Venturing

It’s not every day I learn from a local TV station’s website that my university has launched a new college:

Boise State University announced Monday that it is building a “business garden” in the form of a new college in the capital city in hopes of “growing” a better business community in Idaho.

President Bob Kustra made the announcement of BSU’s new Venture College Monday afternoon in front of business leaders and students who are hoping to be accepted.

The idea is to allow students an opportunity to compete for start-up funds for their business idea, and then have local business executives help them get that idea off that ground and into the market.

The goal is to launch a new business from a non-traditional college model.

You’d think the university administration might have mentioned this development to, you know, faculty.  And yet I spoke with a passel of humanities and social sciences faculty today, and no one had heard of it prior to this morning.

The website for the new “college” offers a little more information:

Venture College prepares students to launch businesses. This new, non-credit program is open to all full-time students in any major. Students who successfully complete the program receive the Boise State University Venture College Badge. […]

Is Venture College for you?  Led by business executives, Venture College offers students a customized education plan, individual coaching by experts, internships and invaluable experience to launch their own businesses or nonprofits. Be a part of like-minded, focused group of friends making a difference!

What will you receive? You will be eligible to compete for limited start-up funding.  You will get real world experience. Some students will actually launch their businesses while still students.  All will gain skills valuable to employers.

What’s the commitment? Venture College is a two-semester program. It’s flexible and self-paced, but you must be able to participate in a colloquium each Friday from noon to 2 p.m. Students should plan on about spending 10-15 hours a week on Venture College pursuits.

The leadership of Venture College—an entrepreneur, a former CEO, and a former venture capitalist—will, we are told, report to the VP of Research and Economic Development, who reports directly to the university’s president.  The college “has the highest level of university commitment.” Venture College is free to students enrolled full-time at Boise State.

I might not have the exact same objections to this new, erm, venture that some of my readers have. Indeed, I find parts of the “Why Venture College?” page quite persuasive, its use of buzzwords aside.  (I was surprised not to see “strategic dynamism” appear on that page.)

Other parts are not so persuasive, in part because much of the “why” page is vague, or it outright contradicts other efforts of the university:

  • “Boise State is. . .challenging traditional educational strategies and piloting new methods for superior, relevant education.” Then why is the college offering lecture capture and Blackboard to the rest of the university?
  • “Venture College will provide self-paced, on demand access to knowledge, intensive mentoring and an opportunity to compete for resources needed to start a business.”  Self-paced and on demand suggest the program will be largely online, aside from two-hour colloquia on Friday afternoons.  Who is developing and delivering the online content?  (I also am concerned that students who are working to put themselves through school or who have family to care for won’t be able to commit to 10-15 extracurricular hours each week for two semesters.  This seems like an opportunity only relatively young, unburdened, privileged students might be able to pursue.)
  • A badge is not, to put it mildly, a college.

I appreciate that the university is trying new models and is acknowledging, albeit indirectly, that there aren’t jobs in Idaho for many of our graduates—at least not well-paying ones, as Idaho has the highest percentage of minimum-wage workers of any state. (Three-quarters of the jobs created in Idaho last year were service-sector jobs, which are more likely than most to pay the minimum wage.)  Students do indeed need to develop what the university terms the “4 Cs” of 21st-century skills: communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity.

My question is this: Doesn’t a liberal arts education promote the development of exactly these characteristics? I know I emphasize all four of these in my humanities classroom.  And I’m not just emphasizing these in an abstract way.  In fact, the assignment I handed out to my Master of Applied Historical Research (public history) students last night asks students to demonstrate they possess all these skills.  I’m asking students to write a proposal for the development of a mobile app that would be of use to public history professionals.  (You can download the assignment if you’re curious.)  Following this assignment, students will draft a grant application or—perhaps, I haven’t decided—create a slide-deck and pitch for venture capitalists or a foundation to fund the development of the app.

Undoubtedly this assignment will horrify some of you.  And it’s a far cry from the advice I heard at my first NCPH conference a few years ago that the introductory graduate course in public history should cover the basics of museum exhibition development, archival management, and historic preservation practice.  Museum stuff is close to my heart, so I do introduce current issues in the field, and I also provide students with an overview of challenges in historic preservation, but from there, my curriculum deviates sharply from the traditional seminar. If you view the syllabus for the course, you’ll see I have recommended Grantwriting for Dummies and I require students to read The $100 Startup because, regardless of whether they want to start their own consulting firms (and some students do indeed have that goal), students need to think creatively, resourcefully, and entrepreneurially, even if they’re employed by state agency or a nonprofit.

