Category: Administrative

Watching the debate about the Michigan and Florida primaries has been instructive in many ways. I’ve previously noted that I come at it from two different angles. First, the states broke the rules and thus deserve to be penalized, though why this penalty should be complete elimination of the delegation I don’t know. Second, the primaries are to some extent about bringing people into the process, and on that basis there is good reason to try to find some way to include the missing delegates.

But there is a complicating argument, that the state legislature, Republican dominated as in Florida, voted this, yet the Democratic party and its leaders in Florida is being penalized. When I go under my first approach (they broke the rules) I can suggest that the Democratic party in Florida could have started work immediately to allocate delegates on a different basis. They preferred not to. But if one is arguing fairness, the state involvement is problematic.

I find the fact that the legislature was controlled by a different party less compelling as an argument. In Michigan, the Democrats controlled the legislature and did the same thing. It’s the state involvement, irrespective of the controlling party, that troubles me. To be blunt I don’t see a good way to make rules clear, fair, and reasonably enforceable when there are so many authorities with their fingers in the pie.

What would I prefer? Let the political parties–any party at all, large or small–set up and administer their own means of choosing candidates. If they want a statewide primary, let them pay for it. If all the parties want to do one together, let them agree on how to finance it. Make the parties 100% responsible for the selection process. Then whether they want a completely democratic process, some mix, or a top-down selection, it is a matter for a private, voluntary organization.

I think that state entanglement with the candidate selection process is a formula for ever increasing legal issues. People are already arguing this issue as though people had a constitutional right to a certain level of influence in their party.

At the same time, let’s eliminate party registration. What business does the state have keeping records of political affiliation? Of what public value is it? Let the parties track their own members. They could then repudiate such claimed members as David Duke for the Republican parties and be held responsible for anyone they didn’t repudiate.

Crossposted to RedBlueChristian.com.

Or perhaps I should call it thoughts resulting from meditations on a healing service. But that makes a long title.

I’ve mentioned here before that my wife and I recently transferred our membership to First United Methodist Church in Pensacola. This past Sunday we had the opportunity to attend a healing service at our new church. I enjoyed the service a great deal. It was done with a traditional liturgy and gently contemporary styling in the music, by which I mean that a band with guitars, drums, and keyboard (they used the grand piano so no effects!) played a combination of more modern choruses and familiar hymns. Unlike some contemporary praise groups who seem to think that comprehending the lyrics is not important and that volume is the key element, the words were sung clearly and at a quite reasonable level.

The service included reading of scripture, prayer, and a medication (see comments!) meditation, then communion was served, or rather the ritual was carried out through the blessing. Once the elements were blessed, and also oil for anointing, people were left free to come forward for communion, for prayer with anointing, or to peruse through pictures that represented situations about which we could pray. I’ll mention more about that in a moment.

The communion ritual was nicely done, with words added at the appropriate asterisks that tied that day’s worship activities to the service of healing. United Methodist readers will probably understand what I’m saying here. Way too often I hear a communion service conducted with no attention to the points at which “words appropriate to the occasion” can be added. A few tasteful lines there that tie in the day’s message, worship activities, or even people from that community can go a long way toward helping this to be communion and not merely a reading from the United Methodist Hymnal. In this case the words were very carefully chosen, and tied the afternoon service to the message of the morning services as well.

I noticed that the lines for communion and for anointing with oil and prayer were quite long, but little attention was paid to the table with the pictures that were offered so that we could take them home and pray about the items represented. Toward the end I went and picked up a picture almost randomly, that turns out to be one of a young soldier in Darfur. The picture has been haunting me. I was already aware of Darfur, but this has brought it home.

I certainly found the service a blessing. But now for what generally makes both my more rationalistic and my more charismatic friends crazy. Both would think that a healing service would be about healing, and that someone would come away cured–or not. The success of a healing service would be measured by healings.

But for me that is not the point. I know that is difficult to understand, and I don’t usually try very hard to explain it. If you feel blessed by a healing service, go. If not, not. But just as I say prayer can’t be measured by studies of the number of people who are healed, or the number of things that are received, so I do not believe a healing service can be measured in that way. Indeed, I doubt it can be measured except by the numbers who attend, and how much they appreciate it.

It is very much like any other variety of prayer. If prayer was designed to work like a vending machine, insert prayer, receive goodies, then we would say it failed if no goodies were received. And for those many people who teach just that, there is justification for the skeptical question of why it doesn’t happen. For me, both prayer and the healing service are about God and our communion with him. If we have communed, then we were successful.

In the meditation, the minister presiding seemed to indicate much the same thing. Unlike a faith healer, he didn’t whip people into a frenzy and suggest that if they had enough faith they would be healed. Rather, he simply suggested coming before God and receiving what God chose to give.

I’m thankful for the ministry of my new church and particularly for this service, which was a blessing to me.

My wife and I went to the front of the church last Sunday, declaring our decision to transfer our membership to a new congregation. Many people today are disenchanted with the idea of church membership. I’m a strong believer in membership and involvement. It’s a commitment you make to be an active and supportive part of a community.

Our transfer was from Gonzalez United Methodist Church to First United Methodist Church (Pensacola). I list both churches, because we are going from a church we love to another church we expect to love. Gonzalez has been a place of service for us, and we are moving to First Church because we believe that we will be able to be of service there as well.

