Do introverts fit in at church? That’s the intriguing question Richard Beck, an associate professor and experimental psychologist at Abilene Christian University, asks in an important post on introverts and the Imago Dei:
The answer, obviously, is that it depends upon what kind of church we are talking about. In liturgical churches I expect introverts and extroverts fare about the same. But in non-liturgical churches they may fare differently.
Specifically, non-liturgical churches tend to be more sociable churches. So, let’s call them that. That is, there are liturgical churches and there are sociable churches. Sociable churches tend to emphasize relationality among its members. For example, a large part of the sociable church experience involves lengthy greetings (being greeted and greeting others), adult bible classes that are conversational and oriented around fellowship (e.g., in my church we sit at tables drinking coffee, eating donuts, and chatting), and the in-depth sharing of personal prayer requests.
This is not to say that liturgical churches aren’t sociable or don’t have sociable facets to them. It’s just the simple recognition that going to a Catholic mass (the prototypical liturgical experience) differs greatly from my day at church at the Highland Church of Christ in Abilene, TX. My experience is heavy on the “visiting,” as they say here in Texas.
In these highly sociable churches there is an implicit theological theme that marries sociability with spirituality. That is, being sociable—visiting intensively, and being willing to “get into each other’s lives”—is highly prized. To a point, this is understandable. A sociable church is going to rely on extraverts to make the whole vibe work.
But introverts fare poorly in these sociable churches. The demand to visit, mix, and share with strangers taxes them. Worse, given that these social activities are declared to be “spiritual,” the introvert feels morally judged and spiritually marginalized. As if their very personality was spiritually diseased.
As an introvert who has always attended non-liturgical “sociable” churches, I can relate to the feeling that my lack of sociability was a sign of spiritual malaise. Fortunately, several years ago I stumbled across a quote by C.S. Lewis that has provided both comfort and a challenge: “Some people are ‘cold’ by temperament; that may be a misfortune for them, but it is no more a sin than having a bad digestion is a sin; and it does not cut them out from the chance, or excuse them from the duty, of learning charity.”
We church-going introverts often find it difficult, especially in smaller congregations, to find the right balance between being true to our natural temperament and being relational and loving to our neighbors. Its encouraging that others are beginning to recognize this struggle and that our standoffishness is not necessarily snobbery or aloofness (though at times it can be). But as Lewis noted, out natural temperament does not relieve us of our duty to be loving and kind to our extroverted neighbors.
Heather MacDonald’s latest piece at National Review explores some of the questions surrounding gay marriage, and the difficulties that arise when parental status and identity is established solely by intent, rather than by biology–as it is in the case of homosexual marriage.
The question, of course, that MacDonald has to answer is why this separation matters at all. She answers:
The institutionalized severing of biology from parenthood affirms a growing trend in our society, that of men abandoning their biological children. Too many men now act like sperm donors: they conceive a children then largely disappear, becoming at best intermittent presences in their children’s lives.
If parental status is a matter of intent, however, not of genes, absent fathers can say: “I never intended to take on the role of that child’s parent; therefore I’m not morally bound to act as a parent.”
The separation of biology and parenthood, then, has two problematic effects: on the one hand, it undercuts the argument that fathers have obligations to any offspring they do not conceive intentionally, further perpetuating the social problems absenteeism has caused. On the other hand, it undercuts the complementarity that men and women have in raising children, a complementarity that MacDonald thinks can be established even at a biological level.
And if it’s right, it might have significant repercussions for younger Christians who want to claim that they are pro-life while still allowing homosexual marriage. The force of MacDonald’s piece is that she establishes a link between the technological subordination of procreation (as expressed through making procreation only valid when it is intentional) with marriage practices, arguing that, “The primary challenge to traditional notions of parenthood comes from gay conception, not gay marriage.”
Culture in America is an enchanted place where the conservative facts of life are magically transformed into liberal fantasies. In movies, TV shows, novels, even comedy routines, our intellectuals, entertainers, and other fools are busily reshaping reality into works of art through their piercing insights into what will get them good reviews and awards, and through their rich and varied experience of the café in the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles.
