Superiority

Walking is superior to bicycling.

• My feet will never go flat before, during or after my walk.
• Jesus never rode a bicycle on water.
• "There is nothing like walking to get the feel of a country. A fine landscape is like a piece of music; it must be taken at the right tempo. Even a bicycle goes too fast." -- Paul Scott Mowrer
• My feet don't need a lock, rack or cage, and Eugene is not the foot theft capital of the nation.
• There is no need for, and therefore no such thing as, a walking helmet.
  
• I only have to beware of distracted and/or psychotic drivers about 5% of the time, when I'm crossing a street. And even then I mostly have stoplights and crosswalks on my side.
  
• The LORD has not required of us that we do justice, love mercy, and go for a humble bike ride with Him.
• There are no catchy eighties songs with accompanying cheesy dances about biking like an Egyptian.
• I'm fine with walking a mile in someone else's shoes, but I'll pass on riding a mile in someone else's bike shorts.
• Falls being inevitable, would you rather skin your knee or rack yourself on a solid metal bar?
• Cool, thick, velvety green grass is meant to be felt between toes, not gouged out by tires.
• Biking across the stage for your diploma, or down the aisle to your groom, will get you talked about. Doubly so if you pop a wheelie.
• "Walking takes longer than any other known form of locomotion except crawling. Thus it stretches time and prolongs life. Life is already too short to waste on speed." -- Edward Abbey
• Expensive bicycles are a status symbol, but a foot is a foot is a foot.
• God didn't pluck Enoch off his bicycle straight into Heaven.
• "There is this to be said for walking: it's the one mode of human locomotion by which a man proceeds on his own two feet, upright, erect, as a man should be, not squatting on his rear haunches like a frog." -- Edward Abbey
• If God had gone biking through Eden in the cool of the day, He would've roared up on Adam and Eve before they could hide in the trees, and pastors everywhere would be denied a prime sermon illustration.
• Making a bicycle consumes finite resources and energy, generates pollutants, and is repetitive drudgery; making feet is part of makin' babies, which is all-natural and fun.
• "Restore human legs as a means of travel. Pedestrians rely on food for fuel and need no special parking facilities." -- Lewis Mumford

Cinema

Just like last summer, I've spent the past three months checking a lot of movies out of the Eugene Public Library. Here, without further elaboration, is how much I enjoyed each movie I watched from start to finish between May 1 and today.

★★★★
None.

★★★☆
A History of violence
Eagle vs shark
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind
Fireproof
Happy feet
Little Miss Sunshine
Primer
The Pursuit of happiness
There will be blood
Waking life
World's greatest dad

★★☆☆
Amazing grace
Capote
Dark city
Something the Lord made
The Accused
The Chronicles of Narnia. Prince Caspian
The Cider House rules
The Curious case of Benjamin Button
The History boys
The Hours
The Ring
Patton
Walk the line

★☆☆☆
Bulworth
Chronicles of Narnia. The voyage of the Dawn Treader
Know1ng
Martian child

☆☆☆☆
None.

Parity

So this morning I heard, on NPR, a man from Tucson argue that it was a good idea to force college campuses to allow people to carry handguns. According to him, only law-abiding citizens obey the current rule against it, and he needs to pack his own protection against outlaws. He spoke approvingly of mutually assured destruction, saying it had done a fine job of keeping the world safe from nuclear annihilation for almost seventy years. And that got me to thinking, y'know what? We should also abolish traffic laws.

Seriously: we should paint over all the stripes, take down all the signs, eliminate all the speed limits, and, most of all, repeal the DUI laws. Because, y'know, only the law abiding respect them anyway. It's a war zone on them roads, what with drunk and crazy drivers thirsty for the blood of decent people. The only thing they understand is force! I should be free to run them off the road, knock them from their cars, run over them, reverse, run over them again, back and forth and back and forth until they're roadkill.

Now, I'm a little too tenderhearted for such work, so I might need a pint or two of courage, and that's where repealing the DUI laws comes in. If I'm just as much of a loose cannon behind the wheel, just as much of an unpredictable source of instant death as anybody else, then everybody will know to keep their distance from me, and I'm a lot more likely to get where I'm going without interference from other drivers. Oh, I suppose there's danger I might get in a one-car accident, but where's the fun in bothering to think about that when I'd rather get all worked up over the bogeymen of other cars, all driven by evildoers who have to be kept in check?

