LA Train Wreck

Yes, I am familiar with the area of this afternoon's crash of a commuter and freight train in Chatsworth. When I still lived in Canoga Park, I would sometime stop near the 180° curve where Old Santa Susana Pass went over the railroad track to watch a Southern Pacific train go by as I was coming home from work in Northridge. (Hey, boys like to watch trains! In those days there was no passenger traffic on that road.) It looks like the collision was about 1000-1500 feet east of that point, as a northbound train would be curving to the east. It looks horrific. Prayers for those on the trains and for the rescue workers.

The West Is Won!!!

Guess who just won the American League West for the fourth time in the last five years?










The other Los Angeles baseball team isn't doing too badly, either.

He Was a What?

Okay. Pastor Zip can understand how some people didn't appreciate Gov. Sarah Palin's take on community organizers during her speech at the Republican National Convention last week. I have friends -- good, solid Lutheran pastors -- who have been heavily involved in such efforts and speak well of what they accomplished.

So for the moment I'll set aside my own experiences when the Gamaliel Foundation's guy in the Quad Cities tried to stir up interest in organizing here in Peoria -- where I went to a big Quad Cities Interfaith convocation and saw just how much of "the community" bothered to show up to set QCI's agenda for the coming year. That would make it easy enough to belittle Sen. Obama's experience -- though if they intend to be victorious in November Sen. McCain's people had better not forget that our junior senator came out of nowhere to defeat the mighty Clinton machine. But this is Pastor Zip's Blog, not my 21st Century Whig blog, so we'll step around the "political" side of this.

I find the following quip gaining popularity with my more, uh, progressive connections within the Church:

"Jesus was a community organizer, Pontius Pilate was a governor."

And while I like a good quip, I've also read the Gospels. So...

Just how was Jesus a "community organizer?"





(Well, there was his disciple Simon the Zealot...)

Big tents are for circuses.

Early this morning (while also watching news reports of the Republican National Convention) I was reading an ALPB Forum Online discussion that had started with responses to the Speaker of the House's mangling of Catholic thought on abortion but had turned into another debate over ELCA vs. LCMS communion practices. I read from an ELCA pastor,

"We are the 'big tent' denomination."

Now, "big tent" --whether it be from political or churchly pundits -- got old for me a long time ago. It just seems a nonsensical thing for anyone who cares about political principles (which the United States of America were founded upon) or a confession of faith (which is what Lutheranism was founded upon). But only early this morning, upon reading once again that sort of nonsense, did words immediately jump into my head. And so I posted them:

"Big tents are for circuses."

The Spirit of Traditional Morality

This by Nathaniel Peters over at First Things on the reaction to the news that the presumptive Republican Vice-Presidential nominee's teen-aged daughter is with child:

Joseph Bottum wrote: “though surely it’s an odd moment when an out-of-wedlock pregnancy becomes a symbol of conservative cultural values, but chalk it all up as yet another way in which abortion has skewed the natural divisions of American politics.”

I beg to differ. The issue is not only that we applaud Bristol Palin for upholding the sanctity of life. The issue is how social conservatives deal with people when they don’t live up to our moral values. Do we stand up and roundly condemn them, or do we care for them while continuing to propose a more excellent way?

What we’ve seen is that, contrary to expectation, social conservatives have chosen not to condemn. The country has seen that “family values” not only means teaching your children not to have sex outside of marriage, but also supporting them responsibly should they fail to follow the teaching. In other words, it means teaching them what sin is and loving them if they sin.

That kind of standing in the truth with love should be a hallmark of those who believe in traditional morality. And it should be incomprehensible to those who do not understand the spirit behind that morality. In that light, it’s only natural that the way Sarah Palin has handled her daughter’s pregnancy should be seen as a symbol of conservative cultural values, and that those who do not share those values should be threatened by the truth lived in love.

For what it's worth, this pastor thinks Peters and Bottom are both correct. It is an odd moment skewed by the abortion debate. And it's, well, Christian people acting like Christians, something we (being sinners) don't always do well. And something those hostile to Christians don't get because it doesn't fit with their preconceptions about us.