To illustrate, I’ll give you some examples. See if you can spot the difference between reality and American culture. In reality, President John F. Kennedy was a fierce Cold Warrior who twice tripled America’s military presence in the Vietnam War to try to stop the spread of Communism and risked nuclear disaster by standing up to the Soviet Union in Cuba. He was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald, an America-hating leftist who had once defected to the USSR.
Now, the culture: in Oliver Stone’s film JFK—nominated for Best Picture Oscar in 1991—Kennedy is a peaceful lefty contemplating a withdrawal from Vietnam. He’s assassinated by a vast right-wing cabal that includes every single person in America except for Oliver Stone. Reality, culture. Can you spot the difference?
Here’s another: in reality, Terri Schiavo was a severely brain-damaged woman who was judicially starved to death in 2005 at the request of her husband, while evangelical Christian right-to-life groups unsuccessfully petitioned to keep her alive. In the culture, a 2005 episode of Law and Order entitled “Age of Innocence” depicted a severely brain-damaged woman whose husband tried to euthanize her—until he was murdered at the instigation of an evangelical Christian right-to-lifer. In reality, evangelical Christians try to keep people alive. In the culture, they murder people. That’s a subtle one, I know—but can you spot the difference?
Today marks the centennial anniversary of the Boy Scouts of America, an offshoot of a movement which began in Britain under the leadership of General Robert Baden-Powell and was brought to America by publisher William Boyce.
It’s fitting that a publisher established the institution since it produced what is arguably the most influential conservative book ever published in America.
Of course, the Boy Scout Handbook is rarely regarded as being a conservative book. That probably accounts for why the Handbook has managed to continuously stay in print since 1910. If it were widely known how masterly the the book inculcates conservative values, it would, like Socrates, be charged with corrupting the nation’s youth.
Cultural critic Paul Fussell once wrote that the Boy Scout Handbook is “among the very few remaining popular repositories of something like classical ethics, deriving from Aristotle and Cicero.” Indeed, it is literally a vade mecum on virtue ethics. Consider, for example, the Scout oath:
Last night’s Superbowl broadcast was one of the most violent in recent memory. No, not the game—the commercials.
Apparently, advertisers get their ideas about how to market to us from watching the Ain’t-It-Funny-When-Someone-Gets-Hurt clips on America’s Funniest Home Videos.
R.J. Snell, professor of philosophy and Director of Eastern University’s philosophy program, responds to the critics of the Manhattan Declaration who believe that “the natural law forgets sin and thus depreciates the necessity of Christ and the supremacy of Scripture”:
There is no cheery optimism in Aquinas with respect to reason. The human is disordered;, one might even say we suffer a totality of depravity since not a single human capacity or function remains in the state of original justice. Yes, humans are utterly messed up, but they are still human beings, and as human beings, as rational animals, they still possess the natural law, for to lose the natural law would be a loss of humanity, actually to become a beast. Not, that is, to act bestially—humans do so—but to be a beast. And this has not happened, since original sin does not change our essence—nor could it. The basic human goods remain the same basic human goods for Adam and for Hitler, and the flourishing of human persons qua persons has not changed. But sin does change our willingness to function as we ought, as we can all attest.
There is, then, no contradiction between the natural law and original sin, at least as understood by Thomas Aquinas. The “Manhattan Declaration,” therefore, remains the declaration of cosmopolis, for insofar as the declaration is reasonable it is reasonable for all, even us sinners.
While I share Andrew’s concern, I suspect this latest evangelical trend isn’t all that trendy. As Slate’s Jack Shafer points out, “The Times accepts estimates from pastors who figure that 700 of the nation’s 115,000 white evangelical churches have taken up mixed martial arts. But the story names only three palooka ministries: Xtreme Ministries, Canyon Creek Church, and Victory Baptist Church.”
Still, while the “Jesus Didn’t Tap” crowd may be numerically insignificant, it’s a prime example of the disturbing resurgence of macho Christianity. At the 9 Marks blog, Mark Mckinley lists four problems with this unbiblical fad:
It’s derivative and unoriginal. It was lame when Billy Sunday was doing it 100 years ago.
It makes the gospel man-centered. Coming to Jesus isn’t a way for you to deal with your daddy issues. I get it, your dad didn’t hug you when you were little and you want to be a different kind of man. How about you go hug your kid then? Jesus didn’t come to help you get in touch with your inner MMA fighter.
