Gathering

Above, behind windows
I bear witness to their daily walk
Prisoner’s march with fingerprint gait
Through tingling raindrop seeds, their fists stretching pockets
Eyes downcast
Snubbing the sidewalk to gaze into flames of worry
Which of us
If a student asks for a bucket of water
Will give him a flashlight instead?

The near sidewalk lies directly beneath my window
Invisible until I rise from my chair, which I seldom do
Unless a familiar laugh or raised voice tumbles up
And in the classroom it’s easiest to see the back row
Because I’m a bit farsighted and they’re in my field of vision
But you who are nearest me are invisible
Unless I fold my neck in half and squint

So, on the sidewalk they advance and retreat
But only one out of dozens is bound for my office
In the classroom they come and go
Talking of g______ Loren Crow
But only a handful of you draw near enough to make contact
And then I fumble and hem and haw and flounder
And you are the hardest ones to see
They, who keep their distance
And fit my field of vision
And fit my expectations
And my stereotypes
And my stencils
And my habits,
Are vivid
Detailed
Defined
Sharp
There

My mentors all agreed,
The best teachers keep a healthy separation.
And the fox walked away with his nose in the air, saying
I am sure they are sour.

Paired and in packs, footfalls synchronized
They circulate woes, treasures
Burning through a meager cache of sleep-heaped energy
To peel one layer off the universe
While daylight spills between their gripping fingers
A breeze swirling against an avalanche

I own no square inch of land
Still, the Oregon countryside takes my breath away
I must not touch artwork on a gallery wall
Still, open doors usher me in
I may approach this near, but no nearer
And understand this much, but no more
And offer, but suffer frequent rejection
Still, I witness their daily walk
Through the window
Across Alder
And bathe my heart in a glorious, excruciating joy

Now monkey-walking through bicycle racks to exhume a buried smile
Now swinging keys on a lanyard for the soothing propeller motion
Now shouldering a backpack strap to a more comfortable spot
Now text-walking in front of an oncoming bus
As the Angel of Death moistens her icy white lips
Now halting mid-step, remembering they must be two places at once
Or two people
Now exploding into full sprint to escape the slugs

Each passage drips into my memory
Deposited in a half full cavern of stalagmites
Downy freshmen who grew a lustrous coat
One day finally exiting the MEC, robed and capped
And setting off for other sidewalks

Gesture

The literature on nonverbal communication is stuffed full of research into the link between gestures and speech. And lately I've noticed that my favorite fidgets and my favorite ideas all have to do with finding unstable balance points.

My students must get sick to death of hearing about dialectical tensions, but most of the academic notions that fascinate me the most are some sort of variation on that. Between kindness and cruelty, which is the good one and which one do we want to minimize? Easy: kindness is good, and we should minimize cruelty. But between, say, sleep and being awake, which is the good one and which one do we want to minimize? They're both good, but each one is the negation of the other, so we have to figure out what balance to strike between them. And we can't do it once and for all, because our need for each changes with circumstance. That's a short run through the idea of dialectical tension. It's a big idea in relational communication: relational partners want both time together and separation, both familiarity and spontaneity, both openness and secrecy. And the balance of each has to be continually renegotiated, and it's the renegotiation that is the lifeblood of the relationship. The idea pops up in a number of other places, and every time it does, it tickles my curiosity just perfectly. I often woolgather about it when I'm out walking.

The other thing I do aimlessly is fidget, and it struck me this morning that most of my commonest fidgets are about balance. I balance on one foot and swing the other one around. I balance books on my third finger and spin them, just like a basketball player with a basketball. I twirl pens through my fingers and around my thumb, which works best with pens that balance easily, and might not work at all with poorly balanced ones.

There's no end of aphorisms about the importance of balance, and most of it just makes me impatient. I'm not at all drawn to the abstraction in those sayings. It's the experience of hitting a tricky balance just right that pleases me. It feels like mastering the arrangement that truly makes a difference in the world. Far more than marshaling brute strength, I think that grasping the multiple interacting forces and learning to maintain balance between them, even as they change, is what it takes to be the source of influence more than the target.

Gauging

They did it again, this week. Twice. They notified a room full of people, "I am intimidating."

Generally, it's a pretty dicey undertaking to make bold, public declarations about other people's perceptions of oneself. The risk of being made absurd is unnecessarily high. And I think a lot of the students I teach are treading close to that line. I've noticed it over the past year or two: more and more college students drop into conversation, or an assigned speech, their assertion that "I intimidate the people around me." And I have no idea where it comes from. We're not talking huge, hulking bruisers, or decorated sharpshooters; not a Nobel prize winner among them. They're just ordinary eighteen, nineteen year old college kids, who are convinced that they make other people's knees shake and stomachs turn to ice water.

My first diagnosis was plain old narcissism. These are kids whose parents, all four or five of them, and grandparents, all twenty-three of them, repeated hundreds of times a day how special they were, how talented, how beautiful, how much better than other children. Now, if they find the people around them unresponsive, it can only be because they are so formidable, so wonderful, that they shock everyone into silence. That must be it.

But it's also been showing up on my course evaluations, too: they tell me that I'm intimidating, that they feel afraid to approach me. And if they're intimidated by a pasty, middle-aged academic dressed in Wal-Mart clearance, they're bound to find the world outside pretty daunting. Somewhere along the way, the benchmark has moved: a fairly large segment of the generation currently coming of age is primed to find people intimidating on the weakest of cues.

The students who claim the label for themselves do have in common a tendency to be assertive. They don't apologize, they don't talk around things, they simply say what they mean. As far as I'm concerned, that's a positive and healthy thing, and I've been known to frame my remarks that way as well. But is it really the case that if we aren't radiating uncertainty, if we aren't indirect in all our remarks, that we project an uninviting hardness that repels people? Are we drifting in the direction of our neighbors across the Pacific, sliding culturally into the high-context obliqueness that makes conversation a mix of ceremony and detective work? I don't suppose it's a catastrophe: cultures do change, and if that's what we have in store, then I suppose it'll be interesting to watch it happen. But it does make me curious what forces are driving us that way.

And I think it has a good deal to do with the particular brand of alienation that's taken over this country's culture. It's the same phenomenon that makes the typical American so conflict-averse, so certain that having an argument must mean ending a relationship. My sense is that we've built on top of being over-medicated, and now our everyday conversations are over-choreographed. Probably some of the blame for that falls at the feet of my field, but as with any helpful advances that pare down the messiness and danger in life, it's tricky getting the balance right.

Governmentality

One of my more cynical, but firmly and confidently held, beliefs about politics is that each party quietly keeps alive the issue that is its greatest source of public outrage, because it needs the outrage for fuel, for dollars, for attention. Republicans don't really want to stop abortion. If they had to, they'd quietly supply the funds to keep the abortion clinics in business. If abortion went away, how far would they have to travel to find another hot button that works so reliably? Democrats don't really want good race relations for the exact same reason.

To that list, I have to add two more very convenient outrages in the Republican column: terrorism and budget deficits. I've spent nearly a decade scratching my bald head over the utter irrationality of the Republican position on terrorism, and how it flies in the face of very recent, very powerful historical evidence: the British and the IRA. How did the British treat IRA terrorists? They refused to militarize the conflict, refused to treat arrested IRA members as prisoners of war despite demands from the prisoners that they do so. Instead, they proceeded as though the bombers were common criminals, and the symbolism and imagery were powerful. And where is the IRA now? Where we would like al-Qaeda to be: on the trash-heap of history. So why should we militarize our confrontation with al-Qaeda? What sane person could think it's a solution? What does it do other than let us flex our muscles and congratulate ourselves on what mighty warriors we are? It reminds me of kicking the computer to try to make it work. It's certainly tempting to do so, but anyone who thinks a kick genuinely will make a computer work better is an imbecile. So why do Republicans cling so stubbornly to militarizing the al-Qaeda conflict? Because they don't really want it solved. Why would they? If it goes away, they lose a key leverage point.

