tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-192906622024-03-07T11:33:23.861-08:00Point PleasantJDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17406757121672582364noreply@blogger.comBlogger282125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19290662.post-64621012101458993012018-05-05T15:56:00.003-07:002018-05-05T15:56:46.915-07:00A Life in (Album) Review: Bruce Hornsby<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 6px;">
Day the Third: I'm running through my ten most influential albums, thanks to the recommendation by my high school buddy, <a class="profileLink" data-hovercard-prefer-more-content-show="1" data-hovercard="/ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=1011907135&extragetparams=%7B%22fref%22%3A%22mentions%22%7D" href="https://www.facebook.com/matthewwwilhite?fref=mentions" style="color: #365899; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">Matthew Wilhite</a>. I'll continue my trek with an album that really demonstrates a lot about what "high school JD" was all about--and what that guy would turn into in the years to come.</div>
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Autumn 1986. Sophomore year. Like most other 80s children with little taste, I had felt my heart leap to Air Supply; I thought Phil Collins was cool; I liked Weird Al Yankovic. In other words, I had little taste of my own.</div>
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Autumn 1986 was also the season in which I took my final piano lesson. My valediction at my final recital was the first two movements of Beethoven's "Sonata Pathetique." I was and will always be proud of that accomplishment. I was beginning to play by ear, and my keyboarding future could have gone anywhere.</div>
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Into this period of my life, ripe for change, burst Bruce Hornsby and the Range and their classic debut album, "The Way It Is." The album, arising in the gap between Michael Jackson's two biggest albums (Thriller and Bad) and just before the rise of Whitney Houston, held such a different sound, it took radio by storm that winter and brought Hornsby a best new artist Grammy in 1987.</div>
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I was drawn to Hornsby--as I was to Elton John--because he was a pianist who also sang. I had taken piano lessons most of my life; I loved singing. These artists combined the two skills, and they looked and sounded really cool doing it. I bought sheet music for the album, trying to learn Hornsby's notes. It was too hard. I realized that I'd never match the notes, I would have to match the style.</div>
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So I looked above the notes on the sheet music for the chords, and I followed them, learning to branch out and add twists of my own. I loved Hornsby's use of drone notes (playing the same low note on phrases that riffed on the same chord), and I figured out how to take a basic chord pattern and riff or jam with it until it was something uniquely my own. Hornsby wasn't a ticket into country-style rock, but beyond that into jazz and, eventually, bluegrass.</div>
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While Hornsby's style carried the day, the album had a huge influence on me beyond the keyboard. The title cut, with its outrage over Reagan-era indifference to injustice, confronted my conservatism at the time (I was a huge Reagan-Bush guy before I studied outside the United States and got a little more perspective).</div>
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In a time when little kisses first became a huge part of my life, "Every Little Kiss" captured my feelings, while "Down the Road Tonight" hinted at sin and the kind of things that weren't discussed at a Christian high school.</div>
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But my favorite songs were the lyrical landscapes of lesser tracks like "River Runs Low," "On the Western Skyline," and "The Red Plains." I was reading novels on my own (they weren't assigned in my high school), and I was really deep into John Steinbeck, whose books evoked the landscape of the Dust Bowl (Grapes of Wrath) and northern California (Of Mice and Men, The Pastures of Heaven).</div>
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My mind was filling with exotic landscapes beyond the hills of southern Ohio or middle Tennessee, and my fingers were creating exotic new soundscapes on the keyboard post-Pathetique.</div>
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A few years later a "western skyline" would welcome me and Jenny as we drove through Black Jack Canyon from New Mexico into our first Arizona sunset, a "mandolin rain" would accompany my own strumming on the instrument, and I would seek to change "the way it is" as a teacher leader and educator in public schools.</div>
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"The Way It Is," looking back, is The Way It Would Be for me in so many unique ways that I could have never foretold in autumn 1986. I guess that makes it a pretty influential album!</div>
JDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17406757121672582364noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19290662.post-86737490533182555912018-05-05T15:55:00.001-07:002018-05-05T15:55:44.255-07:00A Life in (Album) Review: Alison Krauss<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 6px;">
Day the Second: after my high school buddy, <a class="profileLink" data-hovercard-prefer-more-content-show="1" data-hovercard="/ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=1011907135&extragetparams=%7B%22fref%22%3A%22mentions%22%7D" href="https://www.facebook.com/matthewwwilhite?fref=mentions" style="color: #365899; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">Matthew Wilhite</a>, nominated me, I'm looking back at the albums that left the biggest mark on my life and my personal style.</div>
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Flash back to 1995. I had just embarked on the adventure of a lifetime--marriage to <a class="profileLink" data-hovercard-prefer-more-content-show="1" data-hovercard="/ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=1317332405&extragetparams=%7B%22fref%22%3A%22mentions%22%7D" href="https://www.facebook.com/jennifer.dittes?fref=mentions" style="color: #365899; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">Jennifer George Dittes</a>--and we had moved out to Superior, Arizona, far away from home, and we fashioned a remarkable life there: Jenny working at a regional health plan and me teaching English at Superior High School. Surrounded by a loving church and a fantastic community, we fit right in.</div>
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But there were things I missed. My first autumn in Superior, I remarked to my students how much I missed seeing the trees turn colors. A student (Brandon T as I remember it) told me, "Don't worry, Mr. Dittes, there's a tree up in Globe that's turning colors!" As I remember it, Globe was about 20 miles drive away.</div>
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I remember going to WalMart and seeing country music videos on the TVs in the electronics department. I was astonished by all the green I saw--grass, trees with leaves, weeds--before realizing that it was Tennessee I was seeing through desert-thirsty eyes.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkm38dgKVnCeWnQfWK_jn5VOC4_8gN7dVcuxNgB59WFgWx7tGffVFBUizErh6MswLjBZNuQOlvsg109ZABKkt8hQny42wVA_yOZaRXEgBV02YbZ-QtCCuLskA9IondnlONRdRA/s1600/alison-krauss-now-that-ive-found-you-a-compilation-cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="983" data-original-width="980" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkm38dgKVnCeWnQfWK_jn5VOC4_8gN7dVcuxNgB59WFgWx7tGffVFBUizErh6MswLjBZNuQOlvsg109ZABKkt8hQny42wVA_yOZaRXEgBV02YbZ-QtCCuLskA9IondnlONRdRA/s320/alison-krauss-now-that-ive-found-you-a-compilation-cover.jpg" width="319" /></a>Bluegrass arrived in my life at that time, led by Alison Krauss's remarkable collection, "Now That I've Found You." It was amazing. Krauss's pure soprano brought in a smooth pop echo without drowning out the pluck of the mandolin or the steel guitar in her band, Union Station. All the time I had lived in Tennessee, I had seldom listened to bluegrass. Now it was all I wanted to hear.</div>
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The big hit off the album was Krauss's remake of "When You Say Nothing at All," a smooth, mainstream look at a Keith Whitley song that had briefly charted on country radio. Her recording of "In the Palm of Your Hand" with the Cox family opened for me new ways to look at beloved old hymns. Bluegrass made the music feel real. The mandolin plucked as naturally as raindrops falling on a lake.</div>
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In the summer of 1996, I spent a month at a German-language course in Schwäbisch Gmünd. The Americans there were encouraged to teach a dance to the other students. I chose Krauss's "Oh Atlanta," and a Czech partner and I two-stepped the night away as others joined in. That summer I began arranging hymns to fit my newfound bluegrass sensibilities, spinning off versions of "When the Roll is Called Up Yonder" and "In the Sweet By and By" that I still enjoy playing to this day.</div>
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A year later, in the spring of 1997, the album's cover song, "Baby, Now that I've Found You," took on a new meaning for Jenny and me. As Jenny prepared to go to the hospital to have our first child, I compiled a soundtrack to ease her through labor. Krauss's album was well represented, and that "Baby..." of the title song turned about to be the lovely <a class="profileLink" data-hovercard-prefer-more-content-show="1" data-hovercard="/ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=1458503144&extragetparams=%7B%22fref%22%3A%22mentions%22%7D" href="https://www.facebook.com/ellie.m.dittes?fref=mentions" style="color: #365899; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">Ellie Dittes</a>, born on May 22.</div>
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Eventually I learned enough about bluegrass to understand that there were no pianos in bluegrass bands. About ten years ago I picked up the mandolin and began plucking away at church. This instrument brings me a lot of joy, and it opens me to be able to play beloved bluegrass and folk songs wherever I wish to.</div>
JDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17406757121672582364noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19290662.post-79932403716764606122018-05-05T15:52:00.001-07:002018-05-05T15:52:44.841-07:00A Life in (Album) Review: Wang Chung<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 6px;">
<i>I'm transferring this over from Facebook, which is much harder to search than Blogger, in an effort to keep longer, more personal essays like this in circulation.</i></div>
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Day the first: I was nominated by a lifelong friend, <a class="profileLink" data-hovercard-prefer-more-content-show="1" data-hovercard="/ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=1011907135&extragetparams=%7B%22fref%22%3A%22mentions%22%7D" href="https://www.facebook.com/matthewwwilhite?fref=mentions" style="color: #365899; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">Matthew Wilhite</a>, to identify ten albums that had a real impact on me. Sure, I'll post the cover, but each of these albums reaches back into the past and provides interesting insights into how I became...me.</div>
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My eldest son, Owen, has spent the past three years building his knowledge of rock music and assemb<span class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline; font-family: inherit;">ling a huge collection of CDs and vinyls. Being the methodical person he is, he began with the Beatles and has slowly worked his way into the 70s with Led Zeppelin and Simon & Garfunkel. As I write this, he is poised on the edge of the 80s, listening to Queen and early U2.</span></div>
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When I realized where his systematic study of rock history was leading last year, I told him, "Just let me know when you get to Wang Chung."</div>
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Did it make sense to him? Of course it didn't. I'm his dad. I was doing him a favor. God forbid I would have recommended Bruce Springsteen and ruined the E Street Band for him forever!</div>
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Why Wang Chung then? Well, it's true that I really liked them. I owned the Mosaic (1986) cassette, and I had the extended dance version of "Let's Go" on vinyl. It was cheap, synth-driven pop, perfect for the late-80s, with a clean sound. Sure, "Everybody Have Fun Tonight" was the instant hit from the album, but "Let's Go" was my go-to song, a four-minute burst of Saturday night excitement that (in my mind) wasn't equaled until the Black Eyed Peas' "I Gotta Feeling" more than 20 years later.</div>
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The teenaged poet in me loved the first ballad on the album, "Hypnotize." It chorused the starry-eyed view I had of girlfriends at the time, and the way it rhymed 'hypnotize' and 'mesmerize' just seemed cool at the time (sure seems cheesy). The other ballad, "Eyes of the Girl" also captures my teenybopper passions (I was 15 in 1986).</div>
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But beyond the songs, Wang Chung opened up a channel of rebellion for me, a fascination with BritPop that I shared with friends like <a class="profileLink" data-hovercard-prefer-more-content-show="1" data-hovercard="/ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=750308358&extragetparams=%7B%22fref%22%3A%22mentions%22%7D" href="https://www.facebook.com/KLJC3?fref=mentions" style="color: #365899; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">Kristy Jones Clay</a> and <a class="profileLink" data-hovercard-prefer-more-content-show="1" data-hovercard="/ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=100013657446003&extragetparams=%7B%22fref%22%3A%22mentions%22%7D" href="https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100013657446003&fref=mentions" style="color: #365899; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">Lisa Matthews</a>. There were so many other foreign bands that fascinated me, the way Wang Chung did: INXS, Simple Minds, Tears for Fears, A-Ha, and Roxette, to name a few.</div>
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In this way pop opened my eyes to a world far beyond Tennessee, a "World in Which We Live" (Mosaic's closing song) united by shared human values and a desire to seek social change.</div>
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Four years after the release of Wang Chung's Mosaic, I traveled to the UK for my sophomore year of college. While there I saw A-Ha in concert (I had already seen INXS in Nashville in 1988 with Lisa). I made friends from all over Europe and Africa, friends who are precious to me to this very day, along with ideas they introduced me to.</div>
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I eventually gained the global mindset that I had only glimpsed in my living room sessions with Wang Chung on the stereo, even if I outgrew the puppy love that amplified those songs in my 15-year-old mind.</div>
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JDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17406757121672582364noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19290662.post-49263596770923821562016-09-09T19:09:00.000-07:002016-09-09T19:09:47.501-07:00Kingdom of Heaven/ On the Borderlands Now on his way to Jerusalem, Jesus traveled along the border between Samaria and Galilee (Luke 17.11)<br />
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As I studied this text in Bible study this week, I noticed for the first time the setting of Christ's confrontation with the Ten Lepers. Luke carefully sets this scene in time and place.<br />
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The opening word, "Now...," puts the reader in the moment, joining the throng that follow this Galilean messiah to make his mark in Jerusalem, ready to trade petty exchanges with local pharisees (14.1-14) and synagogue leaders (13.14-17) for far-more-daunting challenges with Jewish and Roman elites in the big city (13.31-35).<br />
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But Jesus travels slowly--at least in the way Luke tells it. All the way back in chapter 13, Luke had shown that "Jesus went through the towns and villages, teaching as he made his way to Jerusalem" (v 22). Three chapters later, Jesus is still moving, glacially, toward his destiny, following "the border between Samaria and Galilee," probably no more than ten miles from his hometown of Nazareth and fewer than five miles from Nain, site of one of his greatest miracles (Luke 7).<br />
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The borderlands would seem a strange place for a messiah to walk. There are no highways there. Few people. Most borders follow mountain ranges or rivers. Perhaps Jesus had taken the warning of Galilean pharisees seriously after all--"Leave this place and go somewhere else. Herod wants to kill you" (13.31). There were only two routes to Jerusalem from Galilee, the broad seaside highway along the Mediterranean coast, and the route down the Jordan Valley, the latter of which Jesus would follow.<br />
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Borderlands are places for wild animals, not teachers. I live in a town near the border between Kentucky Tennessee. Until a few years ago, the only buildings one actually found close to the border of the two states were roadside bars and honkey-tonks. The border was a place to sneak away to, a place to imbibe things that couldn't be consumed in town. When I note that Jesus was following the border, I remember a famous quote from another frontier, border town in <i>Star Wars</i>:<br />
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"Scum and villainy," indeed. The border lands are home to bandits, exiles and--apparently--lepers.</div>
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"Jesus, Master," they cry out. Close enough for the group to hear, no closer, they continue, "have pity on us" (v 13). </div>
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Jesus makes no move, he makes no incantation. He simply directs them to get a new opinion on their condition from the priests. "And as they went, they were [all] cleansed" (v 14).</div>
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I have <a href="http://jdittes.blogspot.com/2006/05/water-and-wine-thoughts-on-john-2.html" target="_blank">written elsewhere about the Jewish obsession</a> with cleanliness. This obsession continues in the Christian rites of baptism and Maundy Thursday footwashing. It would seem that the diseases of the time had two explanations--demons and a lack of cleanliness--and the final word on healing lay not with doctors but with priests. </div>
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I'm going to skip the most obvious detail--that only one of the lepers returns to thank Jesus, and this leper appears to be a "foreigner" or Samaritan. That's for others to recount. What struck me as the Bible study finished was a peek ahead to the next section in Luke--another Kingdom of God reference.</div>
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I imagined the Ten Lepers as something other than a real event, but as a Kingdom parable. "The Kingdom of God is like unto Ten Lepers who came upon a Healer in the border lands and called out unto him for mercy...."</div>