Like it or not, the gospel is at least in part about weakness. It’s about the almighty becoming weak to save us. It’s about us being helpless and unable in our sins. There’s no way to Christ that doesn’t start with brokenness and an admission of impotence. Yes, Jesus is the strong man who binds the adversary, but he bound him by suffering, humiliation, and weakness.
It discourages and mocks godly men who aren’t macho. There is an undercurrent of disdain in all of this. Proponents of this testosterone Christianity can’t help but take shots at guys who wear pastels and drink cappuccino. You might not like guys with manicures, but there’s absolutely nothing morally wrong with it. A reserved, quiet, well-groomed man can be a good Christian. Believe it or not.
Son of God. Prince of Peace. Son of Man. Cagefighter? While the first three masculine titles given to our Lord Jesus are biblical and sufficient enough to express the wonder of Jesus, the last title seems to be ever-more increasingly projected onto Jesus by evangelical churches which have long struggled with the over-feminization of the church. Any brief inspection of some of evangelicalism’s top blogs seem to tout Mixed Martial Arts as the next great outreach strategy for men. Forget Promise-Keepers, let’s have a fist, iron, and blood.
On the Sojourners blog, a blog I disagree with 99 percent politically and theologically, Eugene Cho draws our attention to an article in the New York Times on the growing popularity of MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) or more commonly known as Ultimate Fighting Championship and various other leagues.
In a former life, I was a proud and militant pacifist. I would have argued that to equate Jesus with any type of struggle or legitimating of defense would have been heretical. I was wrong—and so is this position of casting Jesus into a male-affirming, machismo-injecting, repressed masculinity with capricious sport.
Hanging in my office at home are several variations of Jasper Johns’ paintings of the American flag. Few people ever see them and those that do rarely comment, so I’m not sure what they think about the art. Do they believe the reproductions are intended to be ironic, hyper-patriotic, merely decorative?
I also have no idea what Johns thought about the works or what he intended by the paintings. In fact, I’ve actively avoided finding out so that his artistic intent doesn’t interfere with my own personal, peculiar interpretation. For me, seeing the Flags helps me to better see the flag.
Normally when I look at an American flag I see—an American flag. Although not consciously recognized, there is a certain semiotic understanding that the flag (a cloth with stars and stripes) is merely the signifier (the form the symbol takes) while the signified (the concept it represents) is America. Of course this leads to another level of recursion since the concept of America is also a sign that stands in for a variety of signified items, both tangible (our homeland) and intangible (our ideals).
When I look at Johns’ Flags, though, I see something different: an abstract representation of an abstract symbol that itself represents abstract concepts. In looking at the paintings I no longer see “American Flag” but see past the symbol to what it represents.
Something similar occurs when I see a flag pin on the lapel of a politician. I recognize that the pin is not merely a reproduction in miniature of an abstract symbol but is intended to convey a specific message to the politician’s constituency and to align oneself with the abstract concepts represented by the flag.
This line of thought leads me to ask, “What does it mean when Sarah Palin wears a lapel pin with two flags—for Israel and the United States?”
Have you ever noticed that the first cowboy to draw his gun in a Hollywood Western is invariably the one to get shot? Nobel prize–winning physicist Niels Bohr did, once arranging mock duels to test the validity of this cinematic curiosity. Following Bohr’s example, researchers have now confirmed that people move faster if they are reacting to another person’s movements than if they are taking the lead themselves. The findings may one day inspire new therapies for patients with brain damage, the team speculates.
Over five years ago, scientists succeeded in teleporting information. Unfortunately, the advance failed to bring us any closer to the Star Trek future we all dream of. Now, researchers in Japan have used the same principles to prove that energy can be teleported in the same fashion as information. Rather than just hastening the dawn of quantum computing, this development could lead to practical, significant changes in energy distribution.
Boredom could be shaving years off your life, scientists have found.
Researchers say that people who complain of boredom are more likely to die young, and that those who experienced ‘high levels’ of tedium are more than two-and-a-half times as likely to die from heart disease or stroke than those satisfied with their lot.
The Pentagon’s mad science arm may have come up with its most radical project yet. Darpa is looking to re-write the laws of evolution to the military’s advantage, creating “synthetic organisms” that can live forever — or can be killed with the flick of a molecular switch.