Same thing, by the way, goes for deficit spending. Anyone who can still say "tax and spend Democrat" without being washed away by a tidal wave of absurdity is living in Oz. The Bush deficit is the crust, mantle, and outer core of the "Obama debt." Clinton gave us a surplus, Bush poured it down the drain, and Obama is foundering under a wave of rage over how large the debt is. It's insanity, but it's outdated fidelity to the hoary old symbols of American politics: Republicans cut the budget and Democrats bust it. Yes, and once upon a time we thought all Jewish people were nebbishy and incapable of fighting, before the IDF came along and re-defined "tough." But to be Republican right now is to sound the alarm about the deficit, all the while never allowing oneself to be pinned down to what program one would actually cut. Republicans panned Obama's State of the Union for not being adequately serious about budget cuts, but then also complained when he canceled NASA's efforts to return to the moon. Which is it? What do they want cut? Answer: nothing. They want the deficit nice and high. While it's high, they have an easy leverage point.

Please understand: I've written a lot about Republicans in this post, and, in fact, I think what passes for Republican thinking and Republican leadership is, at this precise moment in history, unbelievably toxic to our country's well-being. But that's not at all to say that the Democrats don't have their own convenient problems that they don't, at all costs, want solved. I mentioned race above, and there are others. It's just that Republicans, having decided winning back a majority trumps all other objectives, have theirs very prominently on display at the moment.

That's one of the sad but true qualities of elected officials: you must pretend to grasp the seriousness of a problem and be committed to solving it, as long as anyone is listening. But in your heart, you know how badly you depend on the problem's continued existence. How they straddle that hypocritical chasm without falling in, I couldn't tell you. I'm glad I've got the job I have, and not theirs. It must just suck the soul right out of you.

Gandalf

Last night, the library held its second annual Mystery Party, set up as a big, live action game of Clue. Last year, we had fairly straightforward character names taken from the game, and we were left to our own devices to think up details. This year, they chose "books made into movies" as the theme. Students dressed up as the Wizard of Oz characters; Harry, Ron and Hermione from Harry Potter; Max and the Wild Thing from Where the Wild Things Are; Sam-I-Am from Green Eggs and Ham; Dustfinger from the Inkheart trilogy; and Jadis the White Witch from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. My colleague Loren Crow, our Bible professor, dressed up as Darth Vader, and I was Gandalf.

The murder victim was a screenwriter, Mr. Write. The game began with Steve Silver, the detective, introducing each of us, and we had a minute or two to give an opening rap. He told us in advance that he would ask two questions:

1. Where were you on the night of the murder?
2. What happened?

Last year, I used this blog to compose mine, and I wound up pleased that I'd recorded it here for memory's sake. This year I didn't compose it here, but I'm nevertheless going to set it down so I can look back on it later. It's pretty clearly a step down from last year's, but a few of the bits went over well.

"A wizard is never late. Nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he intended to.

Where were you on the night of the murder?

"On my way to Hogwarts. They've hired me as an adjunct; I teach spelling. But I soon realized that there was a stowaway on my eagle: Gollum had climbed aboard, smuggling explosives in his underpants. We took an emergency detour to the Cracks of Doom to drop him in. Again. After that, my eagle needed refueling, so we cut across to Oregon and I sent him out to fish for salmon, while I swung by this library to check out some rare books. I dig rare books.

What happened?

"Knock knock.

Audience: Who's there?

"J. R. R.

J. R. R. who?

"That's what the screenwriter said! I mean, no Tom Bombadil? Merry and Pippin turned into something out of Dumb and Dumber? Frodo reduced to a whiner with one facial expression? Saruman vanishes from the story right in the middle with absolutely no explanation? I'm telling you, at one point the screenwriter wanted the trees to do a song and dance number to 'Let Me Ent-ertain you!' I decided to kill -- to kill -- to -- (violent fit of coughing)

"Sorry, too many centuries of smoking pipe-weed. I've been trying to kick the hobbit.

"Anyway, I decided to sneak up on him, make blinding light come out of my staff, and give him a good grilling! Unfortunately, I mispronounced one word in the spell, and made fire instead of light. And as for the grilling, weeeell ...

"That's what happens when you don't spell-check."

Likeness

"Speaking generally, we may say that the rhetorical function is the function of adjusting ideas to people and of people to ideas."
-- Donald Bryant, "Rhetoric: Its Scope and Function," Quarterly Journal of Speech, 39, 413.

"God has prepared the whole world for the gospel and the gospel for the whole world."
-- Don Richardson, in Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus, 4, 172.

Loo

It's a grim sign that I have to haul out the cliché hammer again this quickly, but I have no choice. I am mortally sick and tired of hearing about "kitchen table decisions." To every single official and spokesperson belonging to the Obama administration I beg you, for Heaven's sake, knock it off. At the kitchen table, I don't decide; I chew. Chase down a herd of cows and watch them go to town on their cud if you think a flood of brilliant plans comes out of chewing. In all honesty, I make a fair share of my important decisions on the crapper, but don't hold your breath to hear that in an Obama speech anytime soon.

Litter

By the power vested in me as a professor of rhetoric, I hereby put the world on notice that I do not have a "radar screen." If you've confused me with an aircraft carrier, get glasses. I have five perfectly good senses, and occasional twitchings of a sixth, but I do not sweep a beam of electromagnetic radiation round and round for the purpose of identifying the range, altitude, direction, or speed of both moving and fixed objects. That would be rude. Plus, I'd have to do some sort of Regan MacNeil trick with my head, which would hurt. On first usage, this metaphor might've been vivid; on second, it might've been tolerable. By now, it's been beaten past death into unrecognizable corpse pulp, and it stinks up far too many conversations.

Please be advised: I have declared the entire world around me a no-fly zone. If you put something on my radar screen, I reserve the right to pick it off with a Sidewinder.

Logic

I spent enough years in debate that I judge arguments just as much on entertainment value as quality of reasoning. Today I was treated to a real delight: Rush Limbaugh says the Haiti earthquake was made to order for the Obama administration, and Pat Robertson says it was sent by God. If both those claims are true, then obviously God must be a Democrat!

Measurement choices

So I'm collecting facets of reality in preparation for the first lesson in my Communication Theory class. Virtually every theory we study is either social scientific or interpretive in nature, so we begin by nailing down what that difference means. It's a cool little idea to play with, and also a fairly important pillar of God's creation, but I'm more and more sure that it's best learned through multiple examples. I'm posting this to preserve the ones I've spotted, and to invite others to contribute more.

I always introduce the concept with a simple thought experiment: suppose I bring a tape measure to class, and the day's activity is to determine the tallest student in the room. How might we accomplish that? We talk about precise definitions of "tall," how to minimize errors in measurement, etc., but at the end of that, we understand that we'd take the tape measure, measure each person in class, and the record of inches and feet would settle the matter. The most important part: once our data were collected and properly understood, it would no longer be rational to disagree. You might speak up and say "Well, Brody (or David or Jordan or whoever) might be the tallest to all of you, but not to me! I have my own opinion about who the tallest student in this class is!" But your classmates could demonstrate that you were simply mistaken. Part two of the thought experiment: what if, instead, the day's activity is to determine the most likable student in the class? Not only could we not do that with a tape measure, but no instrument exists that would settle that question. We might each supply an answer and discuss our answers, but it would be entirely acceptable to disagree with the majority: "Bob might be the most likable to you, but I personally find Fred more likable." Nothing wrong with that.

Many times, students' first reaction is to ask, "So it's just opinion?" Then I explain that opinions are things to which reason is entirely irrelevant -- my example generally is the relative tastiness of chocolate versus vanilla -- whereas interpretive theories deal with questions that aren't exhausted by collection and analysis of data, but are proven intersubjectively. People are free to like or dislike any author, according to their taste, but enough people have found Shakespeare's work exceptionally powerful that obviously something exemplary is at work in his writing, even if there's no literary tape measure that can give it an exact weight.