Why has my teaching and mentoring taken this turn? There aren’t many good jobs for public historians in Idaho; the best places to work are already populated by young, bright people who plan to stick around for a while, and many of the state’s museums and historical organizations are atrophying rather than moving forward; my first-year students already have figured out they don’t want to work for them.  My students want to be freelance grantwriters, historical consultants, documentary filmmakers, and museum technologists, and it’s my job to help them along on their individual journeys. Hence my interest in introducing them to MVPs rather than the MRM5.

Frankly, I also am not certain for how long I can tolerate living on a faculty salary that is lower than average, and I’m increasingly aware my spouse labors in a dying industry. Some might argue that traditional higher ed and tenure-line jobs are also going the way of hoop skirt makers. So I’ve spent the past several years studying entrepreneurship, keeping abreast of advances in technology, staying informed about developments in a couple of industries that interest me and in which I suspect I could consult successfully, and generally trying to be ready to “innovate” myself into an entirely new venture on very short notice. (Do I love my job and do I want tenure? Yes. Do I think my current career track is sustainable for the 25-30 years until my retirement? Nope!)

My main objection to Venture College, then, is that my university’s leadership doesn’t acknowledge, and perhaps doesn’t even realize, that faculty are already innovating, already teaching students to be innovative, creative, collaborative, and entrepreneurial—and not just through very “real-world” projects like the one I assigned, but through a carefully crafted combination of readings, viewings, discussions, activities, writing assignments, and presentations.  You know: a liberal arts education with an eye toward 21st-century ways of engaging with the world.

Elsewhere

Just wanted to highlight a couple of things that have been keeping me busy.

First, there’s a post for the Western Museums Association blog on developing museum professionals in the Intermountain West.

Second, I’m soft-launching the Boise Wiki next week by giving a talk about it. I’ll post more about the wiki once I’ve figured out what I’m going to say at the presentation.  :)

 

Calling

As I wrote in an earlier post, this year I’m participating in Marci Glass’s STARward project, in which participants reflect on a word given to them by Marci.  As luck would have it, I drew the word calling.

“Calling” would be a good word for me in any year, but it’s especially apt for this year.  As I wrote around Thanksgiving, I feel as if I’m once again at an inflection point in my life and career.  2013 is, for me, about completing some projects, letting other responsibilities go, and making space for whatever comes next.

I don’t know if I can articulate my larger calling in a way I’d find satisfactory to me or completely comprehensible to others, but as a bulleted list, pieces of it look something like this:

  • I am called to encourage all people to become fully engaged with lifelong learning, by participating more fully, for example, in crafting their community’s historical narratives or in local citizen science projects.
  • I am called to open dialogues with people who hold very different beliefs from me, not in the hope of changing minds, but of provoking deeper thought in all conversants.
  • I am called to help people become explorers or creators of whatever matters to them, and to help them share their passions with others.
  • I am called to various genres of reflective writing, including poetry and essays.

Many who work in education see it as a calling.  It is, after all, a fairly irrational pursuit–the pay is middling, the status low to mediocre, and the politics and bureaucracies excruciating.  I come from an extended family packed with educators, so one might say teaching is in my blood.  I’m not surprised, then, to see all of the above bullets represent some kind of teaching or learning.  That does not mean, however, that my calling requires me to be in a classroom, even though I do enjoy planning and leading classroom discussions and activities.

Since arriving at Boise State, the focus of my work has trifurcated into “traditional” historical research on women in the natural sciences, the use of technology in teaching and learning history, and the ways the public understands and practices history in a digital age.  All three areas of focus explore the ways people make sense of and express their beliefs about the natural world or the past.  To my mind, this is in line with the bullets above.

I have not been strategic, however, in aligning my calling, desires, goals, and actions.  Anyone who has read this blog knows that my informal writing tends toward the rambling and disorganized rather than the methodical and carefully argued–and my professional life proceeds the same way, in fits and starts, exploring cul-de-sacs and side streets rather than proceeding down the roads I might once have expected myself to take.  And while part of me itches to put down roots and achieve, finally, some semblance of financial comfort, when I really think about my calling, I find it’s less about seeking or even wayfinding in a semi-familiar landscape, and more about trusting myself to make interesting choices as they arise.