As part of its budget for the next year, Darpa is investing $6 million into a project called BioDesign, with the goal of eliminating “the randomness of natural evolutionary advancement.” The plan would assemble the latest bio-tech knowledge to come up with living, breathing creatures that are genetically engineered to “produce the intended biological effect.” Darpa wants the organisms to be fortified with molecules that bolster cell resistance to death, so that the lab-monsters can “ultimately be programmed to live indefinitely.”
Just suppose that Darwin’s ideas were only a part of the story of evolution. Suppose that a process he never wrote about, and never even imagined, has been controlling the evolution of life throughout most of the Earth’s history. It may sound preposterous, but this is exactly what microbiologist Carl Woese and physicist Nigel Goldenfeld, both at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, believe. Darwin’s explanation of evolution, they argue, even in its sophisticated modern form, applies only to a recent phase of life on Earth.
At the root of this idea is overwhelming recent evidence for horizontal gene transfer – in which organisms acquire genetic material “horizontally” from other organisms around them, rather than vertically from their parents or ancestors. The donor organisms may not even be the same species. This mechanism is already known to play a huge role in the evolution of microbial genomes, but its consequences have hardly been explored. According to Woese and Goldenfeld, they are profound, and horizontal gene transfer alters the evolutionary process itself. Since micro-organisms represented most of life on Earth for most of the time that life has existed – billions of years, in fact – the most ancient and prevalent form of evolution probably wasn’t Darwinian at all, Woese and Goldenfeld say.
When Ralph McInerny landed back in the United States and cashed his GI check, a civilian again, the first thing he did was run to a bookstore to buy a copy of Lord Weary’s Castle, Robert Lowell’s new collection of poems.
Or so he told me once, and then he laughed and gave a deprecating shrug, because—well, because that’s the kind of thing smart boys with literary pretensions did in those days, and if there ever was one of those smart 1940s literary boys, it was Ralph McInerny. Besides, Lowell had produced an amazingly Catholic book, and the Catholic Renaissance that included everyone from Flannery O’Connor to Thomas Merton was about to take off in America.
They are slipping away from us one by one, the people who can remember those times that once seemed so promising. Names like Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson had a weight about them; you could conjure with them and see the future—a world turned high scholastic and Neo-Thomistic: Catholic philosophy and Catholic art joining to make a golden age. . . .
A recent poll of self-identified Republicans showed a large majority—63 percent—believe that President Obama is a “socialist.” I always cringe when I hear people throw around the “s” word since it seems to be used more as an insult than as an intentionally descriptive label (although when I hear the words “General Motors” I realize they have a point.)
Socialism had the lowest percentage positive rating and the highest negative rating of any term tested. Still, more than a third of Americans say they have a positive image of socialism.
Exactly how Americans define “socialism” or what exactly they think of when they hear the word is not known. The research simply measures Americans’ reactions when a survey interviewer reads the word to them — an exercise that helps shed light on connotations associated with this frequently used term.
There are significant differences in reactions to “socialism” across ideological and partisan groups:
A majority of 53% of Democrats have a positive image of socialism, compared to 17% of Republicans.
Sixty-one percent of liberals say their image of socialism is positive, compared to 39% of moderates and 20% of conservatives.
I suspect that many democrats are unclear on what they mean by socialism. Most are probably associating the term with New Deal/Great Society-style welfare statism. A few, however, may actually be social democrats while a smaller minority are full-fledged democratic socialists.
How would you define socialism? Do you have, or know people that have, a positive impression of the term?
[Note: Every Friday on First Thoughts we host heated, half-serious, half-cocked arguments about some aspect of pop culture. Today’s theme, in honor of Sunday’s game, is Super Bowl commercials. Have a suggestion for a topic? Send them to me at jcarter@firstthings.com]
Contrary to the trite assertion made every year by people who don’t know how to appreciate football, it is not really true that the commercials the best thing about the Super Bowl (at least not always). Sure, it seems that way because the television viewer is seeing commercials than actual game play (in an average game, the ratio of commercials to playing time is seven to one). The reality, however, is that most of the commercials aren’t all that memorable. Only a few stand out every year and they are almost always beer commercials.