I mean, it's clearly my right to drive my car on sidewalks, through hospitals, up the escalator at the outlet mall, isn't it? The right to do anything you want in your car is part of what makes America great! Don't tell me anyone's un-American enough to think that there's a right way and a wrong way to drive a car. We don't cotton to that kind of traitor talk around here. Matter of fact, I think that's one of them Muslin Sorry laws, isn't it? Not here, thank you so much. We fought them over there to prevent them coming over here and actually stopping at all the stop signs just so they can slip in a quick prayer toward Mecca. Them big flowing robes just cover up the fact that they actually wear their seat belts. I'll tell you, Jesus would've weaved in out of traffic and run over kindergarteners in a crosswalk if He had sinners to smite and demons to cast out. Would've carried a handgun, too; Judas could kiss a barrel of cold hard steel for his trouble.

Bring 'em on!

Meatier-ology

Students who take more than one class from me get accustomed to hearing fresh riffs on a running analogy. Here, I'm going to set down the extended dance mix as a pre-writing exercise before I submit it to the National Communication Association convention in the GIFTS (Great Ideas For Teaching Speech) division.

Communication is like the weather.

• The weather is a complex system made up of a brain-mangling array of inputs, all mixed together in a system so complex and chaotic that we can't master it. Weather forecasting is not an exact science, and people are (for the most part) comfortable with that. But it's also not meaningless speculation, on a par with horoscopes: there are some observable signs that are powerful predictors of certain kinds of weather. Furthermore, weather follows cycles, with certain weather events being more likely at certain times of day or year. Communication is similarly impossible to map precisely, but is subject to forecasts of varying reliability, and those probable events also tend to wax and wane cyclically.
• If communication is like the weather, then culture is like the climate. The climate yields the raw materials for weather, along with a landscape that channels or obstructs the development of weather systems, but the weather also renews the climate: a wet climate will generate rainy weather, and the rainy weather re-moistens the wet climate. Furthermore, if I move a few feet in any direction, it's unlikely the climate will change much, but as I travel dozens, hundreds, thousands of miles, I'm likely to see large variations in climate. However, that curve isn't smooth: at particular spots far removed from my point of origin, I might find that original climate substantially reproduced. Similarly, culture supplies the raw materials and the parameters for communication, but communication renews or changes the culture. If I move a few feet, I'm not terribly likely to find that the culture has changed (although I might stumble into a different co-culture, much like stepping from sunlight into the shade), but a longer journey increases the likelihood I'll find cultural difference. Still, there are places very far apart that are pockets of substantially the same culture.
• Technologically mediated communication (the internet, cell phones) is air conditioning. We create a pocket of weather carved out from the surrounding weather for our comfort. Similarly, we use technologically mediated communication for very self-serving self-presentation, and to overcome physical barriers (distance, an expectation of non-contact) that would otherwise interfere with our communication choices.
• Verbal communication is air, and nonverbal communication is water. These are the newest riffs on this analogy -- in fact, I just thought them up this morning. Deprived of either one, we don't live long, but either can harm us if they're polluted. Air is influential (barometric pressure, wind), but water provides many of the most important clues about imminent events -- think clouds -- and is the easiest to feel and the only one that can be seen. Still, even water that can only be observed indirectly can impact comfort and structural integrity: humidity can make us sweat and can ruin documents and artifacts. Finally, water manifests in many distinct states: vapor, liquid, snow, ice, sleet, dew. Correspondingly, we can't be mentally healthy for long if deprived of communication, but toxic communication can injure us. A lot of us think of words as the substance of communication, but nonverbals provide many of the clues that predict the development and outcome of a communicative encounter. Nonverbals tend to engage more of the senses; only blind people ordinarily employ touch in reading, and it's not possible to smell or taste a word. Chronemic messages are only indirectly observable, but make a big difference in human comfort and relational stability. And, yes, nonverbals come in many forms, from voice qualities to touch to posture to the rest of a very long list.
  

Cartoon

I've got about six weeks to get my submissions written for this year's National Communication Association convention. Two of my papers will be quick and dirty, but one is a sustained scholarly effort. What's below is my attempt to sketch what I think the final product will look like, to give myself some guidance. If you have a thought, do feel free to share it.

Premise number one: Christians exist for the purpose of drawing near to God. We can only do so, we can only bridge the alienation brought about by our sin, because Christ took the punishment and reconciled us to God. Once we accept this, we are in right relationship with God, God's children, and from there we walk daily with Him, growing nearer to Him as the Holy Spirit works to conform us to the image of His son.