When I’m in a reflective frame of mind, I tend to turn to the writings of Friends, who emphasize a variety of discernment based on trusting themselves to see the light and to “proceed as way opens.”  In a recent reading of Catherine Whitmire’s Plain Living, I came across William Taber’s tripartite recipe for contemplative listening; the first two ingredients are desire and focus. “And the third,” he writes, “is trust, a synonym of faith, for it takes trust to go out into the deep water; it takes trust to let go and rest or float in the Deep and Living Water of the Stream” (124).

As an academic who has always thought she felt called to teach in a traditional classroom, I’m surprised to find myself admitting that the classroom, academic publication, or tenure may be simply way stations on my journey rather than destinations in themselves. In Let Your Life Speak, Parker Palmer admits he thought the Quaker saying “Let your life speak” meant “Let the highest truths and values guide you.  Live up to those demanding standards in everything you do.”  Three decades later, he realized in his life the phrase meant something else: “Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you.  Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent” (2-3). Palmer discarded the idea he heard at church “that vocation, or calling, comes from a voice external to ourselves, a voice of moral demand that asks us to become someone we are not yet—someone different, someone better, someone just beyond our reach. . . That concept of vocation is rooted in a deep distrust of selfhood, in the belief that the sinful self will always be ‘selfish’ unless corrected by external forces of virtue” (10).  This idea that we are supposed to shape our lives to external expectations and values—to walk an prescribed path that conforms to an industry, a discipline, a religion—stymies our development because it limits our ability to understand our calling. “What a long time,” Parker writes, “it can take to become the person one has always been!” (9)

Discovering one’s calling, then, is about discernment. As a scholar, for me “discernment” usually takes the form of sifting through countless documents and other primary and secondary sources, looking for patterns or anomalies as I construct an argument.  As a lifelong good student and conscientious worker, thinking about discernment as a process of tuning out external expectations so that I can listen to the quiet voice of self makes me uneasy; I’ve become used to external validation.

In recent months, I’ve been listening to internal and external voices, but trying to turn down the volume on the voices that aren’t mine.  Perhaps there’s been too much listening–I’m feeling as if I’ve fallen into that writerly trap of doing endless research instead of starting the actual writing. I must remember that “calling” implies listening, but it also implies a response: call and response.

But that response need not be programmed or predictable.

Hey, look over there

I have a piece up at The Blue Review on Wikipedia, Ancestry.com, and the gendering of digital public history.  Here’s an excerpt:

Engendering Online History

Wikipedia vs. Ancestry.com: Historianship at a crossroads

Businessweek reports that “genealogy ranks second only to porn as the most searched topic online.” It’s no wonder, then, that Ancestry.com, which for a monthly fee lets anyone search and browse its more than 10 million digitized records of births, marriages, censuses, ships’ passenger lists and more has become a destination for anyone interested in trying her hand at historical research.  I say “her” intentionally, as the majority of users—typically around 65 percent—of genealogical sites are women. Ancestry.com is the world’s most-trafficked genealogical site.

Wikipedia, the highly popular online encyclopedia, on the other hand, has a paltry percentage of women actively editing articles—just 8.5 percent by one measure. The sites allow for two different, and sometimes competing, versions of historical practice to emerge. In particular, Wikipedia’s community ethos, although it embraces collaboration and consensus, may actually discourage participation, especially by women—reflecting a problem that also exists in the historical profession.

Read more at The Blue Review.

The dark heart

I promised a series of posts on gun violence, and so far I’ve only written two: one on the intersection of guns and whiteness and another on Christian responses to the Sandy Hook massacre.  There will likely be more posts coming, as I’m still reading pretty extensively on gun ownership and gun violence in the U.S.  A big part of why I haven’t written more, however, is that I find myself continuously circling back to what I see as the dark heart of gun ownership in the U.S.:

When people say they own a gun for “self-defense,” they are saying they are willing to kill another human being.

I honestly can’t imagine taking a human life.  Fighting tooth and nail to protect myself or my family, and temporarily disabling an attacker?  Sure.  But taking another human life to preserve my own?  Even if I or others might see that life as belonging to an “evil” or ill-willed person?  That I cannot imagine.

It’s profoundly disturbing to me that others can imagine killing another human–so much so that they arm themselves and train to be ready for that moment.

And even if a gun owner claims she’s only going to “maim” an attacker. . .  I suggest you look at Google images for “gunshot wound” and scroll past the Halloween make-up.  How could anyone imagine inflicting that kind of pain on another human?