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What strikes me about this story is this: while one of the lepers returned to thank Jesus, "Were not ten cleansed?" (verse 17). This seems like a minor point, but all ten lepers receive healing, because they are healed at the moment they believe Jesus and turn around to find a priest for confirmation.</div>
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The grateful leper, commended by Jesus for returning to thank and praise God (Jesus mentions God, not himself), remains just as healed as the other nine.</div>
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Perhaps this is because the other nine were in a hurry to get confirmation from the priests--this foreign Samaritan may not have felt the need of institutional confirmation once he saw for himself that he was healed. The border lands were always in flux. Messiahs might appear, so might murderers. There were plenty of reasons not to return for the other nine, grateful or not.</div>
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But there may be something more that Jesus is revealing about salvation here--something surprising to me. It seems like there is a two-tiered version of redemption in the story that may help us understand other events and parables in the book of Luke. There seems to be "saved" and "better-than-saved."</div>
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In the parable of the Prodigal Son, for example, both brothers remain in their father's house. Nine coins are safe in the bank along with one that was lost. Ninety-nine sheep are safe in the pen, along with the one who which was found. So much for good guys and bad guys.</div>
JDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17406757121672582364noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19290662.post-72233118325755862942014-12-21T11:39:00.001-08:002014-12-21T11:39:37.855-08:00Reading for the Year, 2014OK, it's time for a victory lap of sorts. If you're wondering what's on my mind, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/5693583-james-jd-dittes?read_at=2014&view=covers" target="_blank">take a look at the books I read this year</a>. I'm at 66, and while I'll finish a few over the Christmas break, I'm not sure I'll make it to 70 before 2015 begins and brings with it new experiences (trips to New Orleans, Germany, the Republic of Georgia, and a return to Philadelphia and New York City) to read up on.<br />
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Looking back at 2014, I spent a month reading fiction from countries competing in the World Cup--Germany's win was capped by my reading of five novels by German writers:Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, The Mussel Feast, A Minute's Silence, Thomas Mann's His Royal Highness, and Peter Longerich's massive biography of Josef Goebbels. Looking back, though, I think my favorite World Cup-related novel was Paolo Giordini's The Solitude of Prime Numbers, a thoughtful love story.<br />
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My trips to New York were aided by Kevin Baker's Dreamland and John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer. I read four Dos Passos books this year, and he just blew me away. He is truly America's greatest modernist writer.<br />
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My favorite novel of the year was Henderson Smith's Fourth of July Creek, which was lyrical and which vividly described themes that began during the book's historical setting (Reagan's first two years in office) and which resonate today.<br />
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The best nonfiction I read was Timothy Egan's Short Nights of the Shadowcatcher: the Epic Life & Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis. Curtis's quest to capture the images and ceremonies of the remaining Native American tribes in the American West in the 1910s rendered him divorced and penniless, but it preserved traits of those cultures that were dying out, and they allow Americans today to appreciate them. Egan is one of the best writers working in America today, whether you read his columns for The New York Times or others of his fine books, the best of which might be The Worst Hard Time about the Dust Bowl.<br />
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I crossed a few more classics off my list of to-reads: Alex Haley's Roots, Kate Chopin's The Awakening, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (yes, that's right), Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, and the Goethe book (my Audible subscription really helps me to get through these). I also got to re-read John Steinbeck's East of Eden and The Old Man and the Sea.<br />
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A few other books that I would recommend that I didn't mention above:<br />
1. Two historical novels, Sue Monk Kidd's The Invention of Wings begins with the gift of a slave to a Charleston teenager, and follows her repulsion to slavery to Philadelphia and a prominence in the abolitionist movement. Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See was an epic tale and brought back to me a visit I made to St. Malo, France, hitchhiking over my spring break in 1991.<br />
2. Books that I put right to use in my teaching included Edgar Sawtelle, The Smithsonian's History of America in 101 Objects, Where'd You Go Bernadette (a delightful surprise), and Boy, Snow, Bird.<br />
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If you have any recommendations for 2015, post them below. I'm already building a collection, and I'm looking forward to sharing some recommendations with my brother-in-law, Don Gates over the Christmas holiday. I can't wait to read more!JDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17406757121672582364noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19290662.post-26652931578497445842014-12-07T19:24:00.001-08:002014-12-07T19:24:39.207-08:00The "We Three Kings" Wormhole into another Time and SpaceAt choir practice today, I was assigned a solo to sing along with our Three Wisemen.<br />
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The thing about getting into your mid forties is this: the space-time continuum starts to break down. We're in the church, getting ready to go over the song, and all of a sudden, I'm in my home church in Athens, Ohio, eleven years old, with a towel on my head, with several extra-large rubber bands clamping the towel to my cranium, with my buddies, Seth Jasovsky and Eric Jasovsky, getting ready to walk down the aisle with me, singing "We Three Kings" for the Christmas pageant.<br />
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I'm not sure if the space-time continuum is fuzzy or if it was just too long ago, but I can't see how ridiculous I/we must have looked in our costumes that night. At the time, we either thought we were cool--or we just didn't care. What was cool was this: hanging around ANYWHERE with Seth & Eric and Julie Dittes Gates and Sonia and Paul Jasovsky that Christmas in the "magical land of Ohio," or any other for that matter.<br />
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In church, reveling in the memory, I was grinning so much, I missed the first note or so of the solo. It's OK. I have until the weekend to get it right. I just know that my solo will NEVER top the trio singing "We Three Kings" that shuffled down the main aisle, dragging the hems of fathers' bathrobes, that unforgettable Advent evening at the Athens Seventh-day Adventist Church over 30 years ago.JDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17406757121672582364noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19290662.post-11577760608693873472014-11-30T12:33:00.000-08:002014-11-30T12:33:48.479-08:00Some Tips I've Learned for the College BoundThis blog is in response to the New York Times article, "<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/30/upshot/for-accomplished-students-reaching-a-top-college-isnt-actually-that-hard.html?_r=0&abt=0002&abg=0" target="_blank">For Accomplished Students, Getting into a Good College Isn't as Hard as it Seems</a>"<br />
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Bottom line: 80% of top students get into the schools they want, and ridiculous acceptance numbers (<7% at the Ivies) are because of students applying to too many schools. Ellie is at the end of the application process now. She targeted four schools, applied to three, and has been accepted by two of the three (we're waiting on the last one, which also happens to be her dream school--Penn).<br />
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Most of my Facebook friends have kids who are younger than Ellie, so let me break down the college process for you, to save you some stress and ensure that your child controls their educational & fiscal destiny.<br />
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1. <b>Any school is a be-all, never an end-all</b>. "Be all you can be" is no longer the motto of the U.S. Army, but it is the key to successful education in every kind of school. The value of a school isn't in its tennis courts or travel programs; it's in the teachers, the curriculum, and the range of classes offered there. More importantly, it is in that school's ability to prepare the child for the next step: elementary school for middle school, middle school for high school, high school for college, college for career, and career for the next career (today's students will work for 10-14 different employers by the age of 38). A smart parent doesn't say, "My kid is at a great school," anymore. They say, "My kid is getting great opportunities."<br />
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2. <b>Connect present with future</b>. It wasn't good grades that made Ellie think she could attend the top schools. It was her school business club--especially when she placed first at nationals in International Business as a sophomore. "You punched your ticket," I told her at the time. I said it a lot--every time she brought back a high test score or excelled at competition. Good schools, whether they are public or private, prepare kids to compete <i>and </i>excel, and having the word "champion" on a resume moves the student to the front of the college application line.<br />
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3. <b>Every dollar spent is an investment</b>. I'm not just talking about tuition here. How much is the family spending on books, classical concerts, museum visits? When there is travel, is there learning, too? Some technology investments--computers, music players--are better than others. A trip to Yellowstone National Park or a week at music camp is a better investment than Disney. A lot of the money I saved by putting my kids through public schools, I spent on travel, music and books. The money is all the same, it all got spent, but I had more control over the quality of the spending.<br />
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4. <b>Tests are tools, not lotteries</b>. Ellie took every practice test she could: the PLAN in 10th grade, the PSAT in 10th & 11th grades, and, of course, the ACT, which she took three times from December of her junior year to June before her senior year. Together we shamelessly used the testing companies to build interest in colleges (who buy the testing information) and increase her scores, knowing that above a certain level, every added point on the ACT is worth $1000-$2000 more in scholarships. If colleges are going to make it <i>that</i> easy to game the system, we'll take it!<br />
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On her first ACT, Ellie scored a 29, which was the score both her mother and I earned on our single experiences with the test. Ellie hated the score and acted like ACT had sent her a poop sandwich instead of a ticket into 95% of American colleges. The score included a perfect 36 in reading, but showed room for improvement in writing and math. She was already in AP Writing, so we knew the score would go up. We added a community college precalculus class to her schedule that spring. In the March ACT, her score was up a little, but she hadn't matched that perfect 36 in reading from the original test, while the other scores were higher. In the June ACT she came back with a 32 (which to her <i>still</i> wasn't high enough, despite she was up to qualifying for 98% of universities). It wasn't until we met with a Penn recruiter and learned that Penn "superscores" the ACT results, meaning that they take the highest grades from among the various tests, that she was satisfied. The 36 in reading held up, and added to her final test score, meant that she how had a 33 composite: another ticket punched.<br />
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A final thing about testing: I disagree with those who say they "don't test well." Tests are timed exercises in reading, writing and computation. They are not a mysterious portal between the world of high school and that of college. As a teacher, I know that if I can prepare my students to read every word of the prompt, or write an outline in preparation of a written prompt, their test scores will go up. I pity the poor kids who have been coached in "testing strategies" and spend more time gaming the answers than actually reading or computing the questions they're given. These kids "don't test well" because they haven't been taught well, because they believe that test results are 'magical' and not 'earned.'<br />
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5. <b>Talk, talk, talk</b>. Every college has a floor filled with offices and cubicles known as The Admissions Office. People go to work there every day, and they're there to recruit prospective students from specific regions of the state or country. They love to talk to kids. They answer e-mails in less than an hour. They record every interaction, hoping that it will result in an application. It was through talking with recruiters that we learned about the superscore. Through talking with a South Carolina recruiter, Ellie learned she needed a 3rd lab science, allowing her to drop an easy class and add Anatomy & Physiology to the Chemistry and Biology grades on her transcript. Through talking with a Penn recruiter, she learned that they prefer students with a calculus background for their business school, so she added an extra math class and devoted considerable time her senior year to AP Calculus. Without talking, she would have a solid transcript (a better GPA perhaps), but she would have gaps in her record that might cost her a place at her dream school.<br />
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6. <b>Tour, tour, tour</b>. No one would spend $5,000 on a car without test-driving it. No one should spend $50,000-$200,000 on a college education without visits. Every college visit offers an opportunity for learning, whether it's a drive-by or a full college tour. And you're not just touring the community and facilities, you're looking at the kids who go to school there--and want to go to school there. We toured NYU and Georgetown together, but didn't find either a good fit worth the price of application. We drove by Ohio University, West Virginia University and Temple. Ellie made two official visits to South Carolina and three additional informal visits. Interestingly, Ellie wasn't sold on Temple until she had both toured the campus AND worked out ways to use the Philadelphia subway to find her way around the city by herself. She felt at home there--without Daddy's help--and it helped her see herself studying and living in the city. Another ticket punched.<br />
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7. <b>Dream, dream, dream</b>. The final determination of where a student attends is NOT the college admissions or financial aid office. It's the parent or student who signs the deposit check. It frustrates me to hear finances brought up during the Talking Phase, the Touring Phase, or the Dreaming Phase, which should be about students reaching for the best opportunities available and preparing themselves to be successful in life. (When Ellie learned to walk, I imagined her in the Olympics; after her first piano lesson, I started thinking about Carnegie Hall; when she played soccer, I took her to see Mia Hamm and the US Women's Team.) It wasn't for me to tell her she would never be great because we. just. couldn't. afford. it.<br />
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Parents should identify students' strengths, help them identify programs or careers that will let them use those strengths, and take them to the colleges/ locations of their dreams. (Parents, this also makes an indelible impression on your child as to the depth of your love and respect for them.) The local community college or commuter state school will still cash the check, whether you've toured Harvard or not. A student who says, "I was accepted to X Unversity, but I chose Y College," is a student who is in control of their destiny and one who will live their life looking forward without regret.<br />
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Let me be clear. Ellie is an extraordinary kid. I'm not here to toot my horn, or act like anyone else's child has the same drive and dedication that she has shown over the past four years.They might. We have learned some important lessons over the past two years of looking at and preparing for college admission, and I just wanted to share them with all of you.JDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17406757121672582364noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19290662.post-74875348732471743892014-05-24T20:33:00.000-07:002014-05-24T20:49:44.610-07:00Last of the JimsI can think of three dates that determined the outcome of these 43 years I have spent so far on this wonderful green globe:<br />
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<ul>
<li><b>22 May 1997</b> I became a father.</li>
<li>The <a href="http://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/?year=1991&country=9" target="_blank">weekend </a>of <b>3-7 May 1991</b> Destiny thrust me into the great love of my life</li>
<li>In <b>January of 1984</b>, just a few weeks shy of my 13th birthday, I moved from Amesville, Ohio, to Portland, Tennessee. </li>
</ul>
Uprooted in the middle of 7th grade, I was planted in a new school, a new community. The experience marked me for life--my best friends and my boyhood were boxed up back at home--a place I tell my kids was "the Magical Land." My awkward teenage years and the longest chapters in the unwritten book,<i> JD's Book of Blunders</i>, would take place in a strange land of Tennessee.</div>
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A story from those first days in Tennessee came back to mind this week, when I learned that my classmate at Highland Elementary, James "Bobo" Ayers, had passed away due to cancer. Like me, he was 43.</div>
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I have always had a problem with my name. Growing up, my family called me "JD," which always seemed like a baby name to me. To make things worse, my mom tells the story that the name had been given to me while I was still in utero, given by a man who assumed I would be "Junior Dittes."</div>
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When I was ready for 1st grade, I came up with a plan. I was going to leave "JD" behind and become "Jimmy." I remember writing "Jimmy" over and over on my wide-lined, elementary writing book, curling the y's this way and that. It didn't phase my parents--nor did it seem to matter to the other seven kids in the one-room Adventist school I attended.</div>