Faith vs. Science?

The headline to the story in the August 24 edition of the New York Times is "A Teacher on the Front Line as Faith and Science Clash." Looks to me, though, as if we have an even bigger problem with critical thinking than the Grey Lady ever imagined. See if you can find it:

By AMY HARMON
Published: August 23, 2008

ORANGE PARK, Fla. — David Campbell switched on the overhead projector and wrote “Evolution” in the rectangle of light on the screen.

He scanned the faces of the sophomores in his Biology I class. Many of them, he knew from years of teaching high school in this Jacksonville suburb, had been raised to take the biblical creation story as fact. His gaze rested for a moment on Bryce Haas, a football player who attended the 6 a.m. prayer meetings of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes in the school gymnasium.

“If I do this wrong,” Mr. Campbell remembers thinking on that humid spring morning, “I’ll lose him.”

In February, the Florida Department of Education modified its standards to explicitly require, for the first time, the state’s public schools to teach evolution, calling it “the organizing principle of life science.” Spurred in part by legal rulings against school districts seeking to favor religious versions of natural history, over a dozen other states have also given more emphasis in recent years to what has long been the scientific consensus: that all of the diverse life forms on Earth descended from a common ancestor, through a process of mutation and natural selection, over billions of years.

But in a nation where evangelical Protestantism and other religious traditions stress a literal reading of the biblical description of God’s individually creating each species, students often arrive at school fearing that evolution, and perhaps science itself, is hostile to their faith.

Some come armed with “Ten questions to ask your biology teacher about evolution,” a document circulated on the Internet that highlights supposed weaknesses in evolutionary theory. Others scrawl their opposition on homework assignments. Many just tune out.

With a mandate to teach evolution but little guidance as to how, science teachers are contriving their own ways to turn a culture war into a lesson plan. How they fare may bear on whether a new generation of Americans embraces scientific evidence alongside religious belief.

“If you see something you don’t understand, you have to ask ‘why?’ or ‘how?’ ” Mr. Campbell often admonished his students at Ridgeview High School.

Yet their abiding mistrust in evolution, he feared, jeopardized their belief in the basic power of science to explain the natural world — and their ability to make sense of it themselves.

Passionate on the subject, Mr. Campbell had helped to devise the state’s new evolution standards, which will be phased in starting this fall. A former Navy flight instructor not used to pulling his punches, he fought hard for their passage. But with his students this spring, he found himself treading carefully, as he tried to bridge an ideological divide that stretches well beyond his classroom.

A Cartoon and a Challenge

He started with Mickey Mouse.

On the projector, Mr. Campbell placed slides of the cartoon icon: one at his skinny genesis in 1928; one from his 1940 turn as the impish Sorcerer’s Apprentice; and another of the rounded, ingratiating charmer of Mouse Club fame.

“How,” he asked his students, “has Mickey changed?”

Natives of Disney World’s home state, they waved their hands and called out answers.

“His tail gets shorter,” Bryce volunteered.

“Bigger eyes!” someone else shouted.

“He looks happier,” one girl observed. “And cuter.”

Mr. Campbell smiled. “Mickey evolved,” he said. “And Mickey gets cuter because Walt Disney makes more money that way. That is ‘selection.’ ”

Later, he would get to the touchier part, about how the minute changes in organisms that drive biological change arise spontaneously, without direction. And how a struggle for existence among naturally varying individuals has helped to generate every species, living and extinct, on the planet.

For now, it was enough that they were listening.

He strode back to the projector, past his menagerie of snakes and baby turtles, and pointed to the word he had written in the beginning of class.

“Evolution has been the focus of a lot of debate in our state this year,” he said. “If you read the newspapers, everyone is arguing, ‘is it a theory, is it not a theory?’ The answer is, we can observe it. We can see it happen, just like you can see it in Mickey.”