In the end, it’s this dark heart that makes it so difficult for me to write about this subject.  Any data I might present, any cultural biases or logical inconsistencies I might try to highlight can’t pierce a darkness that dense.

Busy busy

Intellectual and vocational theme of the semester: Charismatic megafauna, literal and metaphorical 

I haven’t been writing much here, but I’ve been writing elsewhere, and I hope to soon have a few links to share to pieces in a couple of bloggish venues, as well as to a journal article.

So. . . how about an update on my work life instead? Despite my light teaching load this semester, I’m keeping occupied

  • resubmitting a large grant;
  • revising a traditional journal article on the woman who ran the San Diego Zoo for the second quarter of the twentieth century;
  • writing another journal article that’s in danger of becoming a manifesto on human rights museology;
  • thinking about maybe prepping for a local talk I’m giving next month on the Boise Wiki, a project built largely by students in a couple of my classes, but which I’ll launch into the public wilds soon;
  • overseeing a graduate student pulling together sources for Stories of Idaho, a new digital project that I’m supposed to launch in beta by June 1;
  • trying to make sense of those sources and create coherent content for the first Stories of Idaho module, about the history of wolf management in Idaho;
  • working with a WordPress developer on a plugin that lends a new(ish) kind of interactivity to Stories of Idaho;
  • collaborating with other faculty on a new digital humanities initiative;
  • trying to shepherd grad students through their first year, or through their Master’s projects;
  • reviewing applications from prospective grad students;
  • spending (yet also accruing, I think) some political capital on a university-wide issue of importance to me (compensating grad students);
  • and a bunch of other stuff–these bullets are just what’s keeping me active right now.

Burying the lede

There is a bit of good news, however—I’ve been granted a spring 2014 semester free of teaching and service responsibilities; I’ll be Boise State’s inaugural Digital Arts and Humanities Fellow.  I’ll be trying to make sense of the extensive but understudied medical/healthcare collections and share my findings in part through a section of Stories of Idaho.

A small Wikipedia discovery

I’ve spent much of the past several days working on my piece on Ancestry.com and Wikipedia.org.  (Many thanks to those of you who commented on my last post.)

I’ve been asked to target that article to an Idaho audience, which means I find myself searching Wikipedia and Ancestry for topics related to Idaho history.  Although I have learned quite a bit about Idaho in my two and a half years here, my knowledge is still patchy at best, so my discoveries have been hit and miss.  I find the draft littered with such phrases as “potato magnate” and other keywords I’d rather not share here as they would attract the wrong crowd.

Because I’m more interested in process than product on each of the sites, I’m exploring the sites’ user guides, Ancestry’s message boards, and the “History” and “Talk” pages for individual articles on Wikipedia.  I’m particularly enjoying the parade o’ semiliteracy that is the Aryan Nations talk page.  Especially pleasing is the Aryan Nations guys suggesting the Wikipedians call the FBI to confirm the true leadership of the hate group.  When the Aryan Nations guys are saying you need to use more reputable, government sources, well. . . there’s some kind of lesson in there.  I’m just not sure what it is.

Regardless, I may need to make their discussion required reading in my public history courses.

 

First thoughts: Wikipedia and Ancestry.com

Since I had to take Lucas to school anyway this morning, I decided to stop by the office for some focused time, pneumonia be damned.  Unfortunately, 90 minutes into my productive e-mail session, Fang texted to warn me about the newly falling snow and to suggest I get on the roads sooner rather than later.

Fang clears snow from the car

 Every once in a while, I feel really bad for dragging Fang to Boise.  To be honest, this was not one of those moments.

The result was another day on the couch with the laptop, TV playing in the background.  Despite the distracted recuperation, I made some progress on a piece I promised to write.  It’s another reflection on how the public does history, in line with the chapter I wrote last year, only this time I’m looking at how the historical sausage gets made at Wikipedia and Ancestry.com. As you might imagine, I’m observing that each site’s process and product is inflected by gender. My research into women’s contributions to Wikipedia has uncovered a trove of misogynistic comments about how more extensive participation by women would ruin Wikipedia.  As much as they unsettle me, such sources also warm the cockles of my dark academic heart.

Mostly, I’m interested in how Wikipedians and Ancestry users (Ancestryans?) collaborate or come to consensus, how they perceive and use primary and secondary sources, and how they view and establish expertise within their respective digital communities.