But maybe (like me) you don’t like beer, or are a Southern Baptist (like me) and aren’t supposed to condone beer commercials, or maybe your just tired of the anthropomorphizing of Clydesdale horses (again, me). Then it becomes much harder to choose the best Super Bowl commercials of all time. Harder, but not impossible, for I’ve found the five best Super Bowl commercials that were hawking something other than beer.
Slate shows what the Super Bowl would look like if it were directed by Quentin Tarantino, David Lynch, Wes Anderson, Jean-Luc Godard, or Werner Herzog.
One of the unspoken assumptions in the debate over gay marriage is that monogamy is equally valued by both gay and straight couples. While far too many heterosexuals opt for a form of serial monogamy—marriage, divorce, remarriage—it is still generally understood that sexual fidelity is too be expected within the bounds of marriage. The same assumption, however, is not necessarily true within homosexual relations.
Many same-sex marriage advocates will naturally find such a claim shocking, if not scurrilous. The “It’s about love” crowd have often been strong on empathy while weak on their understanding of how homosexual relationships tend to differ from those of heterosexuals. (It also seems to have escaped their notice that marriage may not be the only term that homosexual activists want to redefine.) But this isn’t a controversial idea—at least it wasn’t until the recently.
Some people took umbrage at the claim, while others were curious why they media hasn’t mentioned it before. The New York Times finally addresses both groups in a recent article:
As the trial phase of the constitutional battle to overturn the Proposition 8 ban on same-sex marriage concludes in federal court, gay nuptials are portrayed by opponents as an effort to rewrite the traditional rules of matrimony. Quietly, outside of the news media and courtroom spotlight, many gay couples are doing just that, according to groundbreaking new research.
A study to be released next month is offering a rare glimpse inside gay relationships and reveals that monogamy is not a central feature for many. Some gay men and lesbians argue that, as a result, they have stronger, longer-lasting and more honest relationships. And while that may sound counterintuitive, some experts say boundary-challenging gay relationships represent an evolution in marriage — one that might point the way for the survival of the institution.
New research at San Francisco State University reveals just how common open relationships are among gay men and lesbians in the Bay Area. The Gay Couples Study has followed 556 male couples for three years — about 50 percent of those surveyed have sex outside their relationships, with the knowledge and approval of their partners.
That consent is key. “With straight people, it’s called affairs or cheating,” said Colleen Hoff, the study’s principal investigator, “but with gay people it does not have such negative connotations.”
The study also found open gay couples just as happy in their relationships as pairs in sexually exclusive unions, Dr. Hoff said. A different study, published in 1985, concluded that open gay relationships actually lasted longer.
None of this is news in the gay community, but few will speak publicly about it. Of the dozen people in open relationships contacted for this column, no one would agree to use his or her full name, citing privacy concerns. They also worried that discussing the subject could undermine the legal fight for same-sex marriage.
That last sentence is particularly revealing. I believe there are two reasons why same-sex marriage advocates are hesitant to be honest about their views on monogamy.
Dad Chen Chuanliu has told how he chains his two-year-old son to a tree while he’s working because he can’t afford a nursery place for him.
The rickshaw cyclist, from the Chinese capital Beijing, decided to put tot Lao Lu under lock and key after his four-year-old daughter Ling went missing last month.
Child snatching is rife in China where strict laws govern the size of families.
“My wife is ill and I can’t stop work. So I chain him to a pole when I have a fare. It seems harsh but it is better than losing him,” said Chen.
If my parents had thought they could have gotten away with it, they’d have chained me to a tree every day too.
Harry Knox, who serves on President Barack Obama’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, is standing by a statement he made last March that Pope Benedict XVI is “hurting people in the name of Jesus.”
Not exactly breaking news, but I missed the story the first time around. Knox’s unrepentant ignorance and hubris is simply astonishing.
Last week, Awadh Binhazim, a Vanderbilt University Muslim chaplain, publicly acknowledged that Islamic law requires the death penalty for homosexuals.
Binhazim is caught in a tough situation. As he says, “I don’t have a choice as a Muslim to accept or reject teachings.” But then he tries to distinguish between sharia law, which is practiced in a number of countries, and “Islamic law.” He claims there is a difference between “Muslim law and Islamic law” and that while some countries practice the former, there are none that adhere to the latter. His explanation is something of a diversion since he later admits that that under Islamic law, the death penalty is required for homosexual behavior.