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<a name='more'></a>By 2nd grade I felt ready for "Jim," and this name stuck for the next six years. "Jim Dittes" caught on in my schools, first in Bartlett, Ohio, later in Parkersburg, West Virginia. By 4th grade, I had left "JD" behind, save for my stubborn family.</div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgV9o9hXXQBKHziOyeQKidoTu2Ecdxgsf1f9GOMt59BYCDK1Dj-WcSBN5Ekdqjer5XNBKNc-pSet_AwR1AyY5UTx-KsCkarK94HQcGar2IfrweJE8eciZAelRyH3H99HDGiQ1vW/s1600/Three+Jims.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgV9o9hXXQBKHziOyeQKidoTu2Ecdxgsf1f9GOMt59BYCDK1Dj-WcSBN5Ekdqjer5XNBKNc-pSet_AwR1AyY5UTx-KsCkarK94HQcGar2IfrweJE8eciZAelRyH3H99HDGiQ1vW/s1600/Three+Jims.jpg" height="320" width="266" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The three Jims in a class photo from 9th grade</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Then came the move to Tennessee. I entered Mr. French's classroom at Highland Elementary as "Jim Dittes." There were about 24 students, ten of them boys. I learned to my chagrin that there were already two Jims: Jim Litchfield, Jr., who went by "Jimmie," and Jim Ayers, who went by "Bobo."</div>
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Mr. French was a smart teacher, and he was quick to find a solution. "We'll just call you, 'J.D." he said. "That's a nice name."</div>
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I slumped into my desk and frowned. The baby name was back. I couldn't escape it. The J stood for me, and the D was for Doomed.</div>
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Jimmy, Bobo and I became friends. Jimmy was gregarious, the shortest boy in our grade, eager to please the big guys. Bobo was soft-spoken with a broad grin and a slow loping gait on the baseball diamond or the football field. I was moody and loud. We never became best friends, but we got along well.</div>
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I would move onto other names. "JD" followed me through high school and into my freshman year of college. My 2nd year of college, I studied in England, trying to recover "Jim," but one evening my British great Aunt Marjorie asked me, "Jim? Why do you go by Jim? James is such a <i>splendid name</i>!"</div>
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That was the moment that "James Dittes" was born. It would become my professional name--the one my colleagues at work would use without getting too personal. Later, when I moved first to Arizona and then on to Albania, I would pick up the name "Jay." (In Albania, my name was often spelled "Xhai.") </div>
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Today, I am James online and at work, and I am JD at home and at church. If I pick up the phone, and someone asks for "Jim" or "Jay," I can quickly get an idea about which part of my past they are calling from.</div>
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That's the odyssey of my name that began that January afternoon in Mr. French's 7th & 8th-grade class. But it isn't the whole story of the Jims of the HE Class of 1985.</div>
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I moved back to Tennessee in 1998 to await a visa to an overseas job I had been given. The following spring I received the tragic news that the first Jim, Jimmy Litchfield, had died in an auto accident, leaving behind a young son. I was teaching at Highland Academy that year, and I had just taught John Donne's <i>Meditation 17</i>. "Ask not for whom the bell tolls," Donne had written, and now it was tolling for my friend, not yet 30.</div>
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And now, this week, the second Jim has passed. </div>
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"Any man's death diminishes me," Donne wrote later in <i>Meditation 17</i>. It's true, and I hope that it doesn't seem trite that I seem so hyper-focused on the deaths of boys--of boys named "Jim"--of boys named "Jim" who were in the 7th grade at Highland Elementary in 1984.</div>
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I never imagined that I would be the last of the Jims.</div>
JDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17406757121672582364noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19290662.post-9943203542765062992014-05-24T19:37:00.002-07:002014-06-07T06:15:10.922-07:00A Return to the Question of SatanA couple of events this week led me back to explore the topic of Satan.<br />
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I have admitted earlier in this blog my difficulty in really <a href="http://jdittes.blogspot.com/2007/07/do-i-believe-in-satan.html" target="_blank">believing in the Evil One</a>--or at least with the certainty that many of the<a href="http://jdittes.blogspot.com/2007/07/more-evilpersonified.html" target="_blank"> Lucifer-wielders</a> seem to have for him.<br />
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Two events this week brought Satan back to light and led to some interesting new takes on the subject.<br />
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First, at a Bible study this week, a group leader resorted to Satan to prove a supposition that cannot be supported by the Bible: in this case it was the erroneous belief that Paul and other early Christians didn't worship on Sunday, among other days.<br />
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"The Devil wants us to believe," he began. My blood began to boil. "It's all part of Satan's plan." I wanted to walk out. This was a blatant <a href="http://www.logicallyfallacious.com/index.php/logical-fallacies/35-appeal-to-heaven" target="_blank">logical fallacy</a>--as if I made decisions or interpreted scripture with any care what some made-up entity really wants! <br />
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Later, a friend posted on Facebook a question about atheists and Satan. Two brushes with the Evil One in one week. I took to Google to figure out the term for "a person who refuses to believe in Satan."<br />
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The answer I found was "atheist." An atheist, I learned, rejects any form of the divine, whether good or evil.<br />
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This is hard for me to stomach because I believe in Jesus Christ, the son of God. I'm not an atheist. But I want to live a life that follows God's will, not one that is led around by the fear of some demonic entity or hypothetical satanic plot.<br />
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One thing that I have learned about Satan is the fact that he wasn't invented by the Jews but by the Persians in their fascinating, dualistic, Zoroastrian religion--a religion in which fire battles darkness, good battles evil. The first Jewish writers to describe Satan in the Bible were the Second Isaiah and Ezekiel, who wrote following the Jewish Exile to Babylonia. By Christ's time, Satan had been fully incorporated into Jewish theology.<br />
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Let's go deeper into how Satan developed over the 1200 or so years that the Bible was written down:<br />
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<ul>
<li>The first mention of Satan is just ten chapters from the end of the Old Testament, in Zechariah 3.1-2. "The Lord said to Satan, "The lord rebuke you, Satan! The Lord, who has chosen Jerusalem...." Zechariah wrote between 520 and 480 BC, following the return of exiled Jews by the Persian emperor, Cyrus.</li>
<li>While the role of accuser had been portrayed earlier in the Old Testament (Job 1&2, Psalm 109.6), the timing of Zechariah's prophecy--and Jesus' later invocation of Satan (Matthew 4.10)--is significant: a generation of Jews had been exposed to the Persian/Zoroastrian god, "<a href="http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/ahriman" target="_blank">Ahriman</a>."</li>
<li>A great example of the evolution of Satan in the Old Testament is the comparison of an obscure event from the reign of King David. The first, in 2 Samuel 24.1-9, describes a census that David took of his able-bodied fighting men in the year after his victory over Absalom in a civil war: "Again the anger of the Lord burned against Israel, and he incited David against them, saying, 'Go and take a census of Israel and Judah.'</li>
<li>The same story appears in 1 Chronicles 21.1. Only in this version, "<i>Satan </i>rose up against Israel and incited David to take a census of Israel."</li>
<ul>
<li>Both selections describe the same story. David's census is seen as an act of hubris (and probably sets up the kingdom for the onerous tax regime that would divide it a generation later).</li>
<li>In the earlier version, God incites David to take the unpopular census, in the second version it is Satah/Ahriman.</li>
<li>The writings come at different points in Israel's history, however. 2 Samuel dates to 920 BC, around the reign of David's son, King Solomon. 1 Chronicles dates to the time of Ezra, a contemporary of Zechariah and an apparent Satan-believer.</li>
<li>In another similar post-exilic tale in 2 Chronicles 18, "a spirit came forward [in council before the Lord], and said, "I will entice [Ahab.]"</li>
</ul>
</ul>
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In Zoroastrian theology, Ahriman opposed the power of Ahur Mazda, creating a dualistic world of good vs evil, in which human beings were the pawns of far-more-powerful spirits of darkness and light. A later belief system, Manichaeism, originating with a Persian mystic named Mani, synthesized Christianity, Zoroastrianism and Buddhism into complimentary accounts of cosmic conflict between good and evil.<br />
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I decided to go further back into the Bible to find an Evil One that I could believe in. It wasn't hard at all. Once I started searching, I found the answer in the most obvious of all locations: the First Commandment.<br />
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"You shall have no other gods before me" (Exodus 20.3)</blockquote>
This scripture best explains how I understand the working of evil in the world--and believe me, I don't have to look very far from my own spirit for evidence of evil.<br />
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It is not Satan that scares me. It is "other gods" that compete for my attention. It isn't an invisible demon sitting on my shoulder that makes me sin--it is my devotion to the god of Knowledge, the evil spirit of Sport, and others. And it is not the love of knowledge or the Cincinnati Reds that is wrong, but when these 'gods' rise above God in my adoration.<br />
<br />
It might help to paraphrase the teaching of Paul to prove my point:<br />
"But God chose the foolish <i>gods </i>of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak <i>gods </i>of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly <i>gods </i>of this world and the despised <i>gods</i>--and the <i>gods </i>that are not--to nullify the things that are...It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God--that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption (1 Corinthians 1.27-30, emphasis mine)<br />
<br />
I live in a nation--a Christian nation, no less--full of "other gods:" the god of the Gun, the god of Celebrity, the god of Politics, and gods of Sport, Violence, Sexuality, Nationalism--the god of Profession, no less!<br />
<br />
I myself am drawn to many of them, but I am drawn to God above all, and I seek to live a life that puts Him above these other gods, Satan or no Satan.JDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17406757121672582364noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19290662.post-70871766836586383332014-03-13T18:17:00.001-07:002014-03-13T18:32:08.903-07:00Living My Grandpa's Life<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtzxEGOVcHiB18g1nqP7rjGRlgexk-VR2kg2dmXCRda6nwhK2lcTy46B5eCtdsSs6uKpaNw96mO2QTXedH3BzmWWyUeB2xiSp4npJWd3I98Ccx7QnI-nvRrpHmh5InCNWyiGif/s1600/DadGrandpa.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtzxEGOVcHiB18g1nqP7rjGRlgexk-VR2kg2dmXCRda6nwhK2lcTy46B5eCtdsSs6uKpaNw96mO2QTXedH3BzmWWyUeB2xiSp4npJWd3I98Ccx7QnI-nvRrpHmh5InCNWyiGif/s1600/DadGrandpa.jpg" height="320" width="316" /></a></div>
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Woke up this morning in my grandpa's bed.</div>
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Put the kettle on for coffee on my grandpa's stove</div>
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Took a walk down Grandpa's driveway</div>
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looking up at constellations--</div>
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the very ones I learned from him.</div>
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I paused next to Grandpa's arched, white mailbox,</div>
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Stared up at Venus to the east-southeast.</div>
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That was when I realized</div>
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Today, March 13</div>
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Is the day I lost my grandpa--</div>
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Seven years ago,</div>
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the world at this very point in its wide orbit</div>
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end-of-winter stars in these places overhead--</div>
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a Universe eternal save his heartbeat.</div>
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He died</div>
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On a Tuesday</div>
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<br />JDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17406757121672582364noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19290662.post-58628232967995391652013-12-24T14:29:00.000-08:002013-12-24T16:29:49.982-08:00Playing for Peace on Christmas Eve<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-TZo4MZgFYJI/UriPxyKPWgI/AAAAAAAAE8Q/fNneuj49Y_Q/w974-h549-no/IMG_20131223_135407_698-SMILE.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-TZo4MZgFYJI/UriPxyKPWgI/AAAAAAAAE8Q/fNneuj49Y_Q/w974-h549-no/IMG_20131223_135407_698-SMILE.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
So this is Christmas: Fort McAllister, Georgia, the Confederate fort that marked the end point of General William Tecumseh Sherman's epic, two-month scramble from Atlanta to the Atlantic--the <a href="http://www.history.com/interactives/shermans-march" target="_blank">"March to the Sea"</a> that gutted the Confederacy, ensured Abraham Lincoln's re-election, and gave to humanity the phrase, "War is Hell."<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
So this is Christmas--or almost so: a short battle raged for fifteen minutes on the 13th of December, 1864. Thirty men died, including twelve of the fort's defenders. Over 200 were injured (the Confederates had laced the woods with land mines. One hundred ninety-five of the fort's defenders were taken prisoner. When the battle was over, a Union soldier raced to the ramparts and waved the Stars & Stripes, informing the U.S. Navy gunboats that the fort had fallen. By water and by land the way was now open to Savannah. Confederate forces quickly, humanely--abandoned the city and slipped into the swamps of South Carolina. Sherman entered the city on December 21 and sent a message to President Lincoln, presenting him the city as "<a href="http://ehistory.osu.edu/world/articles/ArticleView.cfm?AID=35" target="_blank">a Christmas present.</a>"</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
So this is Christmas: four boys advance on the fort, 149 years after Sherman's forces did. They advance at a run--double-time as Sherman might have ordered. But there is no order in their assault. One advances through the open gate, the others leap into the moat, slide through the palisades, and climb the sandy walls. "One, two, three...not it!" one of them calls. A chorus of "not it" replies, and a game of hide-and-seek commences. A fort is a great place to play hide-and-seek.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
So this is Christmas: the prophet Isaiah thunders: </div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Every warrior's boot used in battle<br />
and every garment rolled in blood<br />
will be destined for burning,<br />
will be fuel for the fire.<br />
For to us a child is born,<br />
to us a son is given,<br />
and the government will be on his shoulders.<br />
And he will be called<br />
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,<br />
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.<br />
Of the greatness of his government and peace<br />
there will be no end" (9. 5-7)</blockquote>
<div>
I find myself drawn to this kingdom--this government--where swords are used only as plowshares, spears become pruning hooks (2.4); where "the wolf will live with the lamb" and "the young child will put its hand into the viper's nest. They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain" (11.6-9). </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
But I am not living in the Era of Isaiah, nor is it 1864. I circumambulate the fort, walking between the rampart walls and the river, trying to imagine the sight of ironclads in the water, tuning my ears to the echoes of guns. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
My thoughts are invaded from time to time by calls from the battlements, "Dad?" </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
"I'm over here," I call back. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
"Uncle JD?" </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
"Don't worry."</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
So this is Christmas: I think of Isaiah again, and I grin. I think of a new poem:</div>
<div>
<i>The field of glorious battle will become a ground of hilarious fun</i></div>
<div>
<i> Your ramparts will become jungle gyms</i></div>
<div>
<i>Shouts will sound from children who use your cannon as see-saws</i></div>
<div>
<i> Your artillery shells will roll like bowling balls</i></div>
<div>
<i>In the place where your ancestors were killed and imprisoned</i></div>
<div>
<i> Your sons will hide and seek, your daughters will run and shout</i><br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
So this is Christmas: a time when the Prince of Peace haunts the grounds of war.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
</div>
<div>
So this is Christmas: war is over--at least here in Georgia it is.<br />
<br />
And this Christmas Eve, in a prayer for peace, I long for boys to play in Afghanistan and Syria and in South Sudan the way I have seen my sons and my nephews play here. <br />
<br />
So this is Christmas.</div>
JDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17406757121672582364noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19290662.post-5249615439168962122013-09-02T19:04:00.001-07:002013-09-02T19:04:48.251-07:00Book Review: Willa Cather's One of Ours<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/543137.One_of_Ours" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="One of Ours" border="0" src="http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1349072170m/543137.jpg" /></a><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/543137.One_of_Ours">One of Ours</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/881203.Willa_Cather">Willa Cather</a><br/>
