What you say and what people hear may not be the same thing

One needs to be careful when speaking about controversial and sensitive issues, particularly in public.
Don’t assume that the hearers will receive your intended message.

Why?
Sometimes we are lazy listeners. We hear and interpret the message with respect to our own background, prejudices, and experience.
Sometimes we struggle to separate the message from the messenger.

Choose your words carefully. They sometimes mean different things to different people.
Creation, multiculturalism, evolution, liberal, fundamentalist, submission, modernism, literal, dogma…
Furthermore, I am not just talking about some narrow technical meaning, but rather positive or negative associations, depending on the audience.

Consider your social identity. It may colour whether your message can be received or considered credible.
For example, a university president has a salary of $1 million, yet tells students that due to financial pressures the university will no longer open the library on saturdays.
A white American pastor of an upper middle class congregration argues that Christians should not be concerned with poverty alleviation.

Whites making pronouncements about racism.
Men making pronouncements about sexual discrimination and harassment.
I am not saying it should not be done.
Just considerable caution, sensitivity, and realistic expectations are necessary.

How might I move towards a Christian perspective on my academic discipline?

I am giving at talk/workshop with this title on saturday as part of the Write workshop for Christian academics, sponsored by the Centre for the Study of Science, Religion, and Society at Emmanuel College and the Simeon Network.

This will be a workshop in which participants will be encouraged to complete a questionaire to help them think about how they might work towards a Christian perspective on their own academic discipline. First, the assumptions, key concepts, dreams, successes, and failures of the discipline will be considered. Then, the issue of historical, sociological, and economic perspectives will be raised. A theological perspective might be developed using the key concepts of Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Consummation. Finally, a key question is, "How as a Christian should I practise the discipline?"

Here is the current version of the slides.

I welcome comments and suggestions.

Next week I will be giving a similar talk/workshop for the InterVarsity Graduate Christian group at Stanford.

A radical orthodox perspective on the life sciences

There is a challenging essay.
Love Your Enemies: Life Sciences in the Ecclesial-Based University by M. Therese Lysaught
Here are few extracts.

Genetics [and] .... the life sciences, ... are embedded within a context of violence. Political and military metaphors shape contemporary discourse about biomedicine and biotechnology. For many, and certainly for the media, clinical medicine through the auspices of biotechnology is engaged in a war against disease, disability, suffering, and death? Drawing on the history of the field of genetics and the Human Genome Project, as well as on the rhetoric surrounding medicine and biotechnology more generally, I will first seek to show how the current practice of the life sciences cannot help but to entangle us with war and the violence of the liberal democratic state. 

Moreover, the violence allied with science signals its underlying cause: a religious commitment to science as salvific: For Christians and institutions who are committed to nonviolence as a central component of discipleship and who locate salvation not in the hands of the scientific community but in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, these twin facets of contemporary science cannot but give pause. How then do we situate the life sciences in the ecclesially based university such that the disciplining that is part of their practice is consistent with our call to witness the Good News through lives of peaceableness? The beginning of the answer to this question lies, I will argue, in Christian attitudes toward death,...

The cartoon above is discussed at the beginning of the article. It was from a news article in Nature in 1989, featuring James Watson, then director of the Human Genome Project, wrapping himself in the American flag [where the stripes are now genetic strips], in order to persuade the US government it was in their national interest to fund the project.

Cricket, colonialism, and tax relief

My family enjoyed watching the movie Laagan; it is a feel good somewhat humorous Bollywood sports epic. It tells a fictional story of how in the late 1890s a group of Indian villagers are challenged by the local British colonialists to a game of cricket in order to decide whether they will have to pay triple or no land tax. It highlights the brutality, injustice, and greed of British colonial rule. There are also positive messages about community, caste, disability, and anger management.

 

No academic discipline is free of contexts, values, and faith

In 10 days I am giving a talk/workshop to a group of Christian academics on "How might I move towards a Christian perspective on my academic discipline?"

Some might consider this a non-starter to begin with. Shouldn't academic disciplines, whether physics or economics or literature, be "objective", "rational", "neutral", "secular", "value free", and not involve "faith"?
Isn't E=mc^2 an absolute truth?
Yes. But, there is a lot more to physics; particularly, when you look at current research.
Furthermore, what is the manner in which the discipline is conducted?

Claims of complete neutrality and objectivity in any human endeavour, whether journalism or science, are naive.
All research is done by humans; fallible people who are prone to biases and mishaps.

Every discipline has a context: historical, social, political, economic, and religious. This context does shape assumptions, motivations, questions asked, funding, practises, ....

In Whose Justice? Whose Rationality?, the distinguished philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre [according to Wikipedia]

``defends three ... theses: first, that all rational human inquiry is conducted whether knowingly or not from within a tradition; second, that the incommensurable conceptual schemes of rival traditions do not entail either relativism or perspectivism; third, that although the arguments of the book are themselves attempts at universally valid insights they are nevertheless given from within a particular tradition (that of Thomist Aristotelianism) and that this need not imply any philosophical inconsistency.''

Previously I posted how science involves faith and so the notion of "science versus faith" is a false dichotomy.

So, an important question is, "What are the presuppositions of a specific academic discipline?"

Are you in the top 1 per cent?

The Occupy Wall Street movement promoted the slogan "We are the 99%" to highlight economic, political, and social inequality in the USA.

It is interesting to consider what it takes to be in the top 1% or 10% globally.

According to The Economist 

Wealth is so unevenly distributed, that you need just $3,650 (less debts) to count yourself among the richest half of the world’s population. A mere $77,000 brings you among the wealthiest 10%. And just $798,000 puts you into the ranks of the 1%—within the reach of many white-collar urban professionals in the West. Hence, more than 35m people carry such a plump purse. Among the three billion adults at the bottom with less than $10,000 in wealth, 90% reside in developing countries. Yet 15% of millionaires live in developing countries too.

Note that this wealth is not necessarily cash in a bank account but includes home equity and investments in superannuation (retirement) funds.



I recently encountered this video when it was shown by Cathy Delaney during a talk she gave at Theology on Tap.

Publishers love The not A

In 1954 Bernard Ramm published "The Christian View of Science and Scripture". This became a highly influential book, both for good and ill. It liberated a generation of evangelicals who liked science. It also stimulated a significant pushback from ultra-conservative Americans, ultimately bolstering the growth of Young Earth Creationism. 

What about the title? It is interesting to hear what Ramm said in an interview in 1979:

The original [title] was 'The Evangelical Faith and Modern Science' but the publishers wanted a title similar to Professor Orr's book of a previous generation, The Christian View of God and the World. One day I walked through library stacks looking at titles and it's embarrassing how many books start out with the word The. Eventually I found out that many titles of books are determined by the publicity or sales department of a publishing house.

What is my point?
I think on many complex issues such as science, politics, and economics, it is hard to come up with a definitive and singular Christian view.