Those are my starter examples. Here are others that I've been collecting:

• An archive versus a memory. Maintaining an archive is an attempt to record objectively demonstrable remnants of past events. On the other hand, memory is a trace of our own subjective experience of those events. And if we compare our memories with other people's, we're likely to find that certain of our stored impressions are widely shared, while others are unique to individuals. But even those, and perhaps especially those, are worth examining: often it's the unique perspective that influences people to think in new and creative ways.
• A health inspector versus a restaurant critic. A health inspector will conduct a thorough examination of a restaurant, checklist and swabs in hand, and will issue a report consisting of data collected through techniques that are standardized and replicable. A restaurant critic will report her subjective judgment of the restaurant's success or failure at delivering an enjoyable eating experience. Parallel concepts are nutrition and flavor.
• Nature versus nurture. Our genes determine certain of our traits, but other traits are our own response to our experience, which is some part happenings in the outside world and some part our own interpretation of those happenings.
• God's sovereignty and faith.

That last one brings me back to where we usually wind up the discussion: the big picture of this duality is that there is a reality out there, a reality outside our skulls that is independent of our observation. Even if we were all struck dead at the same moment, the tallest among us would remain the tallest. But there is also a reality inside our skulls, inside our thoughts, and that reality is not identical for any two people: if every human on earth was struck dead at the same moment, the question of who was the most likable would vanish, because there would no longer remain any sentient people to like, dislike, or behave in a way that was worthy of liking or disliking. And a very simple, straightforward definition of God can be derived from this: God is the one for whom the outer and inner reality are unbroken, continuous.

If you've got any other good illustrations of the gap between that which is demonstrated objectively, and that which is argued with intersubjective accounts of experience, I'd love to pile up a few more. It's a powerful idea, and the more illustrations I've got to bolster it, the better we do.

Mañana cosa

During my first two years at NCU, everything I did seemed to endear me more and more to the students, which was a bit worrisome, because I honestly don't want to be popular with my students. Fortunately, that now seems to be turning the corner.

I don't want my students to like me too much right now. Rather, I'd much prefer that they like me ten or twenty years down the road. I want the more adult, mature, fully launched, professional versions of themselves to look back and say "Doyle made my life hell, but under his teaching I grew a lot more than I would've, if left up to my own motivation." This in some ways is a lingering effect of my years at SFA back in Texas. There, I taught a lot of lovable students, and I got a lot of enjoyment out of my daily interaction with them. Nevertheless, it was one of the least competitive four year institutions in one of the nation's largest states, and I told the students, very bluntly, at the very first meeting of each class, that I believed one out of three of them did not belong in college and were wasting their time. My classes almost always started with twenty-four or -five students, but a typical class would collapse down to fourteen to sixteen students as the non-serious ones dropped, and some fell to six or eight. One summer class made it all the way down to four students, whom I then tried to teach with just as much energy and enthusiasm as I would've for twenty-five.

NCU is very different. Many of the students here were raised right, which is to say that they set high expectations for themselves and thrive on being challenged, and that makes them a joy to teach. Others don't have that advantage, but do keep the focus where it belongs, so when a class speeds up and becomes difficult, they put the pressure squarely on themselves and do all they can to keep up. Students like that are the reason I teach: I do my best to come alongside them and give them support, and I've got a much bigger opening to make a genuine difference in their emergence into the world, which is more rewarding than a paycheck ten times the size of mine.

But then there are those, admittedly fewer than at SFA, but still a good number of students, who tell themselves lies and choose to believe them. They peg the degree of effort and risk that they're willing to tolerate very low, and then start looking for loopholes and opportunities to offload blame. I feel a great deal of compassion for them, because I know in how many cases they're using strategies they learned from their parents, and for which they've been rewarded with success for most of their lives. Still, no matter how much compassion I might feel, if I want to do my job the right way then I have to become the stone wall in their path and put a stop to their winning streak.

In fact, it's not terribly different from my years working with the two-year-olds in the nursery. Almost all were strong willed, but, on top of that, a few also suffered from extremely poor parenting. Even with the worst of them, if I said no, meant no, and made it stick, they soon learned that they couldn't get around me. Then, once we understood each other, their behavior would improve, and many of them grew to genuinely like me. College students have a lot more resources, a lot more tools, for the purpose of trying to escape my grasp, such as reinterpreting my decisions as lacking legitimacy. That means I'm generally not in their lives long enough to see the fruits of my efforts. Still, it's the first move of saying no and making it stick that is so vitally important. And for some of them, I'm not the first. But even for them, every exposure to that lesson supplies a fresh chance to decide to turn things around. And even if I wish I could be spared the immediate effects of butting heads with them, the knowledge of why it matters makes it worthwhile.

Some of what went on in the term just ended genuinely amounts to the palpable manifestation of my own shortcomings: I did, in fact, have a grumpy semester. I was struggling under some particular kinds of pressure and life stress that were bigger than what I can easily contain, and I took some of it out on my students. I do regret that; I've beat myself up for it pretty soundly. But much of the discontent I saw on my teaching evaluations was easily recognizable as students attempting to blame me for what they did to themselves. The down side of that is, if they're caught in that pattern, they're pushing back the day that they'll break through and understand what needs to change if they want to be successful or happy. But I don't worry about it too much, because that process never gets set in motion until someone finally digs in her or his heels and tells them "No," and I know I did that. If a few more people do it on this campus, then they have a good shot at changing their ways before they make it to their first job. If not, I'm quite confident a boss won't hesitate before teaching them some painful lessons.

Much of teaching is not about immediate results, not about instant gratification, but rather about setting in motion ripples across a body of water. The size of the body is invisible, and I can't even see how quickly the ripples are moving; all I know is that I did throw the stone. I know that someday, a quick aside I threw out in class may suddenly fall into place for one student with the force of a wrecking ball. I know that because I know what effect my own professors had on me. And I also know that imposing high expectations is a choice I've never regretted in all my years of teaching. I knew from the start that any approach, any choice at all, would please some students and make others unhappy. What I caught on to, just a few years into my teaching phase, was that my choice was making the hard-working students very happy, because at last someone was lowering the boom on their lazy, manipulative classmates, and that I was disappointing students who wanted to pour their energy into anything other than doing what they were capable of. That profile still gives me peace and satisfaction, even if occasionally I have to weather my share, or even more than my share, of complaints. Ultimately, these students are growing up, not down, and if I get out in front of them and expect more than they're currently willing to give, then I feel as though I'm on the right side of history. And a few years down the road, I expect to be a lot more popular with them than I am today.

Magisterial children

When I was fourteen years old, I didn't like being around young children. Naturally, my mother chose that year to announce that I'd outgrown an allowance, and she'd lined up a job for me in the church nursery, sitting with two-year-olds, on Wednesday and Sunday nights. I dragged my feet the entire way. This was about a year after I'd stopped going to church, so I suspect she had multiple purposes for this move, but whatever her reasons, she downright insisted that I give it a try for at least one evening. One evening was all it took: I stayed in that job for the next four years, and would've stayed longer if I hadn't left for college. I still really don't enjoy being around badly behaved children, but after all these years of teaching, I've managed to grow a little helping of patience. I'm not a patient person by nature; it's the product of a lot of hard work and struggle, and as with most of my toughest life lessons, I've adopted a quick bit of verbal shorthand to put me back in a good mental spot when needed: "They're just kids being kids."

Kids are kids, sometimes. It's difficult, frustrating, to be a kid, and it's important to keep certain kinds of misbehavior in perspective. I'm not talking about cruelty, or the kind of violence that goes beyond simple roughhousing, but rather a certain flavor of orneriness, a certain failure to be wise. Those are just part of the ugliness of growing up. They're certainly things to reach past, to look forward to the end of, but a sharp, severe reaction to them is very likely to be an overreaction.

