While I know that some forms of determining merit pay for teachers can be unfair, in general I think tying pay to performance is an excellent, indeed necessary idea.
Now the Florida Education Association is trying to block $700 million in grants from the federal government because it’s tied to incentive pay.
Bad idea, I’d say!
There are generally two reactions I hear to this in Sunday School classes and church pews–it’s either fascination, as if the genealogies make or break the Bible or complete indifference, as in “who cares?”
Both reactions miss the point. Matthew and Luke are each making a point, and they are making it in a way that their early readers probably understood fairly well, though there is disagreement on the meaning in some quite early literature.
There’s a great article on the genealogies and their meaning on the Christianity Today web site. I think this presentation illustrates the importance of not reconciling texts before we understand what they’re trying to say as they are. Many treatments of this issue simply list possible resolutions of the differences, which misses the message that each evangelist was trying to convey.
Grant Osborne, the author, says:
Examining each genealogy closely reveals the authors’ different purposes.
Just so. Go, read and enjoy!
I’ve posted a poll for discussing the need, or lack thereof, for new English translations. This post exists solely for comments on that poll. Note that multiple answers are permitted in case one is not double-minded, but perhaps a bit fuzzy.
No, President Obama’s approval rating; the poll that I have in the right hand sidebar. It has been there for more than 18 months, and surprisingly enough is still generating interest. The last comment is dated December 19, 2009 and there have been quite a number. You can see the results here.
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In case anyone wants to keep this poll alive even further past its sell-by date, I’m including the form as well:
If this surprises you, then you must not have been dealing with bankers and credit card companies that much.
Might this also be part of the reason that regulations tend not to work all that well? You have to think of everything, but if you really plug all the loopholes, the result will be tightened credit, not necessarily a bad thing, but probably not what the government wants right now.
And I think he pretty much demolishes it as an argument. It is, of course, quite valid to calculate the cost of some policy and then ask whether the result is worth the price, but the simple statement that their is a cost accomplishes nothing.
One further note I would add. Just because jobs are lost in one industry doesn’t mean those jobs are necessarily lost to the economy. Ecological regulations, for example, increase the cost of producing certain things, and the increased cost will reduce demand, and thus jobs will be lost from that industry. But that extra cost goes into another industry where it will be creating jobs, always providing, of course, that something valid is accomplished by the regulation.
What this sort of thing should cause us to do, I think, is carefully analyze all policies and all regulations to see if the benefits are worth the cost. I’m guessing that there are quite a number of regulations that seem on the surface to accomplish something useful. We like to label laws with wonderful statements of the benefits they are supposed to confer, but it is much rarer for us to test those results, and even rarer still to change the policy just because it doesn’t work.
The one devastating charge that is leveled frequently at Arminians is that we are Pelagians. Since the teaching of Pelagius was condemned well in the past, this is supposed to either shut us up or send us into a spasm of defending ourselves from the charge. As far as I’m concerned, call me pelagian or semi-pelagian if you want. I’m not going to fight over the possession of labels.
But Mark Olson, who is Eastern Orthodox and not Arminian, responds to Frank Turk in a post titled Free Will, Pelagius, and the East, and I find his reasoning particularly interesting. The more I read of the eastern church fathers and of Eastern Orthodox theology, the better it sounds.
Mark makes another excellent point regarding Christian debates, however, which is:
… Different traditions, as part of their growing apart, develop their own terminology. Even where they use the same words, they don’t often have the same meaning. Thus the first step of any ecumenical discussion is to find a common language for communication. …
Just so. It’s very easy to misunderstand the terminology used by folks in another tradition. Consider “sola scriptura,” as an example, which is often thought in popular terms to mean that you can’t allow any other human to help you understand the Bible, but meant no such thing to the reformers. A little time spent in understanding the terms goes a long way.
Go check out Mark’s complete post. I think it is educational.
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