- Another public school that still don’t get the 1st Amendment.
- Insularity.
- Adam & Eve again.
- Chaos.
- Slippery slope confirmation.
- Nice.
1
I was starting to fear that I’d have nothing to blog today (and I’m unlikely to blog tomorrow for personal reasons, though I may do something tonight and schedule it for delivery while I’m otherwise occupied). Volokh Conspiracy to the rescue!
Many schools, even in very religious parts of the country, still have not gotten the message that religious “speech” is not second-class, nor may schools single it out for suppression.
Defendants maintain that the policies preventing Wright and A.W. from circulating flyers regarding the church-sponsored swimming event are unambiguous and reasonably related to the necessary and appropriate educational function of limiting the number of flyers distributed, and ensuring the distribution of only those flyers that deal with a special or symbiotic relationship to the school or school district. The record, however, does not support defendants’ argument because defendants seem to permit almost any organization, with the exception of churches, to circulate material. Indeed, the record clearly shows that defendants’ regulations, as presently enforced, merely stamp out certain viewpoint-based speech….
I once had a hand in “educating” a Purdue education professor (or trying to; he was a Unitarian Universalist, and they can be awfully hard to educate) who solemnly pronounced that it was his job, as an agent of a public University, to purge from his graduate-level symposium the recurrent recourse to Christian-influenced theories that so appealed to a coincidental group of his students. (That was kind of opaque, wasn’t it? A group of his students discovered that they were all Protestants of fairly compatible conviction and kept doing papers on “values-based” education from their Christian perspective. That’s what he declared had to stop.)
Joseph Bottum hangs this problem on court interventions in the 1970s and 80s.
2
I really don’t intend to serialize the Evangelical travail over Adam and Eve, but a friend who teaches at Calvin College posted this, which includes a gross error.
The gross error is that Calvin is “the finest Christian liberal arts college in the country.” In Calvin‘s terms, surely <interschool rivalry>that honor belongs to Wheaton College. I wouldn’t bring it up were souls not at stake.</interschool rivalry>.
Somewhat more seriously, in my terms (these days), I wouldn’t rule out some Roman Catholic institutions engaged in Classical Education, but there’s a Protestant reflex that “Christian” means “conservative Protestant.” I’m tired of Googling for it, but I’m pretty sure I remember when Jerry Falwell promised to build a great football program at Liberty University because “it’s time for a Christian University to have a first-class football program.” (I did find a posting where Falwell dreamed of Liberty’s team whipping Notre Dame.)
Okay: religion-bating fun aside, the linked article claims that Calvin College purged a scholar on the “no literal Adam & Eve” side because the President, returning from Sabbatical like Moses descending from Mt. Sinai, didn’t like what his people had gotten into while he was away. Or he had a hissy-fit because he disagreed with the conclusion of those in charge during his absence that the opinion was not so incompatible with Calvin’s standards that it should not be published.
Something like that. In other words, the story tries to rinse the sugar coating off a story of amicable parting.
3
When I first posted on the Evangelical travail over Adam and Eve Wednesday, I said I wouldn’t minimize its significance, and others continue writing things about it, too.
John Wilson’s “No One Reads the Bible Literally,” under the Wall Street Journal’s “Houses of Worship” rubric, is excellent. As I said yesterday, “maybe it comes down to whether a “type” must be historically factual.” As Wilson puts that point today:
Critical to debates over “the historical Adam” are theological motifs such as Christ as “the second Adam.” These lose their meaning, many evangelicals argue, if Genesis isn’t read literally.
Apropos of his title, Wilson writes:
But an alarm should sound whenever the word “literal” is used in this context, whether as a badge of pride (“I just believe in reading the Bible literally”) or as a hint that low-browed fundamentalists are lurking nearby. No one—no one—reads the Bible literally. But some readers are more attentive, more faithful, more imaginative and more persuasive than others.
Local Pastor Robbie Bradford of First Assembly of God, which a few decades ago might have flogged the “literal” horse, seems tacitly to admit as much.
4
I’ve been working my way through a Kindle edition of Chaos: Making a New Science, by James Gleick. It strikes me as very good science writing — more than good enough to keep my attention and make me feel like I sorta kinda understand.
“Chaos” is the overarching term for that part of science that studies things like the butterfly in Brazil whose wing flap affects our weather weeks later. Or to put it more generically, of “sensitive dependence on initial conditions.”
But my saying “that part of science that studies things like …” reflects my more traditional (if sadly limited) science background. For those deeply into chaos, it’s the big picture people tend to filter out because it’s so hard to grasp and systematize:
The mathematician Stanislaw Ulam remarked that to call the study of chaos “nonlinear science” was like calling zoology “the study of non elephant animals.”
I like it enough that I changed my banner. Somehow “chaos” seems more candid than the former slightly self-congratulatory banner.
5
I have nothing to say about this now except that the slippery slope is real, and what was unthinkable a few years ago can too easily become today’s axiom.
6
***
Having foresworn heavy blogging about partisan politics, I’ve taken to Tweeting, and you can see those Tweets in the right column. 140 characters to pass along a political link seems about right.
Bon appetit!
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 