Those are all old thoughts. The connection I've made tentatively a few times this year, and more firmly over the past few days, is something new.

I struggle daily with anger, and in particular I get angry about politics. I have very nasty feelings, and sometimes say very nasty things, in response to twists in government wheeling and dealing. And yet, I know full well that any elected official, at any point on the political spectrum, is trapped between the needs and demands of different people who pull in endless different directions at once. I know that political language is designed to strike balances that necessarily are unstable and unsatisfying. I know that political decisionmaking is ramshackle, that compromises stray vast distances from the original need that gave rise to a proposed change, and that any reform which purports to sweep aside the swirling chaos is really just an exercise in gross oversimplification. Simple problems tend to get taken care of by the parties on the scene, without the need for government involvement. With very few exceptions, politicians who "talk straight" are the biggest liars of all, and no matter how entertaining or soothing their words might be, it's necessary to spot the mismatch between their plain speech and the ornate problems they discuss.

So what I'm trying to do, more and more, is tell myself "This is just politicians being politicians," and then to draw that thought into some measure of tolerance and respect for those whose words and decisions ordinarily would infuriate me. They're doing work I would never want to do. They're doing it under circumstances that they don't control, in a political environment they inherited. And just as I found myself more patient with children when I worked directly with them, got to know them, got to leave my mark on their behavior, I also suspect that if I involve myself more in public deliberations, the more salient the complexity of reconciling everyone's needs may be.

One of the earliest lessons I learned about working with youngsters, first toddlers and then teenagers, was "Don't take what they say at face value. Double-check for yourself." Not a bad idea with politicians either. And in all three cases, it's not an excuse for hatred or undue anger; it's just a by-product of what they're working through.

Merry Christmas

Granularity of knowledge requires both investment of effort and immersion in uncertainty. And like any good Baptist, I'm really into immersion.

One of the things that comes up in this or that commmunication class is the phenomenon of "political correctness." Whenever I hear that phrase, I clench my teeth. And that's not because, as is fashionable, I hate hate hate political correctness, or love to bray in my best Texas twang, "Ah'm nawt politically kerrect, haw haw haw!" Actually, I do my best to be politically correct, and I think the original idea that was parodied, caricatured, distorted, malformed, and lied about into something almost universally despised, was a good one. It's something I was taught as a child: good manners. Call people what they want to be called.

Years ago, I asked a friend of mine, "So I get that I'm not supposed to call you Indian. But I gather 'Native American' is not quite right. So what do I call you? Indigenous Turtle Islander?" She said "How about Cherokee?" Problem solved. Larger lesson: call people what they ask to be called. That's just respectful. Is it hard to keep track? Well, I can keep track of their names, can't I? Is one additional identity marker really that much more work? I had asked my friend to provide me with a label that fit her, but was also universal. Why did I think that a reasonable request?

Around that time, I dated an African-American woman for most of a summer. I found out right away that she preferred "African-American" to "black," which was fine with me. But the first time she called me white, I said "No, don't call me that. Call me European-American." What followed was a calm, and even fun, discussion of reciprocity and respect. My position was that she was free to call me white if I was free to call her black, and I would be glad to call her African-American if she'd call me European-American in return. She said our positions weren't mirror images of one another. Over time, we both converged toward a middle ground that chiefly consisted of treating the entire matter as an ongoing conversation. And not a touchy or sensitive one: a very interesting, rewarding one, packed with good, meaty, thought-provoking mutual lessons.

What I believe often holds people back from such conversations, and I'm no exception, is uncertainty. It was a very pleasant, and honestly very unexpected, surprise that we were able to explore the issue without stepping on one another's toes. But typically, when I meet new people and there's an identity issue, I freeze for just a moment because I'm afraid to mis-step, to present myself as a clumsy or insensitive person. It's genuinely not that I fear offending them; life isn't wrapped in cotton-wadding, and those who wear big people pants can handle offensive messages and offensive encounters without a trip to ICU. But I do work hard at telling others about myself through both my words and my actions, and I don't want that gestalt message to include the kind of sloppy, arrogant ignorance that I associate with the outright bigots I've known. It's easy to put such uncertainty in the same category with other fears that aren't tied to genuine danger: public speaking is the first one that comes to my mind, because it's my line of work. But categorizing it that way doesn't lay the issue to rest. Yes, we probably should confront the fear and muddle through it. Easier said than done.

I got to thinking about these things this morning as I listened to an interview on the radio at the end of which the announcer said "Merry Christmas," and the interviewee answered "Happy Holidays." That got me to thinking about the stink surrounding which greeting to use. It does strike me that the best solution is just to ask people which, if any, holiday they're celebrating, and wish them one of those: Merry Christmas, or Joyous Kwanzaa, or חג מולד שמח ושנה טובה. That does require extra effort, but I doubt the effort is what holds people back. I think the bigger barrier to finding out may be fear of uncertainty, which I'm convinced underlies the trap of alienation from which this culture doesn't seem to have any luck escaping.

(On a random note, I actually didn't start naming this month's blog posts with "M C" so that they'd fit "Merry Christmas." I named the first post of the month "mountain climbing" because of its subject matter, and what resulted was just serendipitous.)

Movable claims

I get tickled when I spot patterns of reasoning that transfer neatly between political opponents. The example I've carried around for years is, "Banning it will just drive it underground." What's the first objection to any gun control law? "If guns are illegal, only criminals will have guns." How about restrictions on abortion? "All prohibiting abortion will do is drive women to back-alley quacks or coat hangers." What strikes me about this is, the reasoning seems compelling to them on their pet issue, but it stops making sense as their feelings change. Why distrust a ban in one case, but think it's a constructive move in the other? Why is it that people who make the defiance/driving underground argument on the one issue don't thereby cultivate at least some recognition of its force in the other?

So this morning, I noticed another one: "Teach the controversy." That's the line taken these days by a certain stripe of politically active Christian on the question of what ought to be taught in high school biology classes. They realize they've lost the fight on outright creation science, so instead they argue that teaching evolution as though it's an undisturbed consensus is misleading, and instead educators ought to teach the controversy. Don't just stick to the scientifically-developed precepts of evolution through natural selection; instead, introduce objections to those findings alongside them, and leave students to sort out what they believe. But I remember reading James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me, and I followed the textbook wars in Texas, which was and is one of the primary national battlegrounds for culture clashes in K-12 curriculum, and on that subject, as with gun control vs. abortion, the arguments are neatly flipped: the right wingers want to teach a stable, pseudo-consensus view of history, and their opponents want to "teach the controversy" by including such disturbances as marginalized voices, unflattering accounts of the nation's founders, and stories about American war crimes. Here again, people will argue "Teach the controversy" on one issue, and "We've got the truth, so why contaminate it with nonsense?" on the other, and flip back and forth between those moves without any apparent internalization of their premises.

People are funny. And politics is not about good reasons. Political argument is very much kabuki theater. The forces that settle political disputes have very little to do with anything said for public consumption: the public arguments are engineered to lay on a veneer of deliberation, but the deliberation actually makes no difference. It reminds me of Milli Vanilli, who danced around and appeared to sing, but really had nothing to do with the production of their music. It also reminds me, as I wrote a while back and worked into my rhetoric class, of placebos, in the sense that many patients somehow manage to overcome their symptoms and right themselves in response to the appearance of medical intervention that actually isn't in any way bioactive.

And it seems to be the way of the world. Now I see through a glass darkly, but then face to face.

Meaningful contradictions

Whenever someone says "Don't you impose your God on me; your religion might be true for you, but not for me," I wonder how sound that person's math skills are. Does two plus two equal four only for me? Is that true for me, but not everyone else? Or how about their grasp of elementary science: is gravity true only for me? If you're sufficiently exercised at all the suffering caused by gravity (people falling down, buildings collapsing, avalanches), can you simply reject it? Step off a skyscraper and fly around like a bird?

