kwan Do.”

And finally, could homeschooling be a source of ideas for reforming the public schools?

The increasing diversity of home schoolers and institutional configurations should not obscure the fact that many who home school still choose this option out of frustration with or protest against formal, institution-based schooling and seek to impart an alternative, usually conservative Christian, worldview to their children by teaching them at home. Yet it is also the case that increasing numbers who opt to home school do so as an accessory, hybrid, or temporary stopgap, or out of necessity given their circumstances. It is this newer group of home schoolers who are challenging the historical dichotomies between public and private, school and home, formal and informal that have played such an important role in the movement’s self-definition and in American education policy. Trends toward accommodation, adaptation, and hybridization will likely increase as U.S. education policy seeks to catch up to the sweeping demographic, technological, and economic changes taking place. A movement born in opposition to public schools ironically might offer public education its most promising reform paradigm for the 21st century.

2008 Election, National Politics

Online campaign to revoke Obama’s invitation to Rick Warren

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disappointment.

outrage.

“Your invitation to Reverend Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at your inauguration is a genuine blow to LGBT Americans.”

– quoted from Obama’s Divisive Choice of Rick Warren

There’s a Facebook Group with 1,800+ members already called No Rick Warren at Obama Inauguration

Sample comments:

“We must never, never, nerver forget how Obama betrayed us.”

“Take off your shoes, America, and get ready to hurl them hard!”

“What is Obama’s obsession with fake-Christian hatemongers? He promised change, not status quo.”

Short honeymoon, eh?

Uncategorized

China, Christianity, and Mao

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I recall a small, but significant moment in a taxicab ride in Changsha about twelve years ago. My oldest daughter and I had been in Changsha, Hunan Province for about a week, and I had noticed that every cab we got into had a pendant hanging from the rearview mirror with a portrait of Mao in a red-and-gold frame.

The cult of Mao had largely receded in the rest of China. The only place to find copies of The Little Red Book of Chairman Mao was at flea markets and souvenir shops. So I asked our driver why every taxi cab had a picture of Mao hanging from the rearview mirror. His reply startled me. He explained that the cab drivers believed Mao had proved himself to be a powerful figure – in fact, more powerful than the older, more traditional local gods and Buddhas of China. After all, explained the driver, he had challenged all of the older gods – closed their temples, attempted to rid China of superstition – and yet had not been struck down. Mao had, in fact, lived a long, full life. Ergo, he must be more powerful than all of the gods he had challenged and beat.

Thus, the taxicabs all had a picture of Mao as a sort of talisman – to invoke his spirit and power for protection and favor.

Changsha is in the south of China. It is the capital of Hunan province, Mao’s home. The taxicabs in Beijing, far to the north, do not show the same universal reverence for his image.

I mention this as a way to introduce two books on China, one just re-published, which I recommend.

The first is Rebels of the Heavenly Kingdom by Katherine Paterson. Paterson is one of the most gifted authors of children’s books over the past 50 years. She has twice won the Newbery Award (in 1977 for Bridge to Terabithia, and in 1981 for Jacob Have I Loved). Paterson was born in China and spent her early childhood there.

In 1983, she published Rebels of the Heavenly Kingdom, which is a historical novel set in the years 1850 to 1853. The backdrop is the great Taiping Rebellion – a civil war which rocked China for 14 years and left 20 to 30 million dead. It is the American Civil War times twenty. It is almost unknown outside of China. Americans are preoccupied with the history of our own Civil War (which occurred at almost the same time).

The Taiping Rebellion was led by Hong Xiuquan (in Paterson’s novel referred to as Hung Hsiu-Ch’uan). In China the family name is the first character and is usually the shorthand way to refer to someone. Hong (or Hung) lived at the time and place where western missionaries were first entering China and making the first attempts to translate the Bible into Chinese. Hong was a young 22 year old teacher and student when he first encountered translations and summaries of the Bible in Chinese. Over the next several years, he had a series of vivid dreams in which he saw Confucius being punished for not teaching about the one God, and saw God the Heavenly Father on his throne, with Jesus standing beside him. In his dreams, Hong reported that they commissioned him to rid China of demon worship. Hong began to preach throughout the county where he lived, gained a following, and followed through on his exhortations by destroying idols and temples throughout the countryside.

Paterson’s novel opens as a young boy (Wang Lee) is kidnapped from his impoverished rural village by bandits (former soldiers, deserters from the Imperial army) and then sold into slavery, only to be purchased by a kindly young gentleman who turns out to be a follower of Hong and part of a rebel group. Actually, the young gentleman turns out to be a young lady, Mei Lin, who in a very effective disguise had been recruiting followers for the Way of Heavenly Peace (the Taiping).

The rest of the novel is the odyssey of these two improbable friends and followers of Hong (Wang remains skeptical, Mei Lin is more fervent) as the Taiping Rebellion grows, fights and defeats the Imperial armies, and eventually captures the important Imperial capital city of Nanking and makes it the center of their Heavenly Kingdom. The horrors of war are real and grim. There is death, both in battle and from intrigue. Soldiers and civilians are killed. The strange religious teachings of Hong are taught and repeated throughout the Heavenly Army. So strange, so similar to the teachings of the Bible and yet so tragically different and misused by the leaders of the Taiping.