I’m hesitant to make too much of the comment without further explication by the chaplain. In this instance, Islamic Law is similar to the Law of Moses, which also requires the same punishment for certain behaviors such as homosexuality, apostasy, and adultery. Aside from some nutty Christian Reconstructionists, though, I don’t know of any Jewish or Christian groups that believe the Mosaic law should be reinstituted as a form of civil law.
The question that Binhazim should have been asked was whether he believes Islamic law should be the the law of the land in both Muslim and non-Muslim countries. His answer to that question would have been much more revealing.
Donald Sensing, a alumnus of Vanderbilt Divinity School, notes that a Christian or Jew who claimed that homosexual behavior was an “abomination” would be censured by the school. That is unquestionable, though the double standard exemption for Islam is nothing new in academia. But Sensing also raises a more intriguing point:
Last November I wrote that when future generations judge our era, one of the areas where they’ll likely be aghast is our treatment of those who we regard as lacking consciousness. That future may come sooner than I had ever imagined.
A recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that five of fifty-four patients thought to be in a persistent vegetative state showed brain activity indicating awareness, intent and, in at least one case, a wish to communicate.
Of 54 unresponsive patients whose brains were scanned at medical centers in England and Belgium, those five appeared able, when prompted by researchers, to imagine themselves playing tennis, and four of them demonstrated the ability to imagine themselves walking through the rooms of their homes.
One of those patients — a 22-year-old man who had been unresponsive for five years after an automobile crash — went on to respond to a series of simple questions with brain activity that clearly indicated yes or no answers, researchers said.
Their work is the first to give physicians and families the prospect of a biological test to determine whether a patient who shows no response to his or her surroundings is conscious and aware of them.
When Sotheby’s put Swiss sculpter Alberto Giacometti’s “Walking Man I” up for auction, it was expected to bring between $19.2 million and $28.8 million. Instead, the piece was sold to an unidentified buyer for a record-setting total of $104.3 million.
The sale broke the previous record price for a work of art at auction, Picasso’s 1905 ’’Boy With a Pipe (The Young Apprentice).” In 2004, that work was sold at Sotheby’s for $104.1 million.
Giacometti, a Swiss modern master known for his haunting sculptures of blank-face Everymen, cast the work 50 years ago as part of a commission to plant several of his bronze figures outside Chase Manhattan Bank in New York City’s financial district. The artist famously struggled with the project and eventually abandoned the commission. But he later cast stand-alone versions of some of the planned sculptures, including “Walking Man I.”
If we must have attack ads in American politics, should they look like this?
This is either the greatest thing ever done, or the worst. Both, maybe. A jaw-dropping production, but you have to love the red eyes of the wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Take a noun that can be misconstrued as a verb (or vice versa), mix it into an ambiguous headline, and you have yourself a recipe for a crash blossom:
In their quest for concision, writers of newspaper headlines are, like Robert Browning, inveterate sweepers away of little words, and the dust they kick up can lead to some amusing ambiguities. Legendary headlines from years past (some of which verge on the mythical) include “Giant Waves Down Queen Mary’s Funnel,” “MacArthur Flies Back to Front” and “Eighth Army Push Bottles Up Germans.” The Columbia Journalism Review even published two anthologies of ambiguous headlinese in the 1980s, with the classic titles “Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim” and “Red Tape Holds Up New Bridge.”
For years, there was no good name for these double-take headlines. Last August, however, one emerged in the Testy Copy Editors online discussion forum. Mike O’Connell, an American editor based in Sapporo, Japan, spotted the headline “Violinist Linked to JAL Crash Blossoms” and wondered, “What’s a crash blossom?” (The article, from the newspaper Japan Today, described the successful musical career of Diana Yukawa, whose father died in a 1985 Japan Airlines plane crash.) Another participant in the forum, Dan Bloom, suggested that “crash blossoms” could be used as a label for such infelicitous headlines that encourage alternate readings, and news of the neologism quickly spread.
My front-runner for best crash blossom: “Child’s Stool Great for Use in Garden.” What’s your favorite example?
