Yes, as I began to think about it more I wondered about some of the issues you
have raised Bill, but my first reaction was, as John Kapusky said, refreshment.
 I'm choking on sarcasim and name calling such as in the little slide show that
you sent Danny.  I didn't get any sound with it but it was visually so lame,
boring, ...I just can't be bothered reading most things like that.  Just on the
surface, don't you agree it was nice to hear someone address different camps
who is passionate about both and therefore abstained from sarcasm and name
calling?  His approach was kind and respectful.  Later, love mom

----- Original Message -----
From: Bill Rand  
Date: Thursday, December 2, 2004 4:26 pm
Subject: Re: article on red-blue alliance

>	In some ways I agree with this, in other ways I completely
> disagree with it.  I used to be very much into the evangelical 
> christianmovement back in High School.  In the end I got out of it 
> for two reasons:
> 1)  It is currently intellectually vacuous, funny since it was the 
> churchthat got us through the Dark Ages, but right now the modern 
> church has
> nothing interesting going on in it.  So I guess to that extent I agree
> with this article since it claims that what is needed is more
> questioning and examination.	I'm at this point not convinced that
> there really is anything less to plumb in it.  Don't get me wrong St.
> Augustine, Kirkegaard, St. Anselm, and St. Thomas Acquinas, were all
> potent ideas people and their writings are fantastic.  
> Unfortunately no
> recent Christian philosophers (besides maybe CS Lewis) have said 
> anythingthe least bit novel or interesting.  Thus I disagree with 
> this article to
> the extent that I think there is anything more that can be done to
> reinvigorate the church, part of me thinks its an idea whose time has
> past.  2)  The lack of tolerance and understanding,  again don't 
> get me
> wrong, I'm not convinced that those of us in the faculty clubs 
> couldn'tuse more of this.  Most Christians I knew were committed 
> to the idea of
> loving everyone, but trying to correct them.	The whole idea of 
> love the
> sinner, hate the sin, but that's so paternalistic, and in a sense more
> subversive and corrupting than being openly anti-gay, muslim, etc.
> Moreover the idea of proslytization is something that really 
> annoys me.  I
> mean I'm proslytizing right now but its to a group of individuals 
> who at
> least have made some claim that they want to hear about it and you 
> can all
> delete my message right now if you want to.  However, I was part 
> of a
> group that attempted to proslytize to completely random strangers 
> they met
> on the street and I just have a fundamental problem with that.
> 
>	All in all I would love it if we could reconcile the pew and the
> faculty club, I'm just not sure its possible.
> -Bill
> 
> On Wed, 1 Dec 2004, Daniel Reeves wrote:
> 
> > Cam writes,
> >
> > > My goal here is to urge everyone to create a better world by 
> trying to
> > > understand each other.  In this case, it means researching the 
> other> > side to the same extent we research our own vs. blindly 
> pushing for the
> > > extreme right or left, while in reality hoping to end up with 
> a slightly
> > > different definition of the middle.
> >
> > Here's an article in that spirit that I found interesting:
> >
> > http://www.techcentralstation.com/112904A.html
> >  [text of article follows]
> >
> > Faculty Clubs and Church Pews
> >  By William J. Stuntz
> >  Published		 11/29/2004
> >
> > The past few months have seen a lot of talk about red and blue 
> America,> mostly by people on one side of the partisan divide who 
> find the other
> > side a mystery.
> >
> > It isn't a mystery to me, because I live on both sides. For the past
> > twenty years, I've belonged to evangelical Protestant churches, 
> the kind
> > where George W. Bush rolled up huge majorities. And for the past 
> eighteen> years, I've worked in secular universities where one can 
> hardly believe
> > that Bush voters exist. Evangelical churches are red America at its
> > reddest. And universities, especially the ones in New England 
> (where I
> > work now), are as blue as the bluest sky.
> >
> > Not surprisingly, each of these institutions is enemy territory 
> to the
> > other. But the enmity is needless. It may be a sign that I'm 
> terminally> weird, but I love them both, passionately. And I think 
> that if my church
> > friends and my university friends got to know each other, they'd 
> find a
> > lot to like and admire. More to the point, the representatives 
> of each
> > side would learn something important and useful from the other 
> side. These
> > institutions may be red and blue now. But their natural color is 
> purple.>
> > You wouldn't know it from talking to the people who populate 
> universities> or fill church pews.