Some students were nodding. As the bell rang, Mr. Campbell stood by the door, satisfied. But Bryce, heavyset with blond curls, left with a stage whisper as he slung his knapsack over his shoulder.

“I can see something else, too,” he said. “I can see that there’s no way I came from an ape.”

Read it all here, for there is a lot more to this article. But contrary to what Mr. Campbell and Ms. Harmon want us to think, Bryce the young football player is not the one thinking badly here. If you haven't figured it out yet, think of the "challenge" Mr. Campbell is issuing in his classroom. Meanwhile, here's some more about the teacher:

When Florida’s last set of science standards came out in 1996, soon after Mr. Campbell took the teaching job at Ridgeview, he studied them in disbelief. Though they included the concept that biological “changes over time” occur, the word evolution was not mentioned.

He called his district science supervisor. “Is this really what they want us to teach for the next 10 years?” he demanded.

In 2000, when the independent Thomas B. Fordham Foundation evaluated the evolution education standards of all 50 states, Florida was among 12 to receive a grade of F. (Kansas, which drew international attention in 1999 for deleting all mention of evolution and later embracing supernatural theories, received an F-minus.)

Mr. Campbell, 52, who majored in biology while putting himself through Cornell University on a Reserve Officers Training Corps scholarship, taught evolution anyway. But like nearly a third of biology teachers across the country, and more in his politically conservative district, he regularly heard from parents voicing complaints.

With no school policy to back him up, he spent less time on the subject than he would have liked. And he bit back his irritation at Teresa Yancey, a biology teacher down the hall who taught a unit she called “Evolution or NOT.”

Animals do adapt to their environments, Ms. Yancey tells her students, but evolution alone can hardly account for the appearance of wholly different life forms. She leaves it up to them to draw their own conclusions. But when pressed, she tells them, “I think God did it.”

Mr. Campbell was well aware of her opinion. “I don’t think we have this great massive change over time where we go from fish to amphibians, from monkeys to man,” she once told him. “We see lizards with different-shaped tails, we don’t see blizzards — the lizard bird.”

With some approximation of courtesy, Mr. Campbell reminded her that only a tiny fraction of organisms that ever lived had been preserved in fossils. Even so, he informed his own students, scientists have discovered thousands of fossils that provide evidence of one species transitioning into another — including feathered dinosaurs.

But at the inaugural meeting of the Florida Citizens for Science, which he co-founded in 2005, he vented his frustration. “The kids are getting hurt,” Mr. Campbell told teachers and parents. “We need to do something.”

The Dover decision in December of that year dealt a blow to “intelligent design,” which posits that life is too complex to be explained by evolution alone, and has been widely promoted by religious advocates since the Supreme Court’s 1987 ban on creationism in public schools. The federal judge in the case called the doctrine “creationism re-labeled,” and found the Dover school board had violated the constitutional separation of church and state by requiring teachers to mention it. The school district paid $1 million in legal costs.

Inspired, the Florida citizens group soon contacted similar groups in other states advocating better teaching of evolution. And in June 2007, when his supervisor invited Mr. Campbell to help draft Florida’s new standards, he quickly accepted.

During the next six months, he made the drive to three-day meetings in Orlando and Tallahassee six times. By January 2008 the Board of Education budget had run out. But the 30 teachers on the standards committee paid for their own gasoline to attend their last meeting.

Mr. Campbell quietly rejoiced in their final draft. Under the proposed new standards, high school students could be tested on how fossils and DNA provide evidence for evolution. Florida students would even be expected to learn how their own species fits into the tree of life.

Whether the state’s board of education would adopt them, however, was unclear. There were heated objections from some religious organizations and local school boards. In a stormy public comment session, Mr. Campbell defended his fellow writers against complaints that they had not included alternative explanations for life’s diversity, like intelligent design.

His attempt at humor came with an edge:

“We also failed to include astrology, alchemy and the concept of the moon being made of green cheese,” he said. “Because those aren’t science, either.”