My rating: <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/709825100">3 of 5 stars</a><br /><br />
I love-love-love Willa Cather's work. She's one of my favorite authors. Why doesn't she get the respect she deserves?<br /><br />I think it boils down to the era in which she wrote. The inter-war renaissance of letters that found Ernest Hemingway at his peak, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Faulkner and eventually John Steinbeck (a regionalist whose works compare well to Cather's). Think of it this way. Do you remember the third-best hitter on the 1927 Yankees after Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig? Would you believe Bob Meusel hit .337 with 105 RBI? That's where Cather stands among the American writers of her day--and in my book, that's pretty darn good.<br /><br />In <u>One Of Ours</u> Cather focuses on the story of Claude Wheeler a farm boy who is trapped between two worlds: he's smart enough to go to a Christian college--and excel at a public university, too, much to his father's chagrin--but he's tied to the land, and he returns to farm his property when his brother, Ralph, gets a farm out in Colorado.<br /><br />Claude is passionate enough to attract a girl-next-door type named Enid, but again, he's trapped between two worlds, able to provide amply for Enid, but unable to receive passion in return (which she saves for her religious activities, ultimately ditching him for the chance to be a missionary in China).<br /><br />The war arrives, then, to solve an existential crisis of Claude's. This is where Cather moves from <u>My Antonia</u> territory into topical stuff: America's reasons to join the war.<br /><br />Europeans who read <u>One of Ours</u> will find its treatment of World War I vastly inferior to the rich literature that Europeans produced--and continue to write--around the conflict. But <u>OOO</u> is one of the few American novels that described the war from our perspective (again, it suffers against the competition of Hemingway's superior <u>A Farewell to Arms</u>).<br /><br />But Cather brings out a central truth of the American Expeditionary Force that I haven't found in another American source on the war. Claude isn't fighting for empire, and his soldiers joke about the silly slogan, "making the world safe for democracy." Americans like Claude fight for existential reasons: <br /><blockquote>"But as for me, I never knew there was anything worth living for till this war came on. Before that, the world seemed like a business proposition" [Claude says]<br /> "You'll admit it's a costly way of providing adventure for the young," said David drily.</blockquote><br />Americans fought for personal reasons, not political ones. That's the way we waged the bloody wars of the 20th Century, and it's why our culture found something to glorify in every battle, unlike the Europeans who had fought and died on the very same ground in France, Indochina and the Middle East. <br /><br />The war passes almost as a series of R&R visits to households in France. The battles are short and graphic. The final two chapters are well researched and vividly rendered, but they can't get away from the shallow self-indulgence that was Claude's war...and in relation, was America's as well.<br />
<br/><br/>
<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/5693583-james-jd-dittes">View all my reviews</a>
JDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17406757121672582364noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19290662.post-57358634719559280512013-03-24T11:04:00.005-07:002013-03-24T11:04:59.617-07:00Give Me This Cup: A Meditation for Holy Week 2013It's almost Easter.<br />
<br />
The senses awaken: a whisper in the air, "spring is almost come," and the smell. Dirt writhes with worms, flowers burst to life.<br />
<br />
My mind goes back. I see a cross.<br />
<br />
And hanging there, a man looks back at me.<br />
<br />
Or maybe he's not looking directly at me. His eyes seem distant--deadened by pain and heartbreak<br />
<br />
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He says, "I thirst."<br />
<br />
My first instinct is to help him, although soldiers guard the condemned, and his mouth would be three feet out of reach even if I did make it to the cross. I see a soldier wrap a dirty rag around the end of a branch. Perhaps he was listening, too. <br />
<br />
The soldier dips the rag into a wooden bucket. He twists it in there.<br />
<br />
I wave my arm at the soldier. He doesn't see me.<br />
<br />
I cry out--he doesn't understand a word I say--"That's not what he meant!" I call.<br />
<br />
"I thirst."<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br /><br />
I think I finally understand what Jesus means by that. The cry, "I thirst," echoes back through his ministry to the very beginning.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">A Wedding Feast</span><br />
"I thirst." The cry comes not from the Master, but from the banquet table. Servants exchange fearful glances. The wine is all gone. Only the empty casks remain in the storeroom. Casks for water. Water for cleansing. Cleansing for washing up, after the wine is all gone.<br />
<br />
"I have an idea." Mary hurries from the empty room.<br />
<br />
She returns. With Him.<br />
<br />
"Fill the casks with water," he says. We fill. We pour. <a href="http://jdittes.blogspot.com/2006/05/water-and-wine-thoughts-on-john-2.html" target="_blank">Out comes wine</a>.<br />
<br />
"I thirst," the voice calls again from the banquet hall.<br />
<br />
A servant picks up one of the casks and carries it away. Soon there is laughter, the clatter of cups, the bombast of toasts as the Master returns to the feast.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">In Samaria</span><br />
"I thirst," the Master urges a woman.<br />
<br />
The woman looks surprised. She pulls back her headscarf. Sunlight shows darker skin, alien features. "You're not asking someone like <i>me</i> for water, are you?"<br />
<br />
He is. He thirsts, but so does she.<br />
<br />
And in response to a cup of water, this Master who thirsts offers her--offers me--"living water...welling up to eternal life" (John 4.10, 13).<br />
<br />
This man who hangs. This cross. This man who says, "I thirst."<br />
<br />
And is this all? The writer of John, the one who sends Jesus out eating and drinking among those who hunger and thirst (there is a meal in every chapter, it seems, and the last meal--the Last Supper--stretches out over five chapters), it isn't just he who notices--it is more than him who records these deeds.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">The Upper Room</span><br />
"I will thirst."<br />
<br />
The Master holds out a cup as he says this. He takes a sip and passes the cup around the table. "Truly I tell you, I will not drink of that fruit of the vine until that day I drink it new in the kingdom of God" (Mark 14.25).<br />
<br />
The wine is new. Made bitter, though. "It's blood," the Master says. "My blood, poured for many" (verse 24). Poured out for me.<br />
<br />
My God! Wine poured out for me--and yet, "I thirst." They're his words. Not mine!<br />
<br />
And he waits. To drink. Again. With me.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">The Garden</span><br />
"I'm not thirsty!"<br />
<br />
Face down in the garden, Christ pleads.<br />
<br />
"Daddy!" he cries out. His eyes are closed. Tears escape them. One sees blood.<br />
<br />
"Everything is possible for you." He groans. "Take this cup from me" (Mark 14.36).<br />
<br />
It stays. With him.<br />
<br />
The cup--it stays. It is poured out. Refilled, it is poured again, hour after hour, drop after precious drop of water...turned to wine...turned to blood...on that cross.<br />
<br />
So when he says, "I thirst," on that cross--<br />
<br />
To my mind, he's thinking of the garden--of a moment of weakness, of the fear of separation that haunted Gethsemane's shadows.<br />
<br />
It isn't a parched tongue that cries out. It's a triumphant spirit.<br />
<br />
He isn't asking a question. He's making a statement.<br />
<br />
He isn't addressing an executioner. He's telling God,<br />
<br />
"I thirst."<br />
<br />
It is the cup he takes back, not a bitter rag that reeks of spoiled vinegar, the one from the garden.<br />
<br />
The one from the upper room, the one that pours out mercy at every Communion feast.<br />
<br />
The one that poured living water in Samaria, wedding wine in Cana: the cup that never will run dry.<br />
<br />
He took it back. With two words, "I thirst," Christ took that cup and drank<br />
<br />
its dregs<br />
<br />
dry.<br />
<br />
-----------------<br />
<br />
A couple of notes:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>This post was inspired by my remarkable pastor, Jeff Streszoff, whose sermon series "The Last Words of Christ" has blessed my church throughout Lent.</li>
<li>The image is one I found through Google Images. I didn't pay for it, nor did I profit from it, but the artist deserves credit. If you're looking for high-quality photography or video, check out <a href="http://gate5films.com/" target="_blank">Gate5 Films</a>.</li>
</ul>
JDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17406757121672582364noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19290662.post-90420979072706837022013-02-13T14:10:00.001-08:002013-02-13T16:08:03.339-08:0030 Psalms<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdBDIFuKUFOeWxsGSNXnbczj_ZIxc_wPw0M8dj85-3aAxKIsy0Sh7TNSEJ6I8W4LOYqI824HeuCVnGeFyh6JTigXvY-bpoTPGGgEBHFuxLm40Sjev7WqbrtK1eVQZU6oWG56RR/s1600/2013-02-12_21-55-16_508.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdBDIFuKUFOeWxsGSNXnbczj_ZIxc_wPw0M8dj85-3aAxKIsy0Sh7TNSEJ6I8W4LOYqI824HeuCVnGeFyh6JTigXvY-bpoTPGGgEBHFuxLm40Sjev7WqbrtK1eVQZU6oWG56RR/s320/2013-02-12_21-55-16_508.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
The weeks between <a href="https://www.churchpublishing.org/media/custom/IN-Formation/Epiphany2013.pdf" target="_blank">Epiphany </a>and Lent are among the darkest of the year.<br />
<br />
Sure, the sun sets before I can return home from my teaching job on most days, but they are spiritually muddled, too.<br />
<br />
I blame New Year's resolutions. The Christian calendar has plenty of opportunities for reflection and the practice of discipline (like Lent), but resolutions throw a secular wrench into the works. I often spend January trying to lose weight, exercise more, avoid eating out, etc. It is usually one of the more unexciting times of the year to practice my faith.<br />
<br />
This year, I made a resolution that resolved this dilemma. In the six weeks between Epiphany Sunday and Ash Wednesday, I would write out 30 psalms by hand. This idea isn't <a href="http://www.northlandchurch.net/blogs/writing_out_the_bible_starting_january_1/" target="_blank">new</a>, but the practice was for me. I accomplished my goal this week with two days to spare.<br />
<br />
(Here's I need to give a shout out to my academy friend, Doug Pratt, who posted the idea to Facebook before Christmas. At the time I read it, I thought how silly it would be to try something like this during the busy, holiday season, but later I was inspired to try writing out 30 psalms after Advent.)<br />
<br />
I just wanted to post some of the things I learned about the psalms during this encounter. I have extended my obsession with the Jewish Temple to meditating on psalms <a href="http://jdittes.blogspot.com/2010/09/hart-that-pants-for-worship-meditation.html" target="_blank">42</a>, <a href="http://jdittes.blogspot.com/2010/10/better-is-one-day-in-your-courts.html" target="_blank">84</a>, <a href="http://jdittes.blogspot.com/2011/03/real-simple-worship-thoughts-on-psalm.html" target="_blank">95</a>, <a href="http://jdittes.blogspot.com/2010/10/praise-lord-o-my-soul-thoughts-on-psalm.html" target="_blank">103</a>, <a href="http://jdittes.blogspot.com/2010/10/more-than-watchmen-wait-for-morning.html" target="_blank">130</a>, and <a href="http://jdittes.blogspot.com/2010/11/i-waited-patiently-for-lord-meditation.html" target="_blank">40</a> in other blogs on this site, so I won't spend a lot of time on analysis on this blog.<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>I tried to be "led" to psalms. I'd hear one referenced in a sermon or on a Facebook post, and I'd plan to transcribe it. For example, after one NFL playoff game, I saw Baltimore Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis wearing a shirt that said, "Psalm 91." I hate the Ravens with the bitterness only a Cleveland Browns fan can know, but that night I transcribed the psalm.</li>
<li>I saved Psalm 30 for one of my last. It was a most pleasant discovery, especially given the context of Lent: </li>
<ul>
<li>"What is it to be gained by my spilled blood, by my going down into the pit? Does dust thank you? Does it proclaim your faithfulness? Lord, listen and have mercy upon me! Lord, be my helper!" (verses 9-10).</li>
<li>What follows soon after is a foretaste of Easter: "You changed my mourning into dancing. You took off my funeral clothes and dressed me up in joy so that my whole being might sing praises to you and never stop. Lord, my God, I will give thanks to you forever."</li>
</ul>
<li>I was surprised how many of the 30 psalms dealt with the theme of revenge and retribution. I think of psalms as expressions of praise and devotion. In fact, many of them follow a pretty simple formula:</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<ul>
<li>"I acknowledge you, God, and I write your praise</li>
<li>---> "No other divinity is like you."</li>
<li>---> "No other nation is like yours."</li>
<li>---> "There are people who oppose your king/your nation" (they're the same thing in the psalms).</li>
<li>---> "Please punish them severely. OK?"</li>
<li>---> "Then you will be acknowledged and praised once again."</li>
</ul>
<li>I love to worship, and I believe the Psalms represent exemplars of worship.</li>
<li>But I consider the act of begging God to avenge himself upon my enemies to be a sacrilege.</li>
<li>I transcribed from the Common English Bible--a recent translation that is supported by a number of mainline Protestant denominations--that had been given to Owen when he completed confirmation classes at church. It was the first chance I'd had to really get into this Bible. </li>
<ul>
<li>The language of the CEB was, well, common--as opposed to rich (I prefer the NIV or TNIV). For example, I searched and searched the words, "Be still and know that I am God" (46:10). So many translations of the Bible fail with the psalms because the King James owns the rhythm and the texture of the words. Reading a translation of the 23rd Psalm without "he leadeth me beside still waters" is about as off-putting as versions of Shakespeare's that rephrase Hamlet, saying, "To exist or maybe not to." </li>
<li>In the <a href="http://www.biblestudytools.com/ceb/psalms/46-10.html" target="_blank">CEB, Psalm 46:10</a> reads: "That's enough! Now know that I am God!"</li>
<li>Really? Can one replace "be still" with an exclamation point? It's jarring. And the rhythm is totally off. At least the double meaning remains</li>
<li>The CEB overuses exclamation points. I get it with the psalms--they're emotional, they're passionate. But only poor writers mistake exclamation points for passion, yet that's what the translators of this version have done. I won't bother to count them, but 40-60% of the sentences in the psalms I transcribed ended with exclamation points, which is 39-59% too many of them!</li>
</ul>
<li>I'm not sure if you can read from the picture, but the psalms I transcribed were the following: 2, 5, 8, 14, 18, 19, 22, 27, 30, 40, 42, 45, 46, 51, 63, 77, 79, 81, 89, 90, 91, 100, 110, 115, 121, 127, 137, 139, 146, 150.</li>
</ul>
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<br />JDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17406757121672582364noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19290662.post-19898900773337914012012-12-02T19:43:00.000-08:002012-12-02T19:44:07.755-08:00Of Spider Fathers and Christmas Day<a href="http://media.economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/290-width/images/print-edition/20121201_STP002_0.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://media.economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/290-width/images/print-edition/20121201_STP002_0.jpg" width="270" /></a><br />
<a href="http://economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21567316-male-spiders-make-supreme-sacrifice-their-children-having-mate">This article in the Economist</a> magazine just blew my mind. Researchers took wolf spiders and ran experiments to see why female spiders consumed their mates following copulation.<br /><br />What they found was shocking. When they looked at the hatchlings of mothers that feasted on fathers and those that didn't, here's what they found: when mommy ate daddy, 48% of babies survived one month after hatching. When daddy survived mommy, only 12% of the hatchlings survived.<br /><br />Put simply: a dead daddy produced four times as many surviving hatchlings as a live one.<br /><br />So what's more important: babies' lives or daddy's? The researchers hypothesize that, in giving up his life to his mate, the male wolf spider provides fuel to his offspring that make their survival more likely.<br /><br />While I am happy to relate that I survived the creation of three children (100% of which survive, thanks be to God) with the partnership of a vegetarian wife, this story reminds me that fatherhood is filled with sacrifice. American fathers aren't consumed by our wives but by our children: braces, clothes, Christmas presents--and don't even get me started about the cost of college or driving.<br /><br />Whether it's hobbies that we give up or careers, human fathers make these sacrifices for the same reason that wolf spiders do: because seeing our children prosper is more precious than anything--including Life Itself.<br /><br />I'm reminded as we enter Advent today, of a father who gave up home, reputation and livelihood for the sake of a Son he did not create. There is no record that Joseph survived to see Jesus' adulthood, but Joseph's sacrifice set history in motion.JDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17406757121672582364noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19290662.post-65895485454683766932012-11-17T08:07:00.002-08:002012-11-17T08:25:11.403-08:00Idols in our Pockets"What's in your wallet?"<br />
<br />
It's a fair question, considering the world we live in.<br />
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What's in my wallet is identification. There is some cash in there--or at least there was before my daughter asked me for some money to cover her weekend expenses. There are credit cards, health insurance cards, "frequent shopper" benefits, and stuff like that.<br />
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"What's in your wallet?"<br />
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It's the tag line for a credit card company, too. I won't promote the name, but their ads often feature pagan spokespeople who take time from pillaging (and Christmas shopping) to inquire about viewers' means of payment.<br />
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"What's in your wallet?"<br />
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It's a leading question, one that was asked by Jesus Christ at a time and in a context that placed his ministry in political peril. Every student of the gospels know that Jesus instructed his followers to "Give unto Caesar that which is Caesar's" (Mark 12 and Luke 20).<br />
<br />
Few may remember that before he stated that, Jesus asked:
"What's in your wallet?"