The important bit: the Christian life is relational.

Premise number two: this relational essence makes it the higher priority than message content in things we say to, about, and in service of, God. Paul Watzlawick wrote in Pragmatics of Human Communication that every message has a content dimension and a relational dimension. If a wife asks her husband to lift something heavy for her, and he, watching TV, says "I'll come do it at the next commercial," he may think she's just made a simple request and he's agreed to do it within a reasonable time, which is what the content conveys, but she may fume that he treats her as less important than the television, which is a relational message. Transferring that concept to this discussion, much of what we do, including Bible study, including worship, including prayer, including fellowship, including serving people in need, involves producing and consuming utterances, each of which has a content and relational dimension, but if premise number one is correct, then the relational dimension is always dominant over the content dimension.

The important bit: what we say is never as important as the way our sayings position us relative to God.

Premise number three: our relationship with God is primarily instantiated in a single dialectical tension, not the several that turn up in relationships between humans. Leslie Baxter's work argues that people experience the desire to be together and apart, to be open with one another and maintain privacy, to work up a repertoire of traditions and be spontaneous, and that the life of a relationship is the endless collaborative balancing of those tensions. But all three are meaningless in the relationship between human and God: we're never apart from God, we have no privacy from Him, and we cannot surprise Him. Instead, I tentatively assert that our dialectical tension in relating to God is wisdom vs. innocence. God calls on us to trust Him with a childlike faith, but also allows us to argue with Him, even occasionally letting us win the argument.

The important bit: our relational positioning with God drives us to find the right mix of trust and critical acuity.

Premise number four: Christian argumentation has to date been dominated by an apologetic tilt, which has much in common with multi-vitamins. Taking One-A-Day® can be a good idea if someone's diet actually lacks an important nutrient, but anyone who eats a balanced diet doesn't need such supplements. It's been said that Americans, who lead all other nations in consumption of vitamin pills, simply have the world's most expensive urine. Worse, in some cases high doses of vitamins can be toxic. The fit of this analogy comes from the largely unacknowledged dangers of apologetic argumentation; where someone's faith is crumbling because they can't get over a reasoned objection to Christianity, then apologetic work is a vitamin, correcting a deficiency. But where people pursue such arguments for their own sake, they risk damaging their faith. C. S. Lewis, widely regarded as the contemporary champion of apologetics, repeatedly warned people not to attempt to build up their faith by winning debates, insisting that his own apologetic work had weakened his faith, and the only correction was to experience God's presence directly. Again, the relationship was far more important than the content.

The important bit: Trying to win arguments that prove God's existence or other Christian teachings can address specific obstacles to faith, but is equally likely to weaken it if deployed unnecessarily.

Premise number five: The proper role for Christian argumentation can be understood along the lines of work done by Doug Ehninger in the late nineteen sixties: argument as mutual correction, as a way of granting personhood to another, making oneself vulnerable to another and thereby building a bond. God shows us by joining in argument with us that He is not distant, detached, uninvolved, and as we argue with Him, we are forced to accept correction where we are wrong. Similarly, the arguments we have between ourselves should be opportunities to build fellowship, to grant one another the dignity of making our reasons explicit and being open to persuasion by the other, to surrendering our positions when they are successfully refuted. In all these instances, the relationship is far more important than the content. Rabbinic scholars fell into the trap of adding layer upon layer of content over the Torah, drowning it in commentary and judgments, at the price of a dynamic and engaged relationship with God and one another, and if we pull back from unnecessary apologetic argument and instead use argument as exploration of difference and a procedure for building trust, then we arrive at a more robust and sturdy bond.

The important bit: Argument as procedure has the potential to strengthen relationships, and the Christian life is relational in its essence. ■

I know I'm using argument in incommensurable ways, between us and God and between person and person, but that's one of the things I'll get sorted out. This is just a start, and I've got six weeks to develop it.

Round numbers

I don't know if anything like this happened when I was ten years old. My memory doesn't reach back that far. But when I was twenty, I hit a fork in the road, followed by a comparable fork at thirty and forty, and now I honestly wonder what's going on.