So on Pentecost Sunday, with my former student Rev. Geoffrey Lentz preaching on the Holy Spirit, we made the move. It’s a bit uncomfortable. It’s a much larger church than I’m used to, but the idea is that there are more people there who are interested in the type of teaching I do, and I can perhaps teach more often at my home church than going out elsewhere. At the same time there is some excitement in this. A total of 52 people joined the church at the three services that day, 36 confirmands, and the rest transfers and some professions of faith. There was one baptism of a new member.

For the summer, Jody won’t have a contemporary service, which is hard for her, but we love the sermons both by the senior pastor, Dr. Wesley Wachob, and by Geoffrey. I am looking forward to a great deal of learning as well as teaching.

For all who have come to expect me to be prolific, I have but one post for today. I’m having hardware problems. I decided to upgrade a couple of things related to putting out my podcast, and the upgrades, which should have been simple, have been anything but.

I assume I will have a working system by tomorrow, but right now things are a bit questionable.

Enjoy!

I was actually planning to work on it starting in about an hour, but I just got a service call that’s likely to take a couple of hours. I am really still planning to do this, so be patient!

I was going to update it to emphasize comment moderation, but I see I already did that. The key point to note here is that I use comment moderation with as careful of filtering as I can. Inevitably it catches legitimate comments and puts them in the moderation queue. Since I work in front of my computer normally at least 10 hours a day, moderation is usually very fast. I do sleep at night, however, so it takes a bit longer!

The bottom line on my comment policy is that if you’re talking about the subject, it’s hard to get deleted. But if you can’t insult me without constant use of the f-word, your comments won’t be kept here. Polished insults are acceptable, and often even get me to laugh.

I’m copying the policy here, with some emphasis added:

I have resisted posting a comments policy, because I pretty much allow any comment except for obvious spam and things that would be illegal. I don’t delete comments for criticizing me or my positions.

Recently, however, I have had an influx of spam, and posters should be aware that I have added a substantial number of terms to my moderation list. This means that inevitably some comments will be held for moderation. I will get to them as soon as I can. Thus far, the vast majority of legitimate comments are still getting through.

Other than eliminating the spam, I do intend to keep an open comment and trackback policy, which is simple. I will remove any spam comments, any comments which are illegal or advocate illegal activities, any comments which are likely to get me sued, and any comments that threaten the family nature of this blog. In the last category I include posts that use excessive profanity, “excessive” being my subjective judgment. That does mean that comments can be insulting and quite annoying, but I prefer to keep the discussion out in the open where I can. On the other hand, abusive posters need to learn how to insult without resorting to profanity to any substantial degree.

The only comments I have removed thus far have been spam. I do, however, reserve the right to interpret my rules according to my own subjective judgment.

You can read it again here at its normal location.

Of course, I refer to the misnamed Academic Freedom Bill.

Yesterday I blogged rather angrily about this bill advancing. Why is it that this bill makes me angry and caused me to call certain legislators liars? I want to be brief, for once in my life.

1. The bill is deceptive.
   The entire opposition to the Florida science standards was religiously based. The one group which claims not to be religiously motivated is ID supporters, and the sponsors claim this bill is not about ID. So what exactly does the bill accomplish? Its sponsors would have us believe that it prevents persecution, but if you eliminate all these options, then what is left? Science was always permissible!
2. The bill is cowardly
   By being vague, the sponsors allow themselves to lie about the content, but they also leave teachers and school administrators to interpret. Someone well down the chain of command is going to have to put their neck in the guillotine in order to discover just what this bill means. Will it be a teacher who believes he can teach creationism, yet finds himself fired? Or will it be an administrator who fires a teacher because she reads the bill as limiting the academic freedom to science, yet ends up in court because someone disagrees but nobody knows. The legislators are trying to pass responsibility to the local level.
3. Even if it was a good bill based on its content, it is micromanagement.
   There is a Board of Education to make decisions about schools. Having decisions made by the people designated to make them ensures responsibility. This bill creates chaos in the classroom, and likely in various school boards around the state. But do the legislators care? No, they just want to pander–or appear to be pandering–to certain voters with a bill they know is no good.

That’s why this bill makes me angry and why I referred to sponsors as liars. Just because the lies are standard political lies doesn’t make them any more moral.

When the James ossuary was found I initially commented that I thought it looked like a forgery. This was a rather bold statement on my part, probably excessively so. I’m not a paleographer, and I only had a newspaper photograph to work from. Nonetheless, there was enough that I could see that I seriously questioned the item, and I do read both Aramaic and Hebrew, which makes me a little more qualified than the average bear, though not by much. Unfortunately this was in preblogging days, and I don’t have a copy of my remarks from that time, made in the Compuserve Religion Form under its old software.

Whether I was right for adequate or not at the time, nothing that has occurred since has served to convince me that I was wrong, and a number of things have been written to convince me that I was right. Now 60 minutes has a segment on the collector who brought this ossuary to light and other forgeries in which he has participated. There is no absolute proof that this particular ossuary is a forgery, but combining its own problems with a provenance of “a forger’s house,” it would seem questionable at best to give it any credence.

A hat tip goes to Jim West for leading me to the 60 minutes article indirectly, but then I also want to link to his picture of the ossuary in situ for your viewing pleasure!