(Or something like that.) In my version of the Bible, the TNIV, he actually says, "Bring me a denarius and let me look at it" (Mark 12.15).<br />
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It's a funny question because it was supposed to be a trap. Should we pay taxes to Caesar? There was no easy answer to that question in 1st-century Judaea. No one liked taxes, yet there was one thing more fatal to a public career than endorsing Roman taxes, and that was challenging them.<br />
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It was a trap that Jesus answered first with the words, "what's in your wallet?" or "show me a denarius."<br />
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We infer from Jesus' words that he didn't have a denarius on him. We might even wonder if Jesus knew what a denarius looked like. With a little digging into scripture, we can understand <i>why</i> he didn't have one.<br />
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A Roman <a href="http://www.historicjesus.com/glossary/coins.html" target="_blank">denarius was worth</a> a day's wages for a laborer, around $80 today, so perhaps it's not surprising that Jesus didn't carry these coins around with him. But it wasn't just the value that may have prevented Jesus from carrying one of his own, it was the appearance of these coins, too: encircling the image of Caesar on the "heads" side were the words, "Son of the divine (Augustus)," and on back, the words, "high priest" surrounded the image of a goddess.<br />
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In other words, the coins born inscriptions quite similar to those that Jesus' followers would make about him in the weeks after his Resurrection. But Christ's accusers carried more than words in their wallets.<br />
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The engravings of Tiberius and the godess found on the denarius would seem to violate the prohibition in the 2nd Commandment: "You shall not make for yourself a <i>graven image</i> in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below" (Ex 20.4). The word, "graven" (from the Middle English word "grafen,") carries <a href="http://www.thefreedictionary.com/grave" target="_blank">two meanings</a>. It can mean an image that is sculpted, much like the idols of the near east. It can also mean "to stamp or impress deeply." After all, it's the root of the word, "engrave."<br />
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Deuteronomy 4.16 strengthens this prohibition. It warns Israel against making "any shape, whether formed like a man or a woman, or like any animal on earth or any bird that flies in the air." A similar prohibition continues in Islam today, which forbids the use of images in art, particularly those of Mohammed.<br />
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Pagans and wallets. They weren't merely subjects for an ad campaign in Jesus' day, they were at the center of contentious, theological debate.<br />
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In a way, Jesus' question, "What's in your wallet?" was another way to demand, "Bring out your idols."<br />
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And when someone produced a coin, it meant that Jesus had out-radicalized them before he could get to the words, "Give unto Caesar...." The questioner carried in his wallet Caesar's image--which happened to be very valuable to the bearer--far too valuable to give back in the form of a tax. Jesus didn't carry Caesar's image. Therefore there was little for him to hold onto--little for him to tug back and forth with the Roman authorities--little for Jesus to hold closer to his heart than the Father.<br />
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I am left to wonder, then, what's in my wallet--whether I might be carrying idols around on my person.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Foreign Coins, Foreign Figures</span><br />
I've long been as fascinated with the appearance of money as with the accumulation of it. The bill and the coin is an avenue into the heart of a nation's culture--and the more I have traveled, the more I have learned to appreciate how coins represent cultures.<br />
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I have a jar of coins on my living room mantle left over from my days adventuring over Europe before the age of the Euro. There are about ten countries represented. When I look for gods I find them on the "heads" of coins from Switzerland, France, Greece and Italy. All but Greece feature goddesses. Italy and Greece feature the heads of the goddess & god in profile while France and Switzerland feature the image from head to toe.<br />
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Other countries feature political figures. England and Canada are engraved with Queen Elizabeth's image. I have two Spanish coins, one with the dictator Franco (1966) and one with King Juan Carlos (1980). I have a Turkish coin and one from Hungary that feature their nations' founders, Kemal Ataturk and Lajos Kossuth, respectively.<i> (The coins featured in the picture are--clockwise from top left--England, Turkey, Italy, US nickel (front), US penny (tails), Greece and Switzerland.)</i><br />
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Even more fascinating than the coins are the bills. Coins have changed very little since the days of Tiberius Caesar. Bills are a modern development, and they are far more customized to describe their country. From my travels in Europe throughout the 1990s, I remember the British pound proudly promoting three titans of the nation's history: the Duke of Wellington, William Shakespeare and James Watt. I have a ten-pound note that I keep (my first paid writing commission) that bears the image of Florence Nightingale Of course every British banknote also features one side with Queen Elizabeth's portrait.<br />
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I don't have a wide collection, but my 100,000 Turkish Lira note bears Ataturk's image on both sides--his portrait on one, and a picture of him accepting flowers from children on the other. I collected this note in 1999, 60 years after Ataturk's death, no less, demonstrating the enormous power that Turkey's founder continues to wield. My 1,000,000 Turkish Lira note (which was worth about $2.50 when I visited in 1999) had a picture of a dam.<br />
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My 1000 Italian Lira note bears Maria Montessori's image. I can't emphasize how cool it is that a nation would feature a teacher on a banknote. My communist-era Albanian note is a fascinating look at the darkest year (1976) of that nation's red paranoia. A pickaxe and a gun mark one side, guarding the construction of an apartment building (complete with cranes and scaffolding), while on the other side young men and women march in military formation, carrying the Albanian flag (and Kalashnikovs) [Pictured].<br />
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I remember seeing Austrian "schilling" bills with doctors and engineers on them and thinking to myself: wow, science and technology is really important to this country. What is important in mine?<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">American Gods</span><br />
A look at American coins and bills shows a fascination with government, plain and simple. The graven images on the coins that Americans carry are of politicians, not of gods (I'll let someone else explain the "tails" sides of American coinage). Do Americans worship great presidents? I think we do to a certain extent. One need only visit the U.S. Capitol, tour the Rotunda and stare up at the <a href="http://aoc.gov/capitol-hill/murals/apotheosis-washington" target="_blank">Apotheosis of Washington</a> painted on the dome's interior in 1865 to verify this tendency. <br />
<br />
<a href="http://aoc.gov/sites/default/files/styles/artwork-node/public/images/artwork/6082318543_90e9752777_o.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://aoc.gov/sites/default/files/styles/artwork-node/public/images/artwork/6082318543_90e9752777_o.jpg" width="311" /></a>Moreover, the presidents featured on American coins share one common feature: they presided over significant steps in the establishment and expansion of American government. <b>Washington </b>fought to establish the United States, presided over the Constitutional Convention, and served only two terms as the nation's first president. As president, <b>Jefferson </b>doubled the size of the nation with the Louisiana Purchase and presided over America's first overseas military adventure "to the shores of Tripoli," as the Marine hymn says. <b>Lincoln </b>fought to keep the Union together in the face of rebellion and then oversaw an enormous increase in federal power established in the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments. And <b>FDR </b>set the federal government on the course to where it is today, acting more as an insurer of economic security than a defender of national security. These men weren't gods, per se, but they were key players who brought the U.S. government to greater heights of power.<br />
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Now look at American bills. Washington, Lincoln and Jefferson have their own bills. The other bills feature general-presidents like <b>Andrew Jackson</b>, who crushed native power in the Southeast as a general and expelled them as president, and <b>Ulysses S Grant</b> whose generalship saved the union in the Civil War and whose presidency shamelessly rewarded private railroad and mining interests. Two non-presidents are also featured as well, Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton.<br />
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Apparently no public figure since Grant has been worthy of having his or her image on a bill. I think that part of this is because few people idolize public figures anymore. World War I ended the age of kings in Europe, and it is no coincidence that--in America at least--no public figure since (with the exception of FDR on the tiny dime) has been engraved into metal or paper.<br />
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The backs of U.S. bills are no less revealing. With the exception of the $1 (US symbols) and the $2 (portrait of the signing of the Declaration of Independence) bills, they all feature government buildings: the White House, the Capitol, the U.S. Treasury, the Lincoln Temple/Memorial.<br />
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What's in my wallet? It's the United States government and the men who consecrated it.<br />
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It isn't Caesar's graven image that holds me in thrall, it's Washington's, Lincoln's and Franklin's. It isn't a priestess engraved on the "tails" side but martial eagles, eye-capped pyramids, and public temples<br />
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And despite every coin's engraving, "In God we Trust," my money isn't God.<br />
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It is as divisive as it was in Christ's day. In an era when pushing the nation over a "fiscal cliff" is seen by some as preferable to paying taxes, "what's in your wallet?" engenders a religious fervor equivalent to that which confronted Jesus in the day of the Tiberian denarius.<br />
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And I think that Christ's question remains a challenge that may be even more difficult for Christ-followers to accept today than it was among his homeless band of disciples. "Show me a denarius." A denarius was anathema to Christ and his followers, who trafficked a currency that--like its kingdom--was not of this world.<br />
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Looking back, I think that the best response to Jesus' direction, "show me a denarius," would have been this: "What's a denarius?"<br />
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Looking forward, perhaps Christians' best responses to "what's in your wallet?" just might eventually become--in that perfect Kingdom--"What is a wallet?"<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Two Notes:</span><br />
<i>If I were in Congress (don't worry, I never will be), I would like to see U.S. currency feature a broader range of historical figures, much like the European bills did in the decades before the Euro. To me, American Inventors should be celebrated for a time. I would nominate </i><br />
<br />
<ul>
<li><i>Thomas Edison ($1)</i></li>
<li><i>Eli Whitney ($5)</i></li>
<li><i>Orville & Wilbur Wright ($10)</i></li>
<li><i>George Washington Carver ($20)</i></li>
<li><i>Alexander Graham Bell ($100)</i></li>
</ul>
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<i>Possible alternatives: Benjamin Franklin, Robert Fulton, Samuel F.B. Morse, Cyrus McCormick, Steve Jobs</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Comment below and tell me what you think. Would you add writers? Civil Rights Figures? Movie Stars?</i><br />
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<i>This blog owes a debt to N.T. Wright's book, <u>How God Became King</u>, and his description of the exchange found on pages 147-149. Suffice it to say, I recommend the book. This is one of many fascinating ideas I got from reading it.</i><br />
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<br />JDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17406757121672582364noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19290662.post-85835868097173724282012-02-11T13:28:00.001-08:002012-02-11T13:54:07.197-08:00"Tree of Life" and the Search for God<div class="" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Every year, I get the chance to see one "grown-up movie." Usually it comes around my birthday at the end of January, just after Academy Awards nominations are made. With the help of On Demand this year, we've been able to watch both <i>The Help</i> and <i>Tree of Life</i>, and it's the latter movie that I feel is worthy of an Oscar-season review here at Point Pleasant.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I'm always amazed at the overt spirituality of the best films that are released every year. Hollywood seems like such a bastion of secularism, but time and again I am humbled by the spiritual connections made in some of my favorite movies. Two years, I blogged about the Easter-connected film, <i><a href="http://jdittes.blogspot.com/2009/02/slumdog-millionaire-will-easter-story.html" target="_blank">Slumdog Millionaire</a>. </i>I didn't have time last year to discuss my favorite movie of 2010, <i>True Grit</i>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">First, a note about the term, "Tree of Life." As I grew up, I understood that this was the tree that grew in the Garden of Eden, a symbol of eternal life that Adam and Eve consumed, and from which they were blocked by an angel with a flaming sword after their capital-f, Fall (Genesis 3.22-25). </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">(Four years ago,<a href="http://jdittes.blogspot.com/2008/05/clues-to-tree-of-life.html" target="_blank"> I blogged about this Tree of Life</a> after I had found the species of tree that grew in the garden.) This tree makes a return appearance in Revelation 22.1-5, bearing twelve different fruits every season and engendering "the healing of the nations."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<a href="http://www.zo.utexas.edu/faculty/antisense/TreeOfLifeArt.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://www.zo.utexas.edu/faculty/antisense/TreeOfLifeArt.jpg" width="320" /></span></a><span style="font-family: inherit;">But there is a different Tree of Life I have studied in recent years--one that draws from Charles Darwin. When I studied biology in school, I understood the plant and animal kingdoms, and I broke those into phyla and other, smaller groups, each kingdom was a pyramid that grew broader and broader toward its base, where I found <i>homo sapien</i> among the list of primate species..</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The biological Tree of Life illustrates the biological principal that life is truly broader than mere plants and animals. Ninety percent (or more) of all living things cannot be seen by the human eye, and the Tree of Life tries to incorporate bacteria, viruses, fungi, and the huge assortment of living things into one, circular family--quite a contrast to the pyramidal structure of life that I learned in my high school biology classes (a picture of this tree of life is included into the blog, a more three-dimensional representation can be found <a href="http://www.tolweb.org/tree/" target="_blank">here</a>).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">This is the proper setup for the movie, <i>Tree of Life</i>, which is obsessed with spirituality, with prayer, with God, but not with Genesis. Instead, the film begins with a quote from the book of Job (my favorite creation account found in the Bible): </span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation?<br /> Tell me, if you understand." Job 38. 4</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The central character in the film is a man named Jack O'Brian (yes, the initials spell, "Job"), who has come to question his faith following the death of his brother. The plot of the film takes place inside Jack's head, in a series of recollections of childhood, of whispered prayers, and of wildly fantastical imaginings. Because it takes place inside Jack's head, don't necessarily expect a beginning and middle--nor should the viewer expect to know for sure <i>which </i>of Jack's two brothers has died--I think it's pretty easy to figure out.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">At his core, Jack has a God problem. There are two forms of God who battle for Jack's affection and respect--a conundrum that most people of faith would understand. The dilemma is stated succinctly by Mrs. O'Brian: "There are two ways through life - the way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you'll follow.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Jack's mother represents God the Nurturer--the way of grace. She is full of wonder. She is loving. She comforts Jack and his brothers. In one of her voiceovers, she whispers, "Do good to them. Wonder. Hope." This is the kind of God she is--and Jack adores her.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 18px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">But there is a second embodiment of God, found in Jack's father: God the <i>Naturer</i>, the Striver, the Responsible. "You are not to call me, 'Dad,'" he bellows in one contentious scene, "You are to call me 'Father!'" He tries to instruct Jack, to teach him manners, to toughen him up for the challenges that life will throw at him. (In a particularly heartfelt scene, Mr. O'Brian teaches Jack to fight him, challenging the son to punch him in the face.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">These two forces seem to tear at Jack, who like St. Paul wrestles with the desires to do the things he doesn't want to do while failing to do that which he <i>should </i>do. An illustration of this comes in one of the scenes at church. Soon after a funeral where Mr. O'Brian's strictness and reverence has been on display, Jack can be seen in the empty sanctuary <i>walking across the tops of the pews</i>!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The movie never gives one form of God preference over the other. In the scene where Jack enters transcendence, both of them are there, and both greet him warmly.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The whisper is an important part of the movie. By my recollection, about 15% of the dialogue is whispered in voice over, sounding almost like prayers: </span></div>
<div>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;">"Are you there?"</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;">"Do you know what happened? Do you care?"</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;">"Where do you live?"</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;">"Are you watching me? I want to see what you see."</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I'm not sure how this appears to someone who doesn't have a faith background. It must seem terribly random, this hidden, disembodied dialogue. To me, though, this is the "true" story of experience--the questions that linger, that bring both sadness and wonder.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">I was also struck by the dynamic between the two oldest brothers featured in the movie. While Jack is frustrated by the different natures of his parents, his younger brother, R.L, seems to embody them effortlessly. In another transcendent scene, R.L. practices his guitar on the porch outside the room in which his father plays the piano. The two instruments gradually fade into an impromptu duet on Pachelbel's Canon. The look of pride on Mr. O'Brian's face is unmistakable--"This is the one who <i>gets it</i>."</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 18px;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">And with mother, the relationship is also warm. R.L. asks Mrs. O'Brian, "Tell us a story from before we can remember," and the movie launches into it's most talked-about scene: a cosmos-spanning depiction of the creation of the Universe. This stunning, watching galaxies spin into existence, seeing the sun emerge through the dust of forming planets, peeking in on two dinosaurs that play in a riverbed.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">But R.L. is an Abel to Jack's Cain. Jack's deepest conflicts come to the fore when he is around his brother. At one point, Jack demands that R.L. stick a wire into a lamp. When he isn't shocked, R.L. says, "I trust you." Later, though, Jack asks R.L. to put his finger over the tip of his BB gun, and here R.L.'s faith is destroyed. If Mr. and Mrs. O'Brian are the two sides of God, then R.L. and Jack are the two sides of humanity.</span></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 18px;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 18px;"><i>Tree of Life</i>. It's a prayer and a meditation more than it is a story--which is why I don't necessarily think of it as a great movie. Still, it was an opportunity for me to seek God and see God again through Job's eyes and through those of the fictional O'Brian family, too.</span></span></div>
JDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17406757121672582364noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19290662.post-70585792894155660622011-12-26T07:44:00.001-08:002011-12-26T07:44:07.484-08:00Book Review: Wyoming Stories by Annie Proulx<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1781879.Fine_Just_the_Way_it_Is" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px;"><img alt="Fine Just the Way it Is" border="0" src="http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1266893432m/1781879.jpg" /></a><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1781879.Fine_Just_the_Way_it_Is">Fine Just the Way it Is</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1262010.Annie_Proulx">Annie Proulx</a><br />
My rating: <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/251214234">3 of 5 stars</a><br />
<br />
I've been to Wyoming. Once. It was late spring. I crossed the northern part of the state from the Black Hills to Yellowstone, then climbed down the spine of the Tetons to Colorado. It was the most beautiful place I've ever seen: lush and green, bursting with wildlife, hot springs, and geysers. The worst thing I can say about Wyoming is that I've never been back...