At twenty, I reached the culmination of seven years of non-stop obsession, which built to a climax that didn't leave much more to do. I'd had my first competitive debate at thirteen, and knew immediately that I'd found what I wanted to be good at. The problem was, I'm really not cut out to be a competitive debater. I can think like a debater, and I'm reasonably good with words and on my feet, but I don't have the cut-throat instinct. My competitive streak is about the size of an eyelash. Still, I poured time and effort into debate, and slowly, slowly grew into my potential, which was never much to begin with. In April of 1989, I was in the room as my teammates won the national championship for intercollegiate debate, making fairly heavy use of arguments I'd researched. We celebrated madly that night. This was it, was what I'd always wanted, dreamed about, and I had it.

About ninety days later, give or take, I turned twenty. About ninety days after that, give or take, I quit debate for the first time. I came back for a full season, quit again, came back for one tournament, and retired permanently.

That didn't mean I was soured on debate, though: I'd just made a decision to become a college debate coach. I loved the activity; I just figured all the struggling I'd done, the snail's pace of my improvement, the dozens of places I got stuck, would make me a fantastic teacher of debate. And, honestly, I was better as a coach than competitor. Working with some incredibly gifted colleagues, I was part of a coaching staff that took the University of Georgia program from an underperforming team with loads of potential to a performance, in my last year, that they've still never matched, and that no public school in the history of intercollegiate debate has ever exceeded: second and third place at the NDT (National Debate Tournament) in a single year. Kansas matched it back in 1976, and Emory would later surpass it in 2000 with first and third in a single year, but it's still an achievement I'm proud of my part in. That was my launch into intercollegiate debate coaching: I went on the job market that year, was a fly-in finalist for four different jobs, and was snapped up by Arizona State.

After two years at Arizona State, I very suddenly reached saturation, rapid-onset burnout, and decided I had to walk away from debate altogether. I left Phoenix for a job in Nacogdoches, Texas; it was one hundred percent teaching. It's not as though I wanted to be a teacher, but that was the only work experience I had outside debate coaching that could potentially pay my bills.

During the summer between my last year at Arizona State and my first at SFA, I turned thirty. At twenty, I peaked in direct involvement with debate, and almost immediately lost my love for it. As thirty approached, I peaked in my indirect involvement with debate, and it happened again.

So then, at SFA, I began to learn to teach, which was even more painful and difficult than learning to debate had been. Praise God, the job had me teach a single class, public speaking, over and over and over again; at one point, I had seven sections, which meant I'd teach each lesson seven times, usually in the same week. I can't imagine a more perfect setup for learning to teach, and it paid off. By my third or fourth year, students had begun telling me that I was their favorite teacher, and it slowly dawned on me that teaching was actually a very enjoyable way to spend my days. In my eighth year of full-time teaching, I started on a three year winning streak, and if you're good with math, you can see the pattern cropping up again: in 2007, SFA awarded me the Teaching Excellence Award. Within weeks, I'd accepted a job at Northwest Christian College, and at the end of my first year there, the graduating seniors voted me Professor of the Year for 2008. The following year, I won the 2009 President's Award for Teaching Excellence and Campus Leadership. And about sixty days later, give or take, I turned forty.

So does this mean my love for teaching is about to take a fall? I have seen a few signs of that. The fall term has been tough in each of the past two years. The little spells of mild depression that I fight off from time to time are coming a little more quickly, and are going from mild to moderate. My snap diagnosis is that the dislocation from Texas to Oregon, far away from family and everything familiar, is catching up with me. That might mean I'm going to wither on the vine here, or it might just mean that I have another adjustment to make, and have to be patient and give it time. It's the kind of thing I can't judge while I'm in the middle of it; when I emerge from it, I should have more of a read on what's going on.

And I am very attuned to the potential irrationality of thinking this way. I might just be seeing animal shapes in the clouds. There's nothing magical about periods of ten years, and what I'm describing as though it were a reliable pattern could be nothing but coincidence. It is entirely plausible that my love for teaching could deepen and settle on a reasonably smooth curve, accounting for the occasional dip, for the rest of my days. And there's a very real danger that if I pay too much attention to this alleged "pattern" of round numbers, then framing effects might take over and I might bring it about when it wouldn't have happened otherwise. I might sabotage a career that I love dearly, give it up to corrosion and self-doubt, when it didn't have to be that way. So I'm on guard against that. But the pattern is striking enough that it would be foolish to ignore it entirely.

And I always hope I'll get to the end of these things and either the act of writing will have given me clarity, or that I'll at least have a good zinger to reward anyone who's had the patience, or the lack of anything better to do, to slog through this. Neither seems at hand in this case. So, allakazaam, blog post is ended.