But then, just a couple of weeks back, I wrote a blog entry about my take on evolution, and I said that God, by choice, leaves His existence in the realm of that which could be otherwise, which the Greeks categorized as phronesis, as distinct from episteme, true knowledge. God leaves enough looseness and slippage in the world, enough plausible alternative explanations, that people come to Him only by choice, and never because they're trapped into it. But if that's the case, then I bump up against a contradiction: above, I'm asserting that His existence, sovereignty, role in creating and sustaining the universe all are features of reality, universally and uniformly applicable everywhere and to everyone, meaning they're in the realm that which could not be otherwise, the true knowledge that Chaïm Perelman says is the product of demonstration, not argumentation.

Not long after I spotted this knot, its solution also struck me, much to my delight. I've never been terribly convinced by attempts to disprove God's existence through reductio ad absurdum. Using language, a finite system, to try to map the features of God, a transcendent being, is a sketchy undertaking in the first place. And where we find that things we believe to be true about God result in contradictions, it's foolishness to spring to the conclusion that we've just eliminated the possibility of His existence. What's far more likely is that the reconciliation of His attributes requires knowledge that our brains can't contain.

A week or so ago, I stumbled across a YouTube clip of Carl Sagan discussing the fourth dimension and showing a 3D shadow of a hypercube. The best we can do in understanding dimensions beyond the three of our senses is cobble together mathematical equations about them; we can't visualize them, and there seems widespread acceptance that this is just a shortcoming of our brain architecture. If that's easily accepted, then why do we struggle so mightily to understand that a far more complex problem might not yield all its nuances to our ability to capture meaning in words? God is all powerful, all knowing, all good, and evil exists in the world; the fourth statement in that series contradicts the first three. But it doesn't, because it simply describes a problem whose answer we don't know. To claim that no answer can exist, just because no human with a human brain has produced the answer, is hogwash. Another example: God is sovereign and orders all things, yet human beings have free will. Those two conditions can't both exist as propositions, but that simply means the logic that reconciles them is more than we can grasp.

A lot of times, I imagine a three-year-old toddler trying to tell her toddler friend what her mommy does all day at work. Does the toddler understand it all? Does she have the vocabulary and sophistication to explain it? Do those failings mean that her mother's job simply doesn't exist? Of course not.

So the reality of God's existence belongs both in the realm of that which could, and could not, be otherwise. And all I've found is that those categories of knowledge, however useful they've been since ancient times, are still of human construction and thus, necessarily, incomplete and imperfect.

Mediocre commitment

In the first place, in case there's any doubt, I am grateful for the existence of competitive debate. I owe much of what I do successfully as an educator to the years I spent pouring most of my energy and attention into winning debates. Here are just a few of the ways my debate heritage has imprinted my teaching:

• It taught me to be quick on my feet. Very little has built my credibility with students like my response latency.
• It taught me to be assertive, and, when necessary, nonverbally dominant. I have very few classroom disruptions, and the handful that happen rarely drag out for more than a few seconds.
• It made it very real to me that college students can excel, can work hard, can understand unbelievably complex concepts if they're given the right motivation. That certainty is the best inoculation against low expectations.
  

The list is nowhere near exhaustive. The one bonus I noticed most recently was the way debate prepared me to grade essays. I spent most of my debate career giving the first negative constructive (if you never debated, don't worry about the lingo), which means I was exposed over and over again to the experience of needing to pick apart someone's arguments on first hearing, under enormous time pressure. Every speaker in the debate has to do that, but the first negative is the first speech where actual line-by-line clash occurs, so there's a certain first impression to the picking apart, a certain feeling of getting first crack at the other team. In some debates, my immediate reaction was "Oh gosh, is that all they've got? That's pathetic. A good hard sneeze will make them fall apart." In others, their positions were solid enough that I had to rack my brain, but I managed to come up with winnable arguments in opposition. And in some debates, what they said was of such high quality and made so much sense that I had to shake my head and think, "Too good. I'll make noise, but it doesn't look good for us." So last week, when I was grading essays, I noticed that my brain was back in first negative mode, and where I could sneeze hard and make the essay fall apart, that was a C or below; where I could think of some things to pick apart, but on the whole what they said was sound, that was somewhere in B range; and when, as happened encouragingly often, I thought "Too good; nothing much to quibble with," then those were A essays. And the fact that I was using that gear in my brain both sped up the work and gave me an extra layer of enjoyment, based on my association with those past experiences.

So, as I started out by saying, debate has done a lot to equip me for what I do today. And, since I'm the communication faculty at NCU, and the director of forensics to boot, it would seem that I'm in a position to give that learning experience to the students here. Unfortunately, there are a few complications.

To begin with, virtually no one here has a background in debate from high school. Some college debate teams put a lot of time and resources into novice development, teaching college students how to debate from ground zero on up, but other college debate teams mostly recruit successful high school debaters and teach them from moderate experience up to the top of the activity. All the programs I worked with during my full-time coach years fell into the latter category. Honestly, my debate coaching instincts don't run in the direction of teaching novices. I can certainly do it -- I taught novice labs at summer workshops for a number of years -- but it's much harder work, and doesn't come at all naturally.

To continue, learning how to debate is very time-intensive, and I've rarely seen college students as overcommitted and overstretched, time-wise, as I have at NCU. Students here do a lot of stuff. Scholarship athletes hold key posts in student government. RAs also do small group Bible studies. And I've got at least two team members who have both of those sizable commitments on their time, not to mention classwork, before they ever set foot in my office to practice anything forensics-related. If we had a critical mass of students who could find two two-hour blocks of time each week in their schedules, then I could devote one to bringing them up to speed on vocabulary, concepts and strategy, and we could use the other each week for a practice debate. But I may as well wish for the moon.

Not only that, but the very best format of debate isn't practiced at all in this part of the country. I debated NDT/CEDA, which is research intensive and involves the most actual speaking time of any of the formats: nine minute constructives, six minute rebuttals, two for each debater in each debate. But tournaments in that format simply don't happen much in the Pacific Northwest, and not at all in Oregon. Instead, people here do parliamentary style debate, which is different in a number of ways. In parli debate, research is certainly a good idea as preparation, but it's against the rules to cite the research directly in the actual rounds. This means it's often a winning move simply to make things up. (I didn't originally write "things.") Plus, the speeches are both fewer and shorter, which makes the debates more shallow. The benefit for time invested is a lot less; not zero, but a lot less.

Last complication: I got out of full-time coaching back in the last century because I was burned out on it. I started debating in the fall of 1982, and seventeen years later, I had simply worn out the game. In my last year of coaching, all the debates were sounding alike. I was no longer getting excited about any debate, even debates that I could tell were extremely good. In the years since, the burnout hasn't worn off; I'm glad I debated, and I'm glad I still have the skills and confidence that debate built into me, but I'm not especially interested in being actively involved in debate. It's devilishly hard work for me to get the slighest bit motivated to think, or otherwise work, on debate.

Put all of that together, and I'm left in a terrible dilemma. The students' commitments mean they don't have time to reach a certain minimum level of competence before going to compete, and they compete in a severely limited format, and I'm not as much help as I could be both because my coaching gifts aren't geared to novices and I don't really want to be thinking about debate. We put in token effort and make token appearances, but there are days when I think if we're going to do it in this half-hearted, halfway fashion, we may as well invest that time and effort in something else. But every time I have that thought, I remember what an enormous difference the opportunity to debate made in my life, and I feel an almost painful wish to give that to my students.

To be honest, dealing again and again with this dilemma is about the only part of my job that I genuinely don't like.

Mountain climbing

So this week's news has been all taken up with the three climbers who went missing on Mount Hood. One has been found, dead. The other two are still missing, but the weather has turned severe enough that the search has been halted indefinitely, and I'm hearing that there's less than a one percent chance that they're still alive. This story keeps grabbing my attention in part because it's touched off a debate about whether all climbers should carry beacons. It's also dredged up a loose end from the talk I gave to the incoming frosh last August, a loose end I wound up not including.