<br />
<br />
...save through the writing of Annie Proulx. She's been to Wyoming, too, and she's been there a long time. And her time in Wyoming wasn't just a verdant two weeks in spring. And her writing captures with stark realism a Wyoming that isn't just smiling hotel clerks, and dude-ranch cowboys. And yet there is real beauty hidden throughout this book--beauty that one finds in no other American place.
<br />
<br />
For example, the spectacular scenery of Catlin's hike in "Testimony of the Donkey": hidden lakes, decades-old signatures on the rocks, a splendid scene, all for one dangerous element. I loved the fairy-tale feel of "The Sagebrush Kid" and the interweaving of various histories of the West into the tales.
<br />
<br />
I completely skipped the two stories about the Devil, though. And while Proulx's prose is often praised, I tried to read "The Sagebrush Kid" out loud to my wife, and found myself tongue tied and stammering.
<br />
<br />
Still, the book is a pleasant return to a wonderfully beautiful, haunted place: Wyoming.
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/5693583-james-jd-dittes">View all my reviews</a>JDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17406757121672582364noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19290662.post-40831152573116109012011-12-17T17:41:00.000-08:002011-12-24T19:34:11.654-08:00And His Name... Shall be Called... IshmaelThe Advent Season is the best time to be a Christian, and it's not just because of Christmas presents or the yummy food at Grandma's house.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The Advent Season is a season of promise. Emmanuel is coming! And the promise of "God with Us" is a realization that I treasure year after year after year.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
It's just that every year, I find Emmanuel in a new place. It may be in the glow of candlelight or in the words of a Christmas carol. I may find it in a gift or scrawled on the back of a Christmas card. It's always such a surprise. I know I will find "God with Me," and I will be blessed by that revelation.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
There is one place I find Emmanuel more than any other, and that is in the Bible. Advent is a time for scripture, and whether it is in the Psalms, the Gospels, or the lyrical prophecies of Isaiah, Emmanuel is often there waiting.</div>
<div>
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<div>
This year I found it in a Bible study I attend at Oasis Church. We've been making our way through Genesis, and the text for study was chapter 16: the birth of Ishmael. What I found there was the Christmas story--yes, perhaps one with Father Abraham instead of St. Nicholas, but a story with a special meaning for gentile Christians (like me) nonetheless.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The chapter begins with the matriarch of the Jewish faith, Sarai. (Abram was a patriarch, indeed, but he fathered many different nations. The strain of the Jewish story in the Old Testament wends back to Sarai/Sarah and the child God promised through <i>her</i>, not through Abram.)</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Sarai gives up waiting for a child, and she gives her slave to Abram as a surrogate mother. There is no mention of the enslaved woman's feelings about this arrangement--the prospect of a union with an 85-year-old man could not have felt too enticing. The slave--an exiled Egyptian girl named Hagar who was part of the human bounty of Sarai's brief marriage to Pharoah--becomes pregnant, however, and soon begins to "despise her mistress" (verse 4). The context of the verse implies an "I'm pregnant and you're not" attitude, </div>
<div>
but I would posit that Hagar is enslaved by Sarai, forced into a sexual union with Sarai's elderly husband, and impregnated with a child that will legally become Sarai's. I would argue that there are very many reasons for Hagar to "despise her mistress."</div>
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What follows is abuse. Sarai mistreats Hagar; Abram abandons her to Sarai's vengeance, "Your servant is in your hands" (verse 6).</div>
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<div>
What follows is escape. Hagar runs away, and she doesn't stop running until she's on the road back home to Egypt.</div>
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What follows is Christmas.</div>
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<div>
The way to Egypt is perilous for a pregnant young woman to travel alone. Hagar finds a well and waits there for help. The Bible doesn't say it explicitly, but it's safe to say that Hagar prays for help there--begging from the merchants who passed by, and calling out to the God of her elderly protector. (To understand the scene and her need for assistance at the well, consider the assistance her nephew, Jacob, would later give Rachael at a well in Genesis 29: 6-10). <br />
<br />
It is at this well that Hagar meets "the angel of the Lord."</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The angel encourages Hagar to return to Abram and Sarai, promising not just one child but many descendants.</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The angel of the Lord also said to her:<br />
"You are now with child<br />
and you will have a son.<br />
You shall name him Ishmael,<br />
for the Lord has heard you" (Genesis 16.11)</blockquote>
<div>
Christmas suddenly seems closer. This seems very close to the directions an angel later gave to Mary: </div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"You will be with child and give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus. For he will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High" (Luke 1.32)</blockquote>
<div>
The names are different, but the stories share key elements. The message is delivered by an angel; the promise is for everyone.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
Ishmael means "God listens." In Hagar's distress, God listened. And the woman whom God heard was no patriarch or matriarch, but an enslaved, abused, runaway, foreign girl.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
I know far less of Mary's background than of Hagar's, but the words of her Magnificat echo back in time to paint the picture of Hagar's redemption at the well which she would later name,<i> Lahai Roi</i>, or "The Living One who Sees Me."</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
My Soul glorifies the Lord<br />
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior<br />
for he has been mindful<br />
of the humble state of his servant" (Luke 1.46-48).</blockquote>
<div>
The name Ishmael--"God listens"--seems very close in spirit to the name that Mary gave her child, Immanuel, "God within us."</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Even as Advent is a time when I rededicate myself to "God within," the message of Ishmael's name also resounds. God listens. When we are trapped in the desert, God listens. When we are enslaved, God listens. When all hope seems lost "God listens"...Ishmael--"God listens"...Ishmael, Ishmael, Ishmael.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I'm not the only writer to connect Mary with Hagar. Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, included in the Qur'an a description of Jesus' birth much different from the ones found in the gospels.</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"So [Mary] conceived [Jesus]<br />
And she retired with him<br />
To a remote place.<br />
And the pains of childbirth<br />
Drove her to the trunk<br />
Of a palm tree:<br />
She cried in her anguish"<br />
"Ah! would that I had<br />
Died before this...!<br />
But a voice cried to her<br />
From beneath the palm tree:<br />
"Grieve not! for thy Lord<br />
Hath provided a rivulet<br />
Beneath thee<br />
And shake towards thyself<br />
The trunk of the palm tree;<br />
It will let fall<br />
Fresh ripe dates upon thee...<br />
At length she brought<br />
The babe to her people,<br />
Carrying him in her arms. (Surah 19. 22-27)</blockquote>
<div>
When I read this text, I don't see Mary. I need Joseph in my Christmas narratives, and a cave in Bethlehem is just too much for me to give up for a lonely birth at the base of a date palm.</div>
<div>
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<div>
When I read this text, though, I see Hagar. She is alone. The son she carries isn't hers--it's Sarai's. A return to her mistress may not necessarily be a return to slavery, but it feels just as bad. Yet here in the desert, Ishmael--God listens. And a stream appears (a reference to Hagar's final escape in Genesis 21.19). And sweet, nourishing dates fall all around her as she strains against the tree in her labor.<br />
<br />
I freely admit that I read the Qur'an just as I read the Old Testament: not as a believer, per se, but as a Christian seeking to understand the truth of my Savior, Emmanuel. But I must also admit that I am rooting for Hagar and Ishmael as this story unfolds.<br />
<br />
God promises, and the birth of Abram's second son, Isaac, would fulfill the promise that Sarai had sought to circumvent by giving her slave to her husband. It was through Isaac's line that David would rise and the Christ child would be born.<br />
<br />
But God listens, as Ishmael's name attests, and God blessed Ishmael and Abraham's other sons with another promise of source. At the time Isaac and Ishmael were being born, I had ancestors living. Most likely they roamed the forests of Northern Europe completely unaware of the machinations of Sarai and her slave. The hope of their deliverance--and of mine--comes through Ishmael as well as Isaac.<br />
<br />
God listen then (Ishmael), and God Ishmael's today<br />
<br />
And that is the special message Advent has given me this year.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<i>(I did not have time to add Paul's commentary from <a href="http://niv.scripturetext.com/galatians/4.htm" target="_blank">Galatians 4.21-28</a>. Suffice it to say, he takes a different take on the Ishmael story--demeaning him as a representative of the old law, not as a part of the promise that Isaac represented.)</i></div>JDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17406757121672582364noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19290662.post-46956548194174201902011-12-11T10:26:00.001-08:002012-02-11T10:29:24.945-08:00"One Day" takes me back to my own British Romance<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Jenny and I had some time for a movie night at home last night, and after a look around, we decided to indulge our Anglophilia with a look at "<a href="http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi3449396249/" target="_blank">One Day</a>," an Anne Hathaway vehicle that came out last August.<br />
<br />
The movie follows two friends whose relationship begins on July 15, 1988, the night of their college graduation, and follows them through every July 15 for the next 23years. They engage with other lovers, and they forge new careers, but their friendship remains a constant and pushes them inexorably toward romance.<br />
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This blog isn't meant to be a review of the movie, which has its flaws, but it was easy to connect the movie with some experiences that had a huge impact on my life--and it is my own story (and that of my Bride) that the movie brought to life for me.<br />
<br />
There are two connections: one basic and one much, much deeper, that the movie raised for me.<br />
<br />
I went to college in England for a year, my sophomore undergraduate year, 1990-91. When I left at the of the year, I had built a close friendship with a woman named Jenny George (among many of the close, lifelong friendships I formed that year). Emma and Dexter, the characters in "One Day," are thrown together on the last night of the year. My friendship with Jenny grew over the course of the year, and involved numerous adventures which have been posted on this blog and will continue to present themselves, I'm sure, as the years go by.<br />
<br />
One of the great challenges that our friendship faced that year--and in the years that followed--was how it would impact our relationship going forward. At one point during the year, Jenny talked to me about becoming more than friends, but I wasn't ready for a "real" relationship yet. It was the frank honesty of our relationship that allowed me to express that to her--and let us remain friends.<br />
<br />
By the time of my sophomore year, when I met Jenny at Newbold College, I had been through many swift romances, and I had had my share of dead-end physical relationships. I needed friendship, I knew, and while I had many close female friends, I knew that doomed, whirlwind, physical relationships were sure ways to kill a friendship. By the time I got to know Jenny, I had drawn a clear line between "Women I was Friends With" and "Women I Wanted to Date." She definitely fell into the former category.<br />
<br />
Suffice it to say, it is a challenge to manage the expectations of a close relationship with a member of the opposite sex. A few years later, I "saw the light," as I described in<a href="http://jdittes.blogspot.com/2007/02/valentines-thoughts.html" target="_blank"> this blog from Valentine's Day, 2007</a>.<br />
<br />
In "One Day," it takes Emma and Dexter<i> twenty years</i> to consummate their friendship. And for them, it works out just as well as it did for Jenny and me, who were married four years after we became friends. Had we followed the twenty-year timeline of the movie, we would have been married in the fall of 2010!<br />
<br />
I can only imagine the dramatic ways in which our lives would have been different had we followed the "One Day" path--the dead ends, the bad relationships, the adventures and misadventures. I'm so grateful for my friendship with Jenny George; that it was able to blossom into love; and that our love has endured through 17 years of marriage. One day has become one lifetime with person whom I respect and love immensely.JDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17406757121672582364noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19290662.post-80632809940872494022011-10-01T21:21:00.000-07:002012-07-20T14:45:09.327-07:00The Seven-Sided Box: the Symbol of the Cube in the Bible<br />
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The Book of Revelation ends with a fascinating image: It is a a "new heaven and a new earth," reborn after the final judgement and the expulsion of sin.<br />
<blockquote>
"And I heard a loud voice from the throne, saying, "Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God."</blockquote>
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One of the actors in this final set piece, one of seven angels who had held seven bowls which poured out seven plagues in the destruction of the "first earth," emerges from the scene, takes the prophet to the top of a mountain, and gives him a preview of the coming kingdom--the New Jerusalem. And is what is striking about the New Jerusalem is this:<br />
<br />
It's a cube.<br />
<br />
The near wall is 1,400 miles long (the distance between my house in Tennessee and Gallup, New Mexico, going west). It is another 1,400 miles deep (I calculated this would take me to the middle of Hudson's Bay, Canada, traveling due north). It is also 1,400 miles high (about ten times further away than the International Space Station).<br />
<br />
So the Bible ends with a giant, gleaming cube descending to planet Earth.<br />
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There's more to that cube that I'll cover later, but I'm fascinated by the fact that the New Jerusalem is a cube...until I consider the rest of the Bible, and realize that the whole story is cube after cube after cube--box after box after box--beginning with Genesis 1 and ending in Revelation 21.<br />
<br />
Moreover, the cube ties in neatly with another important element of Biblical symbolism: the Number 7.<br />
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There is another cube in the Old Jerusalem, the city where Christ taught and died, and it was a copy of a cube constructed by Solomon in his temple. 2 Chronicles 3 states that Solomon laid out the Most Holy Place of that temple to be 30 feet X 30 feet X 30 feet, a perfect cube, separated from the temple's Holy Place by a curtain. (So important was the cube to Solomon's design, that a series of steps climbed from the high-ceilinged main room of the temple to the higher, cubic Most Holy Place.<br />
<br />
Within the Temple cube was another box, the Ark of the Covenant (this was not a cube, but a box, about 2.25' X 2.25' X 4'). Within this box was the law of God.<br />
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Solomon's design dominated the Jewish imagination all the way to the time of John the Revelator--and not just Judaism, either. The fire-worshipping Zoroastrians incorporated the cubic room into their temples. (Pictured, right, is the Kaba-ye Zartosht, "The Cube of Zoroaster" in Persepolis, Iran, which has origins in the time of Persian King Darius I in the 5th Century BC.)<br />
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<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e2/Kabaa.jpg/265px-Kabaa.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="256" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e2/Kabaa.jpg/265px-Kabaa.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
The Arabic word for cube, "Kaaba," echoes the name of the most sacred site in the religion of Islam: the curtained black cube in the Masjid al-Haram Mosque in Mecca toward which every Muslim directs prayers. (This cube is larger than Solomon's holy room, roughly 40' X 40' X 40'.)<br />
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I will describe more about this second cube later as we make our way backwards to Genesis,. Needless to say, Muslims are very aware of Biblical symbolism (moreso than western Christians), and provide an insight into the deep importance that the cube plays with God.<br />
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Of course Solomon didn't invent the cube. He based his design for the temple on that of the tabernacle revealed to Moses from Mount Sinai. The tabernacle (also known as the Tent of Meeting) also had a cube-shaped room, 15' X 15' X 15', exactly half the scale of Solomon's room. At the center of this room was also a box, the same box as the one Solomon placed in his Holy of Holies. Within this box were a few artifacts besides the Ten Commandments: a budding rod (a symbol of Aaron's power) and a bowl of manna were missing when the box's contents were chronicled in Solomon's day (1 Kings 8.9).<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Creation, the Cube, and the number Seven</span><br />
Islamic mythology traces the cube back to Adam, who built a cubic worship space in the lands westward of Eden to the specifications of God himself. Future prophets Noah and Abraham would return to Mecca, the site of the Kaaba, to rebuild the shrine (it is important to note here that the current Kaaba dates back to the early 10th Century).<br />
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Indeed the creation story can be seen as the building of a cube. Creation is divided into six days--the six sides of a cube. Imagine the creation story as the sides of a cube. There is a square of light at the bottom. The four sides are (1) land and water, (2) sky & vegetation, (3) sun, moon, and stars, and (4) birds & fishes. The top square of this box is the creation of beasts and humans on the sixth day.<br />
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When you see the creation story in the form of this cube, I think it grows stronger as a story--and explains some of the scientific contradictions that arise in more literal readings of Genesis 1. The foundation of the cube is light--as John 1 affirms--and its top is mankind. The middle four days are the walls, leaving the fact that Genesis shows plants on the earth a full day before there is a sun to sustain them, as a description of space, not linear time.<br />