The book has a reassuring, if slightly improbably ending. But after all the horrors that Wang and Mei Lin experience (both together and apart), it seems churlish to begrudge them some measure of happiness. Some of the incidents, implied and alluded to, will be disturbing to some readers. They should be disturbing. The realities of war and rebellion (and this particular war and rebellion) cannot be glossed over. In the end, to have read this book (and to have re-read it now ten years later) is to understand China and the Chinese reaction and reception to Christianity perhaps a bit better. The first encounter went so tragically awry. The subsequent events of the 20th century, from the violent attacks on Christians in the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 to the expulsion of all western missionaries by Mao’s People’s Republic in the 1950’s are in part explained by the horrible consequences of China’s first encounter with Christianity.

The survival and explosive growth of the Chinese house church movement in the 1970s and later is all the more remarkable, and all the more unexpected, given what had preceded it.

What is also remarkable is that Paterson crafted her tale 13 years before Jonathan Spence published his award-winning history of Hong Xiuquan in 1996: God’s Chinese Son.

I read Spence’s history of the leader of the Taiping rebellion when it was published, and then had the great good fortune to be able to visit the palace of Hong Xiuquan in Nanjing in 1999 when my oldest daughter and I journeyed to China to complete the adoption of our daughter Sarah. We had quite an adventure attempting to navigate Nanjing completely on our own and were astonished to discover that we were the only westerners in Nanjing visiting the museum on that particular day.

The entrance to the Taiping palace is dominated by a large bust of Hong Xiuquan. The Chinese communists judge him favorably for having led an early rebellion against the Imperial government of the Manchu. They largely gloss over the religious dimensions of the rebellion.

I commend both of these books to anyone who has an interest in China and who wishes to understand China better, especially the difficult history of Christianity in China.

Paterson’s tale is haunting and personal. The events of the rebellion seen through the eyes of two young people. It would be a thought-provoking read for students high school up through adult.

Spence’s history has a bit more emotional distance, but is a riveting tale none-the-less. Western missionaries were puzzled by Hong – and could not quite decide whether to endorse and encourage him for his appreciation of God and invocation of Jesus as God’s son, or to denounce and reject him for his heretical, megalomaniacal pronouncement that he himself was Jesus’ younger brother. 150 years later, it is still difficult to understand Hong Xiuquan and to decide what to make of him.

Rebels of the Heavenly Kingdom, by Katherine Paterson, has just been re-released after being out of print for a number of years. It is a 263 page paperback and sells for $12.95.

God’s Chinese Son, by Prof. Jonathan
Spence,
remains in print, 12 years after it was first published. It is a paperback, 430 pages and sells for $17.95. Either (or both) can be purchased directly from Greenleaf Press by clicking the links in this review. Or you can browse the selection of books on China on our website.

– Rob Shearer, Publisher
Greenleaf Press

PS: Readers of this review may receive a 10% discount on the purchase of either or both of these books by entering the coupon code CHINA during the checkout process. The coupon can only be redeemed once per customer.

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Newsweek, of all places, has a (largely) favorable profile of Bobby Jindal up

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“Ever since arriving at the Longville church for today’s event, the governor has been sprinting through his “New Louisiana” stump speech, a self-promotional recap of his 10 months in office, at the relentless pace expected of a guy who graduated from Brown at 21, completed his Rhodes scholarship at 23, ran Louisiana’s Health and Hospitals department at 25, presided over the University of Louisiana system at 28 and served in Washington as an assistant secretary of health and human services and two-term U.S. congressman before becoming the country’s first Indian-American governor at the advanced age of 36. Swimming in his blue blazer, the 5-foot-11, 135-pound Jindal looks more like a bashful science-fair contestant than the latest successor to flamboyant Louisiana Gov. Huey Long, and if it weren’t for Jindal’s lavish Southern drawl, he’d risk sounding more like one, too; this morning’s remarks, like nearly everything he says, have consisted largely of the phrase “a couple of things” followed by a flurry of details, statistics and multipart plans.”

read the rest at the Newsweek site.

I’ve been following Governor Jindal since his first run for governor. He’s very impressive.

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The US quagmire in Germany

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In May of 1972, members of the German resistance group, the Red Army Faction (RAF) bombed the US Army Officers Club in Heidelberg, West Germany killing three and wounding five.

In January of 1977, an RAF commando group attacked the US Army base in Giessen in an attempt to capture nuclear weapons.

In June, 1979, the RAF attempted to assassinate the Commander of NATO, US General Alexander Haig.

In August of 1981, a carbomb exploded at the US Air Force base in Rammstein, Germany

In September of 1981, RAF commandos fired a rocket propelled grenade attack against the car carrying the US Army’s West German Commander Frederick J. Kroesen. He narrowly escaped.

In August 1985, a car bomb exploded in the parking lot across from the base commander’s building at Rhein-Main Air Force Base killing an American soldier and an American civilian and wounded 20.

Clearly, our attempts to pacify and continue to occupy Germany have failed. All US troops should be withdrawn immediately (re-deployed elsewhere?) and the West Germans should be left to work out whatever arrangements they can with the East Germans and the Russians.

Right?