Nearly all college students bellyache about the core. They don't understand why they have to take classes from departments outside their major. Some think that they do understand, and the reasons they come up with don't cast us in a very good light: it's busy work, it brings in tuition money for the school. I'm frequently surprised at how many of my very good, very mature students are the loudest to complain about having to take core classes.

I planned to set aside some time in my talk with the frosh to take up this very subject, and this is how I was going to introduce it: when I lived in Arizona, I used to hear on the news about pinheads taking off to hike the Grand Canyon in the middle of August and taking nothing with them. No backpack, no cell phone, no water, nothing. And, naturally, a lot of them ran into trouble that they didn't see coming, and had to be rescued. Now it certainly should be possible to go on a hike without bringing along a cell phone: the cell phone does nothing to help me put one foot in front of the other. But a wise person will bring along a cell phone in case something unexpected does happen.

This Mount Hood story has a lot of folks demanding that reckless hikers and climbers who need rescuing be billed for the rescue, or even that certain zones be declared no-rescue zones; if you enter them, and something goes wrong, well, been nice knowing you. Most of us have a very easy time identifying sloppy and inadequate preparation in other people's behavior, and seeing it as a very clear-cut and egregious wrong, the kind we would never commit.

But that same principle of necessary preparation for the unknown is in play when it comes to core classes. Nearly everyone changes career fields many times over the course of a lifespan. I, for example, am already in my second occupation, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if there were more changes in store down the road. We take core classes, loading up with extra knowledge of such things as history, social and natural sciences, and basic skills in writing and math, for the same reason that competent mountain climbers take along a camping stove. They likely don't enjoy shouldering the extra weight, but it is reasonably foreseeable that under certain circumstances, it will help them survive.

Unfortunately, necessary preparation is burdensome, and thus requires discipline, and people at this developmental stage have just emerged from under the externally imposed discipline of their parents, and are too giddy with relief from that emergence to be in a frame of mind to impose self-discipline from inside. But they're very ready, attitudinally, to look with disdain on hikers and climbers who set out on a journey unprepared. I just wish I could find a way to make that connection real for them, and make it deep and powerful enough that it would drive them toward cultivating a good attitude about boning up in core classes.

A biogenesis for Doyle

Which would be more impressive: taking a pool ball and placing it, by hand, in a pocket, or sinking all fifteen balls with one shot? (This is not a trick question; go with the obvious answer.)

You do not honor the giver of a gift by loudly proclaiming your refusal for all time to use what was given. You do not display your loyalty, patriotism and virtue by pledging that you will be stupid. If Osama bin-Laden tells you that today is November twenty-seventh, it is not a blow for freedom and the good guys to say no, no, it's Wombatzember eleventy-zilliard. It's just ridiculous flailing.

A lot of my students are young Earth creationists. That's fine; at that age, I was a Republican. People outgrow ideas as they sag and buckle under the weight of information and life experience. (I'm not a Democrat, just in case you drew that conclusion.) But outgrowing young Earth creationism is pretty urgent, as clinging to that belief doesn't accomplish anything they think they're accomplishing.

To begin with, it doesn't make a danged lick of sense. I won't try to lay out the case for natural selection, because it isn't my field and I would have to shave off nuances and mangle details all over the place. But I've studied it a good deal and struggled through explanations from colleagues of mine who know what they're talking about, and I don't have any residual doubts.

But what's more, acknowledging natural selection doesn't negate faith in God. It is true that it offers an account of how life could have come about on Earth without a Creator (although it doesn't entail that conclusion), but that's entirely consistent with God's character. God does not hold us hostage. The door into God's presence is not locked from the inside. People whose character moves them to flee from Him will find that He's left space for them to live with that choice. If, every single day, fiery letters arose in the sky with the sun that said "I exist. And hurry up and get saved, won't you?" then the matter would be settled: only terribly insane people could reject God. (Well, possibly also people who were both blind and skeptical.) But that's simply not the way things are. Chaïm Perelman talks about the difference between demonstration and persuasion, and the Greeks distinguished ἐπιστήμη, true and certain knowledge, from φρόνησις, practical reasoning. In each case, the former refers to matters about which there is not room for reasonable disagreement, while the latter consists of that which could be otherwise. God leaves His existence in this world in the realm of things which could be otherwise, because if He didn't, the entire concept of "faith" would be nonsensical.

Last, we are intelligent and capable of reasoning because God gave us those gifts. We were made in His image, and beasts were not. We were made capable of reasoning in complex, abstract and subtle ways that separate us from His other living inventions. When we stubbornly insist on mutilating reason in order to show our loyalty to Him, we don't glorify Him at all. Instead, we trample on His gifts. God does not require of us that we believe anything that is not true. When we find that a matter is complex, why should that surprise us? The world is complex, as is its Creator. When we grab at slogans or brutally simplify matters in order to silence people who question, or even deny, God's glory, we duplicate their errors; but in our case it's worse, because we do it in His name.

The more we know about how natural selection has shaped life on Earth, the more wonderful it is. God set in motion a pattern of forces, operations and dynamics that brought about all of it, like a pool player setting up the universe's most breathtaking trick shot. And before any of us came to be, as products of that miracle, He knew us. And understanding that is in no way a rejection of faith: furthest thing from it.

A mnemonnie for Conic

For years, when I've covered informative speaking, I've talked about what a good idea it is for a speaker to give the audience memory tricks for the material in the speech, and I always ask students for examples that they used in school. They offer up Roy G. Biv, King Philip Came Over For Good Steak, and a few others, and I always chip in Please Excuse My Drunk Aunt Sally. That's a memory trick for the order of operations in math: first, do parentheses and exponents, then multiply and divide, and finally, add and subtract.

The students giggle at my version, because their teachers say Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally. But, as I explain, that makes no sense. Excusing my drunk Aunt Sally is understandable, because she's probably a little too loud, and might even be hitting on everything in pants. But if she's dear, then why are you asking people to excuse her? Are you ashamed of her? What, is it because she's old? Because she's not cool? What's wrong with you?

Anyway, every once in a while I wake up in the middle of the night, wide awake, and there's no telling where my mind will wander, and last night I had an attack of wakeful, wandering mind. And I got to thinking about other phrasings of this mnemonic. It being the middle of the night and all, I have to admit that a lot of them sound like the title of a horror movie.

• Please educate my dumb Aunt Sally.
• Please exterminate my deadly Aunt Sally.
• Please exfoliate my dry-skinned Aunt Sally.
• Please expel my delinquent Aunt Sally.
• Please excommunicate my Donatist Aunt Sally.
• Please execute my diabolical Aunt Sally.
• Please exorcise my demonic Aunt Sally.
• Please extradite my drug-dealing Aunt Sally.
• Please eat my delicious Aunt Sally.
• Please exhume my dead Aunt Sally.

A palindrome for Loren

So yesterday afternoon, my Bible professor colleague broached the subject of palindromes. I thought for a minute or two and came up with one that included my name: "Le Doyle, el yodel." Not exactly deathless verse, but it serves. That left him empty-handed, so we talked for a moment about how we might work his name into a palindrome, but nothing presented itself, and he had to run on to class.

Now, every day I have a half-hour walk to and from work, which is a nice, unhurried span of woolgathering in my day. All sorts of doodads and geegaws cross my mind. This one raveled together on this morning's trip. Imagine that, to everyone's surprise, an active volcano roared up out of the ground right behind the Pomajevich Faculty Building. I mean, it's been that kind of year, right? In keeping with our luck? And since we're all academics, the first order of business wouldn't be to call 911 or run for our lives. No, we would have to label it. The volcano would need a name. Since this volcano would obviously have as its agenda burning up Christians, we'd name it Nero.

I'm sure you see this coming.