> >
> > A lot of my church friends think universities represent the 
> forces of
> > darkness.  Law schools -- my corner of the academic world -- are
> > particularly suspect. A fellow singer in a church choir once 
> asked me what
> > I did for a living. When I told her, she said, "A Christian 
> lawyer? Isn't
> > that sort of like being a Christian prostitute? I mean, you 
> can't really
> > do that, right?" She wasn't kidding. And if I had said no, you don't
> > understand; I'm a law professor, not a lawyer, I'm pretty sure 
> that would
> > not have helped matters. ("Oh, so you train people to be 
> prostitutes?")>
> > You hear the same kinds of comments running in the other 
> direction. Some
> > years ago a faculty colleague and I were talking about religion and
> > politics, and this colleague said "You know, I think you're the 
> first> Christian I've ever met who isn't stupid." My professor 
> friend wasn't
> > kidding either. I've had other conversations like these -- 
> albeit usually
> > a little more tactful -- on both sides, a dozen times over the 
> years.> Maybe two dozen. People in each of these two worlds find 
> the other
> > frightening, and appalling.
> >
> > All of us are appalling, I suppose, but these reactions are 
> mostly due to
> > ignorance. Most of my Christian friends have no clue what goes 
> on in
> > faculty clubs. And my colleagues in faculty offices cannot 
> imagine what
> > happens in those evangelical churches on Sunday morning.
> >
> > In both cases, the truth is surprisingly attractive. And 
> surprisingly> similar: Churches and universities are the two 
> twenty-first century
> > American enterprises that care most about ideas, about language, 
> and about
> > understanding the world we live in, with all its beauty and 
> ugliness.> Nearly all older universities were founded as schools 
> of theology: a
> > telling fact. Another one is this: A large part of what goes on 
> in those
> > church buildings that dot the countryside is education -- people 
> reading> hard texts, and trying to sort out what they mean.
> >
> > Another similarity is less obvious but no less important. Ours 
> is an
> > individualist culture; people rarely put their community's 
> welfare ahead
> > of their own. It isn't so rare in churches and universities. 
> Churches are
> > mostly run by volunteer labor (not to mention volunteered 
> money): those
> > who tend nurseries and teach Sunday School classes get nothing 
> but a pat
> > on the back for their labor. Not unlike the professors who staff 
> important> faculty committees. An economist friend once told me 
> that economics
> > departments are ungovernable, because economists understand the 
> reward> structure that drives universities: professors who do 
> thankless> institutional tasks competently must do more such 
> tasks. Yet the trains
> > run more or less on time -- maybe historians are running the 
> economics> departments -- because enough faculty attach enough 
> importance to the
> > welfare of their colleagues and students. Selfishness and 
> exploitation are
> > of course common too, in universities and churches as everywhere 
> else. But
> > one sees a good deal of day-to-day altruism, which is not common
> > everywhere else.
> >
> > And each side of this divide has something to teach the other.
> > Evangelicals would benefit greatly from the love of argument 
> that pervades
> > universities. The "scandal of the evangelical mind" -- the title 
> of a
> > wonderful book by evangelical author and professor Mark Noll -- 
> isn't that
> > evangelicals aren't smart or don't love ideas. They are, and 
> they do. No,
> > the real scandal is the lack of tough, hard questioning to test 
> those> ideas. Christians believe in a God-Man who called himself 
> (among other
> > things) "the Truth." Truth-seeking, testing beliefs with tough-
> minded> questions and arguments, is a deeply Christian enterprise. 
> Evangelical> churches should be swimming in it. Too few are.
> >
> > For their part, universities would be better, richer places if 
> they had an
> > infusion of the humility that one finds in those churches. Too 
> often, the
> > world of top universities is defined by its arrogance: the style of
> > argument is more "it's plainly true that" than "I wonder 
> whether." We like
> > to test our ideas, but once they've passed the relevant academic 
> hurdles> (the bar is lower than we like to think), we talk and act 
> as though those
> > ideas are not just right but obviously right -- only a fool or a 
> bigot> could think otherwise.
> >
> > The atmosphere I've found in the churches to which my family and 
> I have
> > belonged is very different. Evangelicals like "testimonies"; 
> it's common
> > for talks to Christian groups to begin with a little 
> autobiography, as the
> > speaker describes the path he has traveled on his road to faith. 