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One could rewrite Genesis 1 along the lines of Revelation 21 this way: In the beginning, the Cube of Creation descended into chaos This is how the first heaven and first earth were made.<br />
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We have known about the linear week, and I know that I have practiced it all my life. But there is a cubic week in Genesis 1: a complete, six-sided box in which everything is complete.<br />
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Imagine creation as a cube. Turn it around in your mind and look at its individual sides. See the light, the water, the sky, the fishes, all moving in concert. It is beautiful, isn't it? It's amazing.<br />
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It isn't yet perfect.<br />
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Genesis 2 begins with the<i> seventh side of the box</i>. <br />
<blockquote>
"By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done" (verses 2-3).</blockquote>
In terms of the box, God needed a seventh side. That seventh side was holiness, and I believe that he put it <i>in the middle of the box</i>--a.k.a. the seventh side. No one waits until the seventh day of the linear week to rest; no, we sprinkle rest throughout the week--it touches all six sides. Nor was holiness intended--I believe--to be a linear idea but a spatial one.<br />
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Look back through the Biblical cubes I mentioned. The cubes--the Holy of Holies in the tabernacle and the temple--have boxes in them. And in these boxes is the Law of God. These cubes are filled with holiness.<br />
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As always, the prophet Isaiah describes the Seven-Sided Cube far better than I could ever do:<br />
<blockquote>
"This is what God the Lord says--<br />
he who created the heavens and stretched them out,<br />
who spread out the earth and all that comes out of it,<br />
who gives breath to its people,<br />
and life to those who walk on it;<br />
'I, the Lord, have called you in righteousness...." (Isaiah 42.5-6)</blockquote>
Here we have the sides of the box (heavens, earth) and the box's top--the "breath of its people and life to those who walk on it." But there is also righteousness, holiness, the seventh side that touches upon all others. It isn't just attached to the "man" side of the cube, it touches<i> all sides of the creation</i>.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The New Jerusalem and Me</span><br />
There is another number in the Bible that has a symbolism quite opposite to the number 7. Revelation states that "it is man's number. His number is 666" (13.18). If the number 7 represents a created cube filled with holiness, it's pretty easy to interpret 666. It means "empty, empty, empty."<br />
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I want to close with the first cube--the massive New Jerusalem--because now that I understand the seven-sided box, I want to know this:<br />
<br />
What's inside the big cube?<br />
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There is no temple in this New Jerusalem (I have written about this wrinkle in a <a href="http://jdittes.blogspot.com/2010/07/temple-who-needed-it.html">previous blog</a>). This is<br />
<blockquote>
"because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp" (21.22b-24).</blockquote>
That's the inside of the box--the seventh side--and it touches on all six sides: the jewel-encrusted foundations, the four golden walls, and the crystal ceiling that glows with the light of the Creator.<br />
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There is so much to learn from this paradigm, but I want to close this blog and get your feedback. Here are some questions I hope to answer in the future:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>Did Jesus understand the seven-sided cube? What are some of his teachings that can be understood spatially?</li>
<li>There are many references to empty boxes in the Bible--a desire to place God's law in the empty hearts of mankind. Can these be better understood by the seven-sided box?</li>
<li>What are some other cubes mentioned in the Bible? I almost added Noah's Ark to this discussion, but it wasn't a cube--although it was a box. Another nominee might be Joseph's casket as it was carried to Caanan.</li>
</ul>JDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17406757121672582364noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19290662.post-45300694609285689352011-09-10T23:21:00.000-07:002011-09-10T23:21:39.617-07:009/11 and Faith, My Journey after that Dreadful Day<a href="http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/09/03/four-ways-911-changed-americas-attitude-toward-religion/?iref=allsearch">CNN posted a story</a> recently on 9/11 and its impact on Americans' faith.
It really struck a chord with me, because it took me back over ten of the most decisive years of my life.<br />
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<a href="http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2011/images/09/02/t1larg.911faith.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2011/images/09/02/t1larg.911faith.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
CNN's writer, John Blake, found three significant changes in Americans' faith practices since then:<br />
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<ul>
<li>The humiliation of the attacks had altered Americans' self-identification as a "chosen" nation</li>
<li>Interfaith forays were more acceptable, with Muslims making inroads to mainstream culture and cooperating with Christian groups more often.</li>
<li>Atheism had become a forceful, militant idea. It came out of the closet.</li>
<li>I would add a fourth: the unholy marriage between Christian fundamentalism and Zionism that lured the nation into two world wars--and nearly a third in Iran, had not cooler heads prevailed.</li>
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For me, 9/11 was a faith touchstone. It didn't seem like such a big deal at the time. I was a practicing Christian then; I am a Christian today. But looking back, I think it raised some questions that I had no hope of finding answers to at the time.<br />
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I remember that I had children's story the weekend after the attacks. Like everyone else that day, I was stunned, still unable to put the attacks--and the ongoing investigation--into perspective. As I remember it, I chose John 1.5 for my text: "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it." At the time, there seemed to be a lot of darkness in my country, but I knew the Light, and I wanted kids to have that hope.<br />
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Still, I made a reference to how difficult it was to have faith. I had sung, "He's got the Whole World in His Hands" with Ellie that week before the attacks, and it just seemed contradicted. I was trying to find a place in which God could fit in this fallen world.<br />
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I was not helped by the sermon that day: "God is still in control." It felt to me that the pastor wasn't encouraging us to confront the issues that had been raised, but to cling tighter to a slogan that had been used before in other contexts: when the church budget was out of balance, when a member needed help finding a job, when leaders had failed us. Wasn't 9/11 bigger than that?<br />
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I'm not sure that September of 2001 was when I began searching further afield for answers to my spiritual questions. I have always been independent when it came to theology. I think I did become more open about it, reading sources in history, archaeology, and literature to confirm the tenets of my faith. I read critiques of the Bible, and consumed books by Muslims and atheists. I even organized an interfaith dialogue at the Highland Church with some Muslim friends I had made at Western Kentucky University (where I was wrapping up my graduate degree, and visiting the Islamic Center on occasion).<br />
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The more I looked, the more answers I found. My Christian faith was strengthened, but my connections to the Adventist Church were strained. "God is in control" wasn't going to cut it for me. A national tragedy wasn't a "sign," it was an opportunity for us to become something greater as a nation.<br />
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Five years later, spiritually exhausted by uncivil battles over worship styles, Jenny and I visited Bethpage United Methodist Church, and we found a new home in a denomination that shared our focus on Jesus Christ and the Kingdom of God. It was a group of Christians who reacted to tragedy with compassion, not "I told you so."<br />
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I think that I was looking for this kind of community that Sabbath after 9/11, and probably for many years before that. I wish that my country could have found it. Instead we were misled. The loss of all those innocent people in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania was used to justify torture, the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis, a loss of freedom here at home, and oceans of debt.<br />
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I don't want to overblow 9/11. I do appreciate any chance I get to look back and assess the changes that I've made. It wasn't one event that led me to this point on my faith journey, it was many events, all orchestrated by a loving God and witnessed by my incredible family.JDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17406757121672582364noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19290662.post-89232825368503726132011-08-22T23:33:00.000-07:002011-08-22T23:40:38.785-07:00Your Education Policies: A View from the Depths<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: none; color: #f3f3f3; font-family: inherit;">I've had a really tough time so far this year. A passel of new regulations, passed by a viciously anti-teacher legislature last spring, have tied me up in knots and wasted a lot of my time. I wrote this essay between midnight and 1:30 a.m. just to blow off some steam. It's not like I had time to write during my 11-hour workdays. I'm planning to share it with my legislators and with SCORE, a Trojan-horse organization founded by Republicans in Tennessee to de-fund public education and drive every last well-meaning teacher either out of the state or into private or charter school jobs.</span></i><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #f3f3f3;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black;"></span></span><br />
<div style="background-color: transparent;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #f3f3f3;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.7447081506252289" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I teach at a school that you represent, Station Camp High School in Gallatin. I’m beginning my third week of the school year, teaching German, Creative Writing and 11th-grade English. I sponsor three clubs at our school (yours and mine and my 9th-grade daughter’s).</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’m burned out. That’s right, and it’s only the third week.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Someone needs to tell what’s going on. Someone needs to describe all the work that has been wasted by the onerous regulations placed on public school teachers and administrators in the 2011 legislative session. Someone needs to get you to see the effects of decisions you made six months ago. I will do my best to try.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This is my eighth year at my high school. During that time I have taught every grade level of English, and every strata of each class except A.P. I have also taught--as I am teaching now--German 1 & 2 and creative writing. After three years here--years in which I was observed regularly, and I carefully worked out lesson plans under the direction of my administrators--I earned tenure back in 2007.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">While politicians, movie producers and journalists tried to disparage tenured teachers like me with allegations of ineptitude and stories of mysterious “rubber rooms,” I was proud of my tenure. I knew how hard I had worked to earn it. I also knew the ways it could be used to benefit both me and the students who would study in my classes in subsequent years.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Tenure gave me the freedom to turn my classroom into a learning laboratory. I knew how to teach, plan, and manage a classroom--that’s what I understood my tenure to mean. It meant that I had the freedom to experiment with new styles of learning, to reach out and form community partnerships that might benefit learners in my classroom, to organize learning experiences outside the classroom and collaborate with teachers across subject areas and grade levels. I wouldn’t have gotten tenure in the first place if I hadn’t shown mastery of basic teaching methods over three years. Tenure gave me a solid foundation from which I could reach higher.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Over the past three years, this foundation has produced amazing results both for me and for my students at SCHS. My love of experimentation and my creativity--with the support of my school administration--really began to blossom in new ways. I formed a close bond with TPAC Education which brought teaching artists into my school to help make lessons more meaningful. I learned Google Docs and used a donation of 32 used laptops from Volunteer State Community College to create my school’s first “paperless classroom.” This past summer I won a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to study American history through song at the University of Pittsburgh, where I developed ways to use folk music to augment my literature classes.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I returned from Pittsburgh four days before the administrative day where we learned about the new evaluation system: that tenure was transitory, that teachers who didn’t perform “above expectations” or “significantly above expectations” for two years in a row would return to probationary status. When I saw the regulations--about 30 minutes of paperwork per 90-minute lesson (and I teach three different lessons a day)--I knew that my days as a tenured teacher were numbered. But that didn’t bother me as much as knowing that the freedom I had worked so hard to gain, build, and share with my students, was also transitory.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">You need to know what is going on in the schools you represent. If you’re working for teachers, parents and students, you need to understand the results of your policy actions.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This is how Tennessee Educaton Reform 2.0 has worked for me so far:</span></span><br />
<ul><li style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #f3f3f3;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I have attached below the lesson-planning form that was adapted by my school’s administration. It includes all the relevant data that will go into my evaluations this year. It took me 30 minutes to produce. The toughest part about the planning form isn’t the questioning or the assessment--I’ve been doing that since I started teaching, it’s how I gained tenure. It’s wasting time referencing the standards. In German 1 there are about 20 to utilize, but in English 11, there are almost 70 state performance indicators (SPI’s). I find myself asking, “This is a logic lesson. Is it 5.2 or 5.4?”</span></span></li>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #f3f3f3;"> <ul><li style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; list-style-type: circle; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This has tripled the amount of time it takes me to plan lessons. Usually I have lesson plans posted a week in advance of the lessons I teach. This year, I’m struggling to stay one to two days ahead.</span></li>
</ul><li style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">My grading has increased markedly</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">--not directly because of the state regulations, but because of an ambitious goal I had set to make my classes paperless. With laptops at every desk, students generate about 30-35% more work for me to grade. This is an exchange that I’m willing to make, because (1) I am investing my time to see kids learning more, and (2) I’m optimistic that eventually technology will let me cut the grading load to what it was before or less. Before, the satisfaction of seeing successful learning and being a part of technological innovation made the extra work worthwhile. Now I feel like I’m doing a lot of work the State of Tennessee doesn’t necessarily want me to do, and instead I should spend more time acting and planning like a non-tenured teacher. You might imagine the frustration I feel there.</span></li>
<li style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I have no time</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Last year I graded at home from 9 to 10 five nights a week; this year I am grading/planning from 8:30 to 11, and I have little to show for it. Last year I graded on Sundays only when I had a big batch of essays to complete. The first Sunday of this school year, I spent four hours at my school setting up for the launch of my paperless classroom. Last Sunday, my wife and kids went to the movies without me so I could spend five hours getting my grades ready to post and plotting out lessons for my three classes.</span></li>
<li style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I can’t perform the kinds of leadership roles I want to provide to other, less-experienced teachers</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. I mentioned earlier how I arranged for teaching artists from TPAC Education to come to our school. Last year I had three colleagues join me in an Arts in Education Unit. This year, we’re all so busy trying to keep our heads above water, we’ve all but given up on the idea, losing precious momentum toward Arts in Education that I had labored to build over two years. I learned some cool new teaching tricks at the NEH Summer Institute that I would love to share through a professional development, only I have no time to draw up a proposal, much less plan a three-hour training. </span></li>
<li style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I can’t develop the technology that I brought into my school last year</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, and I can’t train other teachers to use these 21st-century teaching tools. I want to train more teachers at my school about Google Docs and utilizing technology in the classroom. This summer the district brought in a “tech guru” from Atlanta as a keynote speaker. I got to have a private meeting with her to share some of the things I was doing with Google Docs in the classroom. While she had a broad knowledge of Google applications--and other forms of software--she hadn’t experimented with it in the classroom setting like I had, and she was very impressed. I don’t get paid four figures a day to visit Tennessee like she did (it would be nice, but let’s face it, I’m just fighting to keep my job in this state, much less tenure). I live here and have committed myself to my </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">county’s </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">education success, not just my own. I can’t do it, though. That’s what I’ve realized in just three weeks.</span></li>