Our reckless, wildly irrational students, bringing to bear the same good sense that drives them to take nutria on a merry chase -- because, after all, you can shake off rabies with nothing more than a good night's sleep and a dose of Airborne®, right? -- would frolick in the magma. Naturally, they'd borrow Tracy's shovel to scoop up a big helping of it, put it in a heat-resistant bucket, and bring it to BTH class. And when Loren asked, "Youngsters, what in the world is that?" they'd answer ...

"Nero lava, Loren!"

QED.

Words on warrants

I get very tickled whenever I remember that Antonin Scalia is Catholic.

A whole lot of Christians misunderstand Judaism. I've been reading up on the Oral Torah, including Klinghoffer's Why the Jews Rejected Jesus, as well as a fair number of other interfaith dialogue works by folks like Amy-Jill Levine and Jacob Neusner. The notion is that the Talmud, which is filled with rulings and teaching stories from hordes of rabbis, is the written recording of an oral tradition that God handed down to Israel at Sinai alongside the written law that survives as the five books of Moses.

Not everyone goes along with it. Karaites accept the Tanakh as sacred, but reject all of the oral tradition as the work of humans and therefore not binding in the same sense. Jesus spoke against the oral tradition here, although digging out exactly how far His criticism went is more than I want to take on in this post.

To turn aside to Scalia for a second, I can report that he's the most rabid proponent of the idea that the Constitution ought to be construed only according to its original meaning, and that the legislative intent of Congress is irrelevant to understanding the meaning of a statute. In other words, binding documents are dead, not alive, and people who arrive later and explain their meaning anew using changed circumstance are doing violence to the best way of applying the law. He doesn't believe the Constitution is a living document; it means what it meant in 1787, and no more.

What tickles me about that is that the Roman Catholic church is, of the Christian denominations in the United States, the one closest to Rabbinic Judaism in its treatment of sacred scripture. Along with the Bible, there's the catechism, there's the magisterium, and there's a whole lot of tradition. Catholics include the Apocrypha in their Bibles, and popes, from time to time, announce that by divine revelation they've added to the understanding of what the Bible teaches, such as the immaculate conception and Mary's bodily assumption into Heaven.

Martin Luther's break with the church, with "Sola Scriptura" as his motto, is such a Scalian move. But in matters of faith, Scalia sides with people who want to make the Bible into a pliable, renewable, re-readable document in a way he'd never tolerate when it comes to the Constitution. I guess God is more in need of our help to clarify what He was saying than James Madison is.

Words over weddings

Just wanted to record this while the big' ol smile still hasn't faded from my face.

Not long after I arrived at NCU, a young man named Jordan transferred in from East Bay, and became the first Communication major that I didn't inherit from my predecessor. A semester or so later, a young lady named Tessa also chose Communication. The neat thing about that was, they were dating steadily. A few months ago he proposed to her.

And they just paid me a visit, and asked me to officiate at the wedding in July.

Wow.

Words on wheels

Korie Homan and Esther Vergeer reach the finals of the U.S. Open in wheelchair tennis ... in a walkover.

Less than two weeks later, after serving for thirty years as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, Stephen Hawking ... steps down.

40

So what do you do when you have two incompatible ideas in your head, and they both have that special gravitational force of being powerfully true? We've got all kinds of theories, from cognitive dissonance to dual-processing, but the matter is far from settled.

People live by symbols, and also by experience. Some rites of passage are experiential, like taking one's first step, and others are symbolic, like turning eighteen and becoming an adult in the eyes of the law. At the end of today, I'll hit one of the symbolic ones. This is the last day of my thirties, and tomorrow is the first day of my forties.

Forty isn't old; I don't have the slightest qualm about saying that. But I'm firm in my conviction that forty is no longer young. Teenagers are clearly young. People in their twenties are young adults. Even people in their thirties have lost only the outer layer of newness. But by forty, I've left being "young" behind by almost any reasonable measure.

The "almost" is in that last sentence because I don't feel "no longer young." I've always felt as though the conventional associations with my numerical age didn't quite fit; I felt like a young 30, a young 35, a young 39. Because I'm an academic, I get to indulge my eccentricities and approach a lot of my daily work very playfully, and because I deal with people in their late teens and early twenties, I get to soak up a lot of the enthusiasm and fun that they radiate like little quasars.

But it does feel as though something is changing.

Now, don't get the idea that I feel gloomy or depressed about turning forty. That's not it. But it has hovered in the dead center of my attention for the past few days, and out near the periphery of my attention for most of the past year. Forty has always felt as though it was going to mean something, as though something was going to change. Between those two statements, meaning and change, I think meaning is far more likely, since it is symbolic, rather than experiential. But it might turn out to bring change as well.

What I half-expect to happen is that mortality will become more real.

I know that I'm not going to live forever. I've known it since I was a very young toddler. But knowledge can be superficial or deeply internalized. Small children can repeat back the definition of death, and even paraphrase it back to show that they comprehend it, but it isn't entirely real to them so long as their world is half-pretend. And the idea that knowledge moves from symbol to a pattern of experience is something I've taught a whole lot of first-year students as they arrived on campus. I tell them a story of a gruesome accident that I almost had while driving on a rainy night, and how it took the dangerous and potentially fatal nature of driving from my conceptual knowledge to my lived experience, and made me a much safer driver. I tell them their awareness of the difficulty of college and the necessity of working responsibly and with discipline is only conceptual, but will have to become experiential if they want to survive. And I say all that to say that I think my awareness of the end of life is about to move another big monster step away from the conceptual and toward the experiential.

What's puzzling is how passing a purely symbolic milestone is supposed to accomplish that. Couldn't tell you. Beyond that, I'm not sure what changes will come with it. I have started to think across the span of what I've done to date and to weigh it, measure it, evaluate it. Is it enough? Have I used my years well? How much can I do with the years ahead? I don't regard them as scarce, but neither are they infinite. What in my life is wasteful? What areas of my life are about to fall out of my complacency and start to demand careful arrangement?

Age is just a number, and my rational faculties tell me it's silly to dwell on July 15, 2009, because it's unlikely to be categorically different from the 16th or the 14th. There's genuinely not a reason to perceive the crossing of a boundary there, because that transition is continuous, not stair-stepped. But the symbol is powerful, and it's working on me, and what that work turns out to be is something I'll have to wait and see.

Program note: I'm not, by any means, done with abortion thoughts. Those got shoved aside as I put more hours into getting my summer online classes ready to go, but I have several more to post. I imagine that'll be the last half of July.

Abortion 2

Years ago, a case came to the Supreme Court, DeShaney v. Winnebago County, which was about the state's duty to remove a child from the home if there was clear evidence of abuse. One of the issues batted back and forth was what was described as the razor's edge problem: you've got to protect the child, but if you're mistaken and the parent is not guilty of abuse, then you've done a horrendous injustice. The entire margin of error for acting correctly in such a situation is about zero. Social workers in that situation are damned if they do, and damned if they don't.

That's not the only razor's edge problem in this world. I teach a number of classes that include major writing assignments, and a lot of the writing that students turn in is, honestly, embarrassing. I've worked for my entire career on what to do about it, but it's not as easy as it looks. My first instinct is just to knock off tons of points for sloppy writing. The problem is, that pushes many students toward being alliterate, of being anti-reading and writing, which is almost worse than never having learned to read and write in the first place. So I can't turn a blind eye to sloppy writing, but I also can't go in, guns a-blazing, and try to obliterate it with the force of my wrath. What I have to do is carefully balance points lost for errors with resources for improvement, as well as a good deal of encouragement anytime I do see good writing out of someone who'd previously struggled. This might seem a pretty simple idea, but it's tempting just to treat bad writing as an enemy, a pestilence, something to be stomped out with as much force as necessary. It has in common with DeShaney a fierce and desperate wish to pin down the problem to one simple target, and then bash away at that target with shock and awe tactics. In reality, the solution can be just as bad as the problem if applied bluntly, with no precision.