> Somewhere> in the course of that testimony, the speaker always 
> talks about what a
> > mess he is: how many things he has gotten wrong, why the people 
> sitting in
> > the chairs should really be teaching him, not the other way 
> around. This
> > isn't a pose; the evangelicals I know really do believe that 
> they -- we
> > (I'm in this camp too) -- are half-blind fools, stumbling our 
> way toward
> > truth, regularly falling off the right path and, by God's grace, 
> picking> ourselves up and trying to get back on. But while 
> humility is more a
> > virtue than a tactic, it turns out to be a pretty good tactic. 
> Ideas and
> > arguments go down a lot easier when accompanied by the admission 
> that the
> > speaker might, after all, be wrong.
> >
> > That gets to an aspect of evangelical culture that the 
> mainstream press
> > has never understood: the combination of strong faith 
> commitments with
> > uncertainty, the awareness that I don't know everything, that I 
> have a lot
> > more to learn than to teach. Belief that a good God has a plan 
> does not
> > imply knowledge of the plan's details. Judging from the lives and
> > conversations of my Christian friends, faith in that God does 
> not tend to
> > produce a belief in one's infallibility. More the opposite: 
> Christians> believe we see "through a glass, darkly" when we see 
> at all -- and that
> > we're constantly tempted to imagine ourselves as better and 
> smarter than
> > we really are. If that sensibility were a little more common in
> > universities, faculty meetings would be a lot more pleasant. And 
> it should
> > be more common: Academics know better than anyone just how vast 
> is the
> > pool of human knowledge, and how little of it any of us can 
> grasp. Talking
> > humbly should be second nature.
> >
> > There is even a measure of political common ground. True, university
> > faculties are heavily Democratic, and evangelical churches are 
> thick with
> > Republicans. But that red-blue polarization is mostly a 
> consequence of
> > which issues are on the table -- and which ones aren't. Change 
> the issue
> > menu, and those electoral maps may look very different. Imagine a
> > presidential campaign in which the two candidates seriously 
> debated how a
> > loving society should treat its poorest members. Helping the 
> poor is
> > supposed to be the left's central commitment, going back to the 
> days of
> > FDR and the New Deal. In practice, the commitment has all but 
> disappeared> from national politics. Judging by the speeches of 
> liberal Democratic
> > politicians, what poor people need most is free abortions. Anti-
> poverty> programs tend to help middle-class government employees; 
> the poor end up
> > with a few scraps from the table. Teachers' unions have a 
> stranglehold on
> > failed urban school systems, even though fixing those schools 
> would be the
> > best anti-poverty program imaginable.
> >
> > I don't think my liberal Democratic professor friends like this 
> state of
> > affairs. And -- here's a news flash -- neither do most 
> evangelicals, who
> > regard helping the poor as both a passion and a spiritual 
> obligation, not
> > just a political preference. (This may be even more true of 
> theologically> conservative Catholics.) These men and women vote 
> Republican not because
> > they like the party's policy toward poverty -- cut taxes and 
> hope for the
> > best -- but because poverty isn't on the table anymore. In 
> evangelical> churches, elections are mostly about abortion. 
> Neither party seems much
> > concerned with giving a hand to those who most need it.
> >
> > That could change. I can't prove it, but I think there is a 
> large, latent
> > pro-redistribution evangelical vote, ready to get behind the first
> > politician to tap into it. (Barack Obama, are you listening?) If 
> liberal> Democratic academics believe the things they say they 
> believe -- and I
> > think they do -- there is an alliance here just waiting to happen.
> >
> > Humility, love of serious ideas, commitment to helping the poor -
> - these
> > are things my faculty friends and my church friends ought to be 
> able to
> > get together on. If they ever do, look out: American politics, 
> and maybe
> > American life, will be turned upside down. And all those 
> politicians who
> > can only speak in one color will be out of a job.
> >
> > I can hardly wait.
> >
> > William J. Stuntz is a Professor at Harvard Law School.
> >
> >
> > --
> > http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/dreeves  - -  google://"Daniel 
> Reeves">
> > Q. How do you tell an extrovert computer scientist?
> > A. When they talk to you they look at your shoes rather than 
> their own.
> >
> >
> 
> --
> Bill Rand	 1427 Broadway Apt. #2	Ann Arbor, MI 48105   734-
> 717-7965
>     wrand Æ umich.edu		   http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~wrand/
> "All the stars in your sign have an important message of hope, 
> but you
>      may not get it before the sudden explosion in your galactic
>   spiral arm on Wednesday." - Pisces Horoscope, The Onion, 9/8/2004
> 
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