</span></ul><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #f3f3f3;"><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’m just speaking for myself. I cannot speak for the administrators whose work loads have doubled with the additional evaluation responsibilities. I cannot speak for the colleagues who were a year away from tenure and now have to wait for three. My kids are all in school now (my youngest is eight), I can’t speak for teachers with young families or those expecting babies, who are now facing this increased workload. You need to talk to them. It is you who need to listen.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I share with SCORE and many others the desire to see Tennessee’s public education system become the best in the South, and I hope that I have demonstrated a willingness to do the hard work that profound change in education requires without explicit, step-by-step direction from the state department of Education.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I just fear that we’re missing out on opportunities for implementing real learning by treating teachers like numbskulls who have to fill out a planning guide and list out standards-based questions on their forms before they can teach a German class how to say “What’s up?” or lead an English 11 class through the turbid waters of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Moby Dick</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Last Sunday’s New York Times featured a number of respected thinkers who finished the thought, “If I were president....” James Dyson, the engineer who re-invented the vacuum cleaner, wanted to change education in the right way:</span><br />
<div dir="ltr" style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 36pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Standardization and rote learning lead to sub-standard results because they don’t inspire or challenge. My solution: get rid of binary right and wrong answers. Experimentation is learning. Only through making mistakes do we find out what works, what to do differently and how to get better. Box-ticking does not correlate with world winning. Certificates won’t beat global competition. Creativity will.” --Kornbluth, Jesse, “If I Were President,” </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">New York Times</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, Sunday Review Section, 21 August 2011.</span></div><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Part of me is willing to accept a lower TVAAS score because I chose to teach my students about thinking and not “box-ticking.” I would rather see a student demonstrate a love for learning than a high score on an end-of-course exam. As a teaching professional, of course I want to grow towards both goals, but as an overworked, maligned public school teacher, I feel hung out to dry.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In your capacity, you attend a meeting, you write a press release, you attend a luncheon or a fundraiser, and you feel like you have done something with your day, you might even feel like you did some good. Where I’m at now, I grade sixty papers and work 90 minutes on planning, and I feel like I have only fallen an hour further behind where I need to be. I haven’t contacted parents, I haven’t arranged extra time to help a student who isn’t yet up to speed, etc.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Tennessee has gone too far towards standardization in its onerous micromanagement of teachers, both tenured and non. Legislators and policy advocates have taken away from teachers and administrators the freedom to experiment with learning, the room to let students try--then fail--then explain and learn. I hope that this letter may apprise you of the situation on the ground and encourage you towards more balanced, more rational policies in the future.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sincerely,</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">James Dittes</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Station Camp High School</span><br />
</span></div>JDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17406757121672582364noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19290662.post-44150268492544120732011-07-16T19:53:00.000-07:002011-07-16T19:54:38.326-07:00The Haunting at Edward Braddock's GraveI am standing at a monument to General Braddock near Fort Necessity in Farmington, Pennsylvania. His face is etched into the panel. More than 250 years cannot erase the arrogance with which he tore a road through the wilderness from the Potomac River over the Alleghenies. I doubt that look was there when a force of French and Indians surprised his army near the banks of the Monongahela, turning them back on each other into mad confusion, just fifty miles from his goal: the forks of the Ohio River at present-day Pittsburgh.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjD3kXYiQKj1txW2Q9ofKVde7JueMu7-c3x8zZhz6c7gC3b18o__SUH1NDEuo6yZgqLl2fzU6R6V0HSmR2nMaH42RzY6TrvxI8a_1Tw4rAywXutYqEMYPeXNfP2OProFQhe0606/s1600/IMG_20110716_112130.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjD3kXYiQKj1txW2Q9ofKVde7JueMu7-c3x8zZhz6c7gC3b18o__SUH1NDEuo6yZgqLl2fzU6R6V0HSmR2nMaH42RzY6TrvxI8a_1Tw4rAywXutYqEMYPeXNfP2OProFQhe0606/s320/IMG_20110716_112130.jpg" style="clear: both; cursor: move; float: right; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;" /></a>They carried him here, 35 miles away, where Braddock died of his wounds and the only remaining officer, a 23-year-old George Washington, took over, hustled the soldiers about a mile further, and set up a fort to take on the pursuing French & Indians.<br />
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I remember the story. I wasn't even in school yet when my dad told it to me. We were walking in the woods at the time, exploring our new home near Amesville, Ohio. He told me how Indians hid in the trees, watched Braddock's army pass, and launched their attack. I pace around the monument. On my way back to the car, I pass this sign: "This is the spot where Major-General Edward Braddock was buried, July 14th 1755."<br />
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Washington had buried Braddock in the middle of the road they had built through the thick forest. Indians were known to dig up recent burials to claim scalps. Therefore, Washington's first order as commander was to bury the general and then direct every soldier and pack animal to tread the ground above him. It wasn't until sixty years later, that workers building the National Road (current US 40) unearthed the general's remains, reinterring them further up the hill, underneath the present monument.<br />
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These woods are haunted. I can tell that.<br />
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I follow the path. It ends at a creek, in woods so think and tangled, I think I can see Braddock's demise hiding in the shadows.<br />
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There is the trace of a path off to the right. I can see it. I have a sense for trails. I can see them when others can't, even in the dark of night. I have followed trails--and creeks, and sounds--since I was a boy.<br />
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I follow a trail. I see it winding through the ferns. I begin to run. I can't help it. I look down. I can't see my feet.<br />
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I see the feet of a boy. Blue Nike tennis shoes. Blue baseball cap. He's carrying a musket. He traded it for two baseball cards from Ross, a boy at school. Even though Mom has forbade toy weapons, he hides it in the woods; he carries it as he looks for trails to follow. He looks down. He doesn't see his feet either. He sees the moccasins of a scout--a scout for General Washington's army, a scout who knows the ways of the Indian, a scout who follows in their paths.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnDLP9uY9PJoorVPJIkA6vZsM_VeakycoemdR3Tu8cemgtz7PIRgKrFloRsNjX-Q4h5ZHdKlDi1ntKGiH7oja3otY9_FFbZKKN-XoU-w0tCmaYZJj5XRnAvX-9Kwz2kqQ88Env/s1600/IMG_20110716_112919.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnDLP9uY9PJoorVPJIkA6vZsM_VeakycoemdR3Tu8cemgtz7PIRgKrFloRsNjX-Q4h5ZHdKlDi1ntKGiH7oja3otY9_FFbZKKN-XoU-w0tCmaYZJj5XRnAvX-9Kwz2kqQ88Env/s320/IMG_20110716_112919.jpg" style="cursor: move;" width="239" /></a>The boy runs a hundred more paces through the woods, and he comes to a huge, fallen tree (pictured). The tree is rotting, covered with moss, melting into the forest floor. The boy climbs onto the log, holds out his arms to walk four or five steps along the log, then he sits down to catch his breath.<br />
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This is where I find tears welling in my eyes and pouring down my cheeks. I am overcome with emotion. I feel like I've stepped through a portal, and I have returned. In those two hundred paces through the Allegheny woodland, I have embodied memories that are among my most precious--memories that seemed blotted out somehow, buried decades ago and trod over with the footsteps of experience.<br />
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These feelings overwhelm me. I haven't felt things so keenly since the day Jonah was born. Is it sadness? No, it's more like joy, but there is some sadness left there, too. Sadness for things past.<br />
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It's as if I <i>AM </i>ten years old, resting on "Jumbo," the landmark that was the center of my woodland adventures in Ohio. I can see the woods for all the wonder they contain. I imagine them filled with Indians--with enemy soldiers--who will flee at a single blast from my musket.<br />
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And yet I'm sitting in the same place--on the same moss-covered log--as this 40-year-old man. I don't recognize him. He has a scruffy beard, a bit of a belly. He isn't wearing a baseball hat, and he has sandals on his feet. <i>He isn't anything like me</i>.<br />
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I can't stop crying. I rise from the log and follow the trail. It peters out in a creek bottom. The 40-year-old man is walking with me--or <i>in </i>me--step for step. It seems like every other second, thirty years pass and then disappear. It is 1981 and this is Tick Ridge, Ohio; no, it is 2011, and this is Braddock's Haunted Grave, Pennsylvania.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2xqHsbSJa5UHKNkXhrzl8oOvYzW02ybeYeKsmo4JcmKTn2voBRFN4GQYaoJSJKQCQXNRBYtvPZEziiCT-LkTZCzhRwT2PDhaEHCBcshqIK-yzJ0g5SwUjD3xP4uazSD2t3aDS/s1600/IMG_20110716_113735.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2xqHsbSJa5UHKNkXhrzl8oOvYzW02ybeYeKsmo4JcmKTn2voBRFN4GQYaoJSJKQCQXNRBYtvPZEziiCT-LkTZCzhRwT2PDhaEHCBcshqIK-yzJ0g5SwUjD3xP4uazSD2t3aDS/s320/IMG_20110716_113735.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>Fifteen paces on the other side of the creek bottom, we find the old road. This one is wider, and even though it is covered with ferns (see pic), it is wide and bordered on both sides by old growth forest. It is the boy <i>and me</i>, united in wonder, in purpose, and in spirit.<br />
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A few steps further, and the boy suddenly leaves me. There is a snap about thirty feet in front of me, and a deer leaps off into the woods. It pauses to study the 40-year-old man now sixty feet away. It is a young buck, with fuzz still covering the nubs of its new antlers. It holds me in a stare, huge eyes wondering, 'Where did this creature come from?'<br />
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I whisper, "Hello there, young buck." Looking back, I wish I had said, "Goodbye."<br />
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I take out my cell phone to find my location on GPS. It <i>is </i>2011 after all, I guess. I look back up at the buck. It turns and bounds away. I make my way back to the highway and walk along it to my car, still parked a stone's throw away from Braddock's Grave.<br />
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As I write this, hours later. The emotions are still raw. I have Kleenex next to me, and I hope I can get it together by the time my roommate gets back to our apartment. I still haven't figured out what it all means.<br />
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I do know this. Today I have experienced a memory that I will treasure and revisit for at least thirty years to come.<br />
<div style="clear: both; text-align: RIGHT;"><a href="http://picasa.google.com/blogger/" target="ext"><img align="middle" alt="Posted by Picasa" border="0" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/pbp.gif" style="-moz-background-clip: initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: initial; -moz-background-origin: initial; background: transparent none repeat scroll 0% 50%; border: 0px none; padding: 0px;" /></a></div>JDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17406757121672582364noreply@blogger.com5Farmington, PA, USA39.8072982 -79.5655972000000136.8360002000000009 -139.3312222 72.7785962 -19.799972200000013tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19290662.post-84110069720941244962011-06-27T21:05:00.000-07:002011-06-27T21:05:09.395-07:00A Musical Autobiography<i>Note: I'm at the University of Pittsburgh for the summer, studying at a summer institute called "<a href="http://www.voicesacrosstime.org/">Voices Across Time: American History through Music</a>." I'm writing this as a draft of my first project, to provide a "musical autobiography" of myself, using an experience I had through music.</i><br />
<div><br />
</div><div>I have always been steeped in music. I can't remember a time in my life where music wasn't important to me. My father is an accomplished pianist and organist who today earns his living playing for churches. My mother grew up playing the violin and planned--through the end of her freshman year of college--to be a professional musician. By the time I came into my parents' lives, you could say that music was part of my destiny.</div><div><br />
</div><div>I began taking piano lessons in first grade, and I continued--summer and school year--all through elementary school. I was not an exceptional pianist, but by the time I finished eighth grade, I could play well. It was the summer after eighth grade, that I faced an important decision about my future in music.</div><div><br />
</div><div>I was bored. I practiced my exercises and the classical pieces assigned to me, but I didn't have a love for the piano. I was thinking very seriously about quitting. I was about to start high school. I felt like moving on.</div><div><br />
</div><div>I remember sitting at the piano in my living room, muttering. (I have since learned that muttering is about as natural to 14-year-olds as breathing, but it seemed really important to me at the time.) I put away my Beethoven book and pulled out a book of songs from the movie, "Snow White." It didn't take me long to learn the songs. As I was playing, "Some Day My Prince will Come," something happened.</div><div><br />
</div><div>I had a vision.</div><div><br />
</div><div>In my vision, I was playing the piano. There was <i>a girl</i> there, sitting on the bench next to me as I played. And she <i>liked</i> what I was playing!</div><div><br />
</div><div>It was a powerful vision, I must say. The girl, she sidled closer to me, so that our arms touched--from shoulder to elbow, no less. I can't remember what other fantasies might have moved my 14-year-old mind, but it probably also involved squinching my lips together at the end of the song and seeing hers--squinched up too--waiting to meet mine.</div><div><br />
</div><div>I should add that at this time in my life, there was <u>nothing </u>more confusing to me than teenaged girls. In reality, had one sat next to me, I probably would have been unable to play anything--not even "Chopsticks." But that shouldn't take away from the vision. I realized something about my music. <i>I could benefit from this</i>, I thought<i>, this might be just the thing that will attract a girl!</i></div><div><i><br />
</i></div><div><br />
<a name='more'></a>So I stuck with the piano. Not only did I keep up with my lessons, I began to learn--for the first time--how to play by ear, how to pick out songs that I knew and arrange them to fit my purposes. I continued lessons through the tenth grade, by which time I was able to arrange songs, perform them at church, and even write some songs of my own.</div><div><br />
</div><div>Six years after I devoted myself to my vision of music, I found myself in the small town of Minehead, England. I had hitchhiked there with a group of friends from college. It was a rainy, blustery day--the kind quite commonly found in England during the late fall. After a night of camping in the elements, my friends and I sought refuge through the unlocked door of a church, a 15th-century Anglican structure called St. Michael's Church.</div><div><br />
</div><div>There was no one in the church that day, but we entered anyway, to find warmth more than anything. At the front of the church I found a piano, and I sat down to play some of the hymns I had learned. I had a few arrangements that really meant a lot to me, and the songs added to the reverence of this darkened, empty sanctuary that had echoed with the songs of worship for centuries.</div><div><br />
</div><div>And you want to know something really cool?</div><div><br />
</div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhK9mku-q7RxuTukkNyJTEdDA27cy6a534ZQK77hT51VD_HnJXUv44-wthQUwuWCL0_h6gIF3I5_BSORD71WPCjOvcO_0d7JdUstzd8nGV5eLsgpY7rGokEfZfyy5seH3QblZG-/s1600/JD+at+piano%252C+St+Michael%2527s%252C+Minehead.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhK9mku-q7RxuTukkNyJTEdDA27cy6a534ZQK77hT51VD_HnJXUv44-wthQUwuWCL0_h6gIF3I5_BSORD71WPCjOvcO_0d7JdUstzd8nGV5eLsgpY7rGokEfZfyy5seH3QblZG-/s320/JD+at+piano%252C+St+Michael%2527s%252C+Minehead.jpg" width="215" /></a>There was this <i>girl </i>there. She sat on the piano bench right next to me. </div><div><br />
</div><div>The song wasn't, "Some Day My Prince will Come" (it was a church after all). It was a hymn, "Softly and Tenderly."</div><div><br />
</div><div>As I played, this girl, she sang along, and she asked me to harmonize. For about two hours we played hymns and listened to our friend, Gavin, read from the huge Bible at the front of the church. When we left, the sun was out. The day was warm. Mist rose from the cobblestone streets below the church. We took some pictures and moved on to other adventures.</div><div><br />
</div><div>Last week my wife Jenny, our three kids, and I drove to Bardstown, Kentucky to watch a production of "The Stephen Foster Story." I've been married for seventeen years now, and I've been a father for fourteen.<br />
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On the way home, Jenny kept coming back to the relationship between Foster and Jane McDowell, the woman who inspired "I Dream of Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair" and other songs. Their relationship is at the center of the play, and it had been a rocky one. Foster had struggled to earn a living even though his songs were very popular. In the end Foster's music--the songs he had written for Jane--had been a glue stronger than fortune. They had wed, despite her parents' misgivings.</div><div><br />
</div><div>The <i>music </i>had been the bond, Jenny said. Jane couldn't have been with anyone else after those beautiful songs.</div><div><br />
</div><div>She looked over at me. "Do you remember that day in Minehead?" she asked. "Do you remember the church--the song you played on the piano?"</div><div><br />
</div><div>"Of course I do," I replied. "'Softly and Tenderly.' I really liked that arrangement."</div><div><br />
</div><div>"That song was such a bond," she said. "It is what made me begin to fall in love with you."</div><div><br />
</div><div>I smiled. It made me remember the vision I had in my living room at age 14. It had come true, far beyond the most fanciful hopes I could have mustered at the time.<br />
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</div>JDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17406757121672582364noreply@blogger.com0