The evening of the vote, Mr. Campbell learned by e-mail message from an education official that the words “scientific theory of” had been inserted in front of “evolution” to appease opponents on the board. Even so, the standards passed by only a 4-to-3 vote.

Mr. Campbell cringed at the wording, which seemed to suggest evolution was a kind of hunch instead of the only accepted scientific explanation for the great variety of life on Earth. But he turned off his computer without scrolling through all of the frustrated replies from other writers. The standards, he thought, were finally in place.

Now he just had to teach.

Again, read it all here. And ask, just what is Mr. Campbell really teaching? Let's look at his Mickey Mouse Challenge again.

On the projector, Mr. Campbell placed slides of the cartoon icon: one at his skinny genesis in 1928; one from his 1940 turn as the impish Sorcerer’s Apprentice; and another of the rounded, ingratiating charmer of Mouse Club fame.

“How,” he asked his students, “has Mickey changed?”

Natives of Disney World’s home state, they waved their hands and called out answers.

“His tail gets shorter,” Bryce volunteered.

“Bigger eyes!” someone else shouted.

“He looks happier,” one girl observed. “And cuter.”

Mr. Campbell smiled. “Mickey evolved,” he said. “And Mickey gets cuter because Walt Disney makes more money that way. That is ‘selection.’ ”

Er, no, Mr. Campbell. That is actually...

...

......

[someone's gonna really hate this]

.........

............

..............intelligent design.

On the part of Walt Disney, who kept redesigning his creation.

Mr. Campbell may have "helped to devise the state’s new evolution standards." But looks like we need to be more concerned about thinking standards among Florida's leading teachers and America's leading media.

Hat tip to Gary North's Specific Answers.

My Web Sites

I posted my first web page in March 1996 after CompuServe, which was then one of the premier online services, created Our World for its members. The old URL for my first web page still works, though before I left CI$ I put forwarding information on all the pages that I had. I hope that's proven useful, as there are still plenty of web sites that point to that old site.

One of the things I thought I'd do then was have a detailed page of Christian and Lutheran resources, turned into a much bigger project than I ever imagined, but since the World Wide Web and my site developed over a few years, I didn't really notice how big a project it had become. Created near the end of 1996, Pastor Zip's Christian Web Links grew in length and spawned Pastor Zip's Lutheran Web Links in mid-1998. By then I'd came up with the idea of having a link there, with a brief description, for every Lutheran church body that had any English pages. Pastor Zip's International Lutheran Web Links was branched onto a page of its own at the end of the year 2000 (and I've been thinking I need to break it into regional pages as it is a pretty long page). As I discovered more a more small Lutheran synods and associations—and as more of them discovered my site—Pastor Zip's US Lutheran Web Links was branched in mid 2002.

Actually, I had first branched an Our World Site for Zion (with its unwieldy http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/przip/zionpeo.htm URL) within weeks of putting up that first simple page. And while I had intended a broader based series of personal pages, except for my pages directed towards space exploration (the currently rather out-of-date I Want to Go!) they've just never happened as I've focussed on the Lutheran links and Zion's site.

The World Wide Web has somewhat settled down. Wonderful sites might move or disappear (and sometimes re-appear) every few months as internet services firms went broke and/or consolidated, so keeping on top of a site full of links could take some time. And as more and more came online, some of my initially simple ideas proved that they would be far too time-consuming for someone doing all this on the side as a "hobby."

And yet, through all this, Pastor Zip's Lutheran Web Links—especially the subsidiary church body pages—has filled a still-unique niche. And it is just plain fun when someone half-way around the world writes me, or I meet someone new for whom Pastor Zip's Links are a favorite and oft-used bookmark.

Anyway, I've just updated my original Steven P. Tibbetts Home Page for the first time since December '06! Same with Pastor Zip's Anglican Web Links, which I'd not done anything with in almost 2 1/2 years! Zion's pages, most of those basic Lutheran links, and the US Lutheran Links were updated earlier in August. You're certainly welcome to look around—and tell me what you think!