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Date: Thu, 2 Dec 2004 17:26:25 -0500 (EST)
To: Daniel Reeves <dreeves &AElig umich.edu>
cc: improvetheworld &AElig umich.edu
From: Bill Rand <wrand &AElig umich.edu>
Subject: Re: article on red-blue alliance
Status: O

	In some ways I agree with this, in other ways I completely
disagree with it.  I used to be very much into the evangelical christian
movement 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 church
that 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 anything
the 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't
use 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 &AElig 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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