Sender: -1.329 (spamval) -- NONE
Message-id: <a9b66a632d9b.41aeec12 &AElig hilltop.bradley.edu>
MIME-version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-language: en
Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT
Content-disposition: inline
Priority: normal
Date: Thu, 02 Dec 2004 10:18:58 -0600
To: Daniel Reeves <dreeves &AElig umich.edu>
Cc: improvetheworld &AElig umich.edu, Nicole Poellet <poelnico &AElig umich.edu>
From: lreeves &AElig hilltop.bradley.edu
Subject: Re: article on red-blue alliance
Status: O

Wonderful.  Now that one I enjoyed reading.  Laurie 

----- Original Message -----
From: Daniel Reeves <dreeves &AElig umich.edu>
Date: Wednesday, December 1, 2004 8:08 pm
Subject: article on red-blue alliance

> 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.
> 
>