Dwight Gardner reviewsThe Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a new nonfiction book that explores the curious and disturbing intersection of race, poverty, bioethics, and medical progress:
The woman who provides this book its title, Henrietta Lacks, was a poor and largely illiterate Virginia tobacco farmer, the great-great-granddaughter of slaves. Born in 1920, she died from an aggressive cervical cancer at 31, leaving behind five children. No obituaries of Mrs. Lacks appeared in newspapers. She was buried in an unmarked grave.
To scientists, however, Henrietta Lacks almost immediately became known simply as HeLa (pronounced hee-lah), from the first two letters of her first and last names. Cells from Mrs. Lacks’s cancerous cervix, taken without her knowledge, were the first to grow in culture, becoming “immortal” and changing the face of modern medicine. There are, Ms. Skloot writes, “trillions more of her cells growing in laboratories now than there ever were in her body.” Laid end to end, the world’s HeLa cells would today wrap around the earth three times.
Because HeLa cells reproduced with what the author calls a “mythological intensity,” they could be used in test after test. “They helped with some of the most important advances in medicine: the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization,” Ms. Skloot writes. HeLa cells were used to learn how nuclear bombs affect humans, and to study herpes, leukemia, Parkinson’s disease and AIDS. They were sent up in the first space missions, to see what becomes of human cells in zero gravity.
For those who don’t speak the languages of texting and leet speak, the headline can be translated as “Thirty Percent of “Elite” Students Entering College Cannot Use Proper Punctuation and Grammar—a Finding That Must Be Considered With Wry Bemusement, Lest We Fall Into Despair.”
Not all texting is similarly indecipherable, of course. Yet that has not stopped texting—and its online cousin, social networking—from being considered the primary catalysts for the horrid writing of post-secondary students. Whether these technologies are the cause of the problem or just another symptom is still to be determined. But one thing is clear: Young people are, generally speaking, atrocious grammarians.
As almost all college professors can attest, even “elite” students appear to be unfamiliar with basic grammar; their papers are often written as if they were posting on a friend’s Facebook wall. Yet while most complaints are based on anecdotal evidence, a university in Canada has quantified just how disastrous the situation has become:
For years there’s been a flood of anecdotal complaints from professors about what they say is the wretched state of English grammar coming from some of their students.
Now there seems to be some solid evidence.
Ontario’s Waterloo University is one of the few post-secondary institutions in Canada to require the students they accept to pass an exam testing their English language skills.
Almost a third of those students are failing.
“Thirty per cent of students who are admitted are not able to pass at a minimum level,” says Ann Barrett, managing director of the English language proficiency exam at Waterloo University. . .
Even those with good marks out of Grade 12, so-called elite students, “still can’t pass our simple test,” she says.
Emoticons, happy faces, sad faces, cuz, are just some of the writing horrors being handed in, say professors and administrators at Simon Fraser.
“Little happy faces … or a sad face … little abbreviations,” show up even in letters of academic appeal, says Khan Hemani.
“Instead of ‘because’, it’s ‘cuz’. That’s one I see fairly frequently,” she says, and these are new in the past five years.
[. . .]
Khan Hemani sends appeal submissions with emoticons in them back to students to be re-written “because a committee will immediately get their backs up when they see that kind of written style.”
Today marks the centennial anniversary of the Boy Scouts of America, an offshoot of a movement which began in Britain under the leadership of General Robert Baden-Powell and was brought to America by publisher William Boyce.
Hanging in my office at home are several variations of Jasper Johns’ paintings of the American flag. Few people ever see them and those that do rarely comment, so I’m not sure what they think about the art. Do they believe the reproductions are intended to be ironic, hyper-patriotic, merely decorative?
Normally when I look at an American flag I see—an American flag. Although not consciously recognized, there is a certain semiotic understanding that the flag (a cloth with stars and stripes) is merely the signifier (the form the symbol takes) while the signified (the concept it represents) is America. Of course this leads to another level of recursion since the concept of America is also a sign that stands in for a variety of signified items, both tangible (our homeland) and intangible (our ideals).
It’s pre-school childcare – Chinese style.
When Sotheby’s put Swiss sculpter Alberto Giacometti’s “Walking Man I” up for auction, it was expected to bring between $19.2 million and $28.8 million. Instead, the piece was sold to an unidentified buyer for a record-setting total of $104.3 million.