So I do understand that motive. I understand the feeling. I don't judge it and I don't condemn it. But I have to reject it. It's childish, and it's counterproductive. There are vanishingly few genuine problems in this world that can be done away with through an application of force to one spot, one straightforward cause. Almost anytime we hear someone assert otherwise, what we're really hearing is their fear, not their reasoning.

And abortion is the most glaring example of this.

I genuinely don't get why people who otherwise are so skeptical of government solutions to anything make such a huge, and completely irrational, exception to argue that outlawing abortion would be a step in the right direction. Outlawing alcohol worked great, didn't it? Outlawing gun ownership will certainly get guns out of the hands of criminals, right? Why, outlawing driving in excess of the speed limit has made our interstates safe enough to picnic on!

In the late 1960s and 1970s, before Roe v. Wade, there was a good deal of agitation for repeal of the laws prohibiting abortion. Doctors and nurses in particular knew just how many women were showing up in emergency rooms after botched back-alley abortions, or coathanger self-abortions. That is what is achieved by criminalizing abortion. Not fewer abortions, because I guarantee you that the botched and coathanger abortions succeeded in killing those babies. But they also resulted in gruesome deaths for the women, which is surely not what was intended.

I'm very much in favor of finding a way to make fewer abortions happen. Criminalizing them is not that way. It's another razor's edge problem. Ideally, you want to give the procedure to the medical profession, because that can have two beneficial effects:

• Fewer dead women.
• Less secrecy, which means more opportunity to talk, to offer help, to witness, to love.

Unfortunately, persuasion and witnessing don't work every time, and some women exercise the freedom the law gives them. But the solution is to step up the help and the witnessing. Getting impatient and swinging a sledgehammer blow at the procedure is just going to have the backfire effect of driving the women underground, where they will still kill the baby, and often themselves as well.

Peter didn't want to stand idly by while the soldiers arrested Jesus, so he lashed out at Malchus, servant of the High Priest, cutting off his ear. Jesus denounced Peter's act and healed the servant. Jesus never demanded imprisonment for sinners, but went to them, spoke to them, met their needs, loved them, told them to go and sin no more. That's the model we should follow. We clutch the idea of a law to ourselves as though it's the answer, but the only thing it provides is false, illusory comfort, and enough history of disastrous backfire that we have no excuse for not knowing better. Abortion is a razor's edge problem, and we stand more risk of getting it wrong by trying to cut through it than we do by waiting and praying and keeping our emphasis on Christ's Great Commission to all of us.

Abortion 1

Here, for the record, is Doyle on the issue of abortion as of June 2009.

Premise One: Every single abortion is a murder. Yes, you read that right. Keep reading.

• When does life begin? Unclear. That's not a scientific or medical question; instead, it's a philosophical question. You can make a case from Scripture that it begins at conception, at the first breath, or at the moment God created Heaven and Earth. Of the various arguable starting points, the case for any of them is not so much more powerful than the others that the matter is settled, so what remains is to decide which way to err. If a body in an Emergency Room might be dead or might be alive, doctors would err on the side of making sure they weren't letting the patient die. That simple, clear-cut judgment call illustrates an elegant way to settle the matter of which starting point should be accepted. Even if I can't make an airtight argument that a fertilized egg is a full human being, I can say that if such a claim meets minimal tests of rationality to become admissible, and no other framing of the question can dismiss it, then I ought to lean toward embracing it.
• It may be killing, but is it murder? That's an easy one: yes. It's premeditated, and the life being extinguished is entirely innocent.
• What about rape or incest? The conditions of the child's conception are in absolutely zero way relevant to this question.
• What about cases in which the mother's life is in danger? If we take our faith seriously, then we place such cases in God's hands and trust Him. I like to think I take my faith seriously. I'm not always perfect in doing so, but that's what it dictates in this matter.

Premise Two: Abortion should be completely and utterly legal. No restrictions, no waiting periods, nothing.

• I do not believe in outlawing abortion. I believe in stopping abortion. The two are entirely distinct. Anyone who believes in gun ownership should have an easy time grasping this: I assume that in your perfect world, zero people would die from gunshot wounds, but wishing for that world does not place you in favor of gun control. Outlawing something, criminalizing it, prosecuting it, has absolutely no necessary relationship to stopping it.
• Nothing in my Bible gives me permission to agitate for the passage of laws against particular sins, and then walk away satisfied. My Bible teaches me that my job is to spread the Gospel, and then leave each person's sins to their growing relationship with their Father, and to the transformative work of the Holy Spirit. That's how abortion can be stopped. Using the bludgeon of the law to stamp out abortion strikes me as profoundly un-Biblical.
• Would I, then, be opposed to laws against murder? Do I think there's any role at all for a criminal justice system? I think all of these human institutions are effectively playground equipment. I think they set up human encounters, and it's the way we handle these encounters that gives us the opportunity to glorify God, or else fail to do so. That said, I do not trust in law enforcement to protect me from being murdered. God has chosen the last moment of my life and the cause of my death. Until that moment, I am invulnerable. At that moment, nothing can save me. Again, if we took our faith seriously, we wouldn't bicker over these things nearly as much.
• I finally believe that dishonest, power-hungry, ambitious people routinely and deliberately exploit the very emotional, fervent opposition to abortion among Christians in order to make themselves powerful. I believe most politicians who talk the loudest about being "pro-life" actually want very badly for abortions to continue, because for them, abortion is a self-replenishing fountain of campaign contributions. All they have to do is step in front of a camera, make a statement whose language pushes the abortion button and the checks come flowing in. And it breaks my heart that my Christian sisters and brothers are so eager, so hungry, to be exploited in this fashion. It's true that a clear cut face-off between good and evil is more emotionally satisfying than a murky, complicated problem that's tied up with poverty, ignorance, and people's sin nature, but it's also true that our craving for that kind of satisfaction leaves us defenseless against deceit. The Bible is filled with warnings against those who will deceive us, and we're so convinced that when deceivers appear, they'll wear horns and a tail and a T-shirt with 666 emblazoned across it, that it never occurs to us that someone in a suit, with a southern accent and an American flag lapel pin, might be distorting God's word in the same way the serpent distorted it in the Garden. But scarcely a day goes by that I don't see exactly that happen.

There's more. There's a good deal more. But those are the four corners of my position on abortion. In the wake of Dr. Tiller's murder, I get the feeling it's going to be a long, hot summer, and for the rest of this month I plan to set down in words a lot of what I don't understand, what I do understand, and what I wish more of my Christian family understood.

It was a very jittery summer

So, here's the plan. Starting next week, every weekday morning, I'm going to visit a Eugene coffee house, order a Cafe Americano, take in the atmosphere, and record my impressions. I want to do a different one every day, and see how long I can keep that up.

I need your help making my list, since the yellow pages and Google maps both are woefully incomplete. Starting with them, and then adding others from my own memory, I've generated the list below, and I'm inviting your additions. But the two parameters are, they've got to be primarily coffee establishments, not just restaurants with good coffee; and they've got to be places I can walk to, just because places I can't walk to are places I'll never frequent.

The starting point is the Northwest Christian campus, and I'm willing to walk for up to an hour. That means I can make it to the far reaches of Willamette and the high 20s, but not places out on River Road, in Santa Clara, etc. I might entertain possibilities on Coburg Road, as I can walk there from my apartment.

With all those parameters set, here's the list so far. If you see holes in it, please fill them in.

• Espresso Roma
• The Buzz
• Dutch Brothers
• Full City
• Gary’s Coffee
• Wandering Goats
• Novella Café
• Perugino
• Bean Buzz
• Espresso Barn
• Midtown Coffee
• Java Generations
• Theo’s Coffee House
• Vero Espresso
• Amazon Coffee
• Allann Brothers Beanery
• Eugene Coffee Company
• Supreme Bean
• New Odyssey
• Café Aroma
• Quick Fix Coffee

(And no, before anyone asks it, I am not going to Starbucks!)