Have you ever contributed to Wikipedia or Ancestry?  If so, I’d love to hear your thoughts on your experience.  If not, I’m curious as to why you haven’t participated on these sites, as they are incredibly popular in the U.S.  (Businessweek reports that “genealogy ranks second only to porn as the most searched topic online.”)

Round 3

WPA Poster reads "Fight Tuberculosis; Obey the Rules of Health"Today I was prescribed a third round of antibiotics for pneumonia.  Anyone want to place bets on how functional I’ll be when classes begin on January 22?  Or when I need to get back to working on some key collaborations on Monday?

Meanwhile, I’m still crossing plenty of items off my sedentary to-do list, and I have lots of time for reading and reflection.  That’s good, since I declared 2013 will be about seeking completion and space.

I also jumped at the chance to participate in Marci Glass’s STARward exercise, a year of reflection (and writing) on a word selected by Marci for commenters and/or parishioners.  The word Marci gave me is “calling.”  (You can go request a word yourself, if you’d like.)  I’m looking forward not only to the opportunity to reflect on calling, which I think is an excellent word for me for this year, but also to stay connected with Marci, whose blog I enjoy.  And, because it’s a small world, it ends up Marci is friends with a friend of mine from college, and the church she leads is a short walk from my house. I think we’re destined to meet in person before long.

I’ve been thinking, too, about renewing my commitment to blogging and to blogging communities. Marci is also one of the RevGalBlogPals, a few of whom frequently commented on the same blogs as I did several years back; in fact, one of them, Rev. Dr. Mom, stopped by the Clutter Museum recently to leave a comment for the first time in a while.  I like seeing these bloggy connections forged again.  I’ve been spending too much time on Facebook and not enough time engaging in conversations across blogs.  So, a small resolution there: more bloggy engagement.

More writing all over, in fact.  I have a light teaching load this spring, and I intend to take advantage of it.

 

 Image source

The gods of gun violence

Joseph the carpenter depicted in stained glassIt’s no secret that when it comes to religion, I’m a skeptic. That said, I’m not a belligerent atheist; I’m a listener, not a combatant. In fact, several believers have been surprised by my atheism and remarked that despite my lack of Christian faith, I have “a deep soul.”  Most recently, a fundamentalist Christian student told me I have a “secret Jesus” in my heart–and I think I’m OK with that assessment. I dig “red letter” Jesus, but I’m not into the stories of miracles, nor am I interested in drawing guidance for today from lessons and laws written for an entirely different world.  If I had to commit to a Christian or quasi-Christian denomination or practice, depending on how I’m feeling that day, I might choose an unprogrammed Quaker meeting but admit to nontheist or universalist leanings, or, if I wanted something in, say, a modest basilica with organ music, I’d find the most progressive local manifestation of the United Church of Christ.

That said, as a practitioner of American studies, I’m less interested in calibrating my own spiritual compass than I am in how Christian ideas are generated, circulated, and morphed in U.S. culture.  Quite frankly, much of what I find scares me.  Yet I also read a good deal of writing by today’s Progressive Christian thinkers, and I find heartening their insistence on a new Social Gospel centered on social justice issues.  Some Christians have termed it a “Social Justice Gospel,” and the concept has both been praised and damned.  I’m here to recommend it.

A caveat

It’s important to keep this perspective in mind as you read this post–I’m writing about how perceive the reactions of U.S. Christians to the Newtown shootings, and I’m highlighting what I see as thoughtful responses and missed opportunities. I’m not prescribing what Christians ought to believe about the shootings, though certainly I myself see a disconnect (and perhaps even some hypocrisy?) between what some Christians claim to believe and how they are acting.  This post is about that disconnect, and I hope it allows us to open a conversation about the relationship of Christian faith and works to violence in American life.

So take a deep breath and settle those hackles.  Are we good?  OK.

A taxonomy of responses

While certainly there is a good deal of nuance in Christians’ responses to the mass shooting in Newtown, the responses might be classified into three broad categories that I’m calling confident faith (with variations comfort-focused and repentance-focused), questioning faith (with variations why? and who are we?), and the social justice gospel.  Under each heading below, I’ve highlighted some representative reactions to the shooting.

Confident Faith: Comfort-focused

You’ve seen these on Facebook and elsewhere: God needed those children as angels. There are now 26 more stars in the sky.  The children are now with God, and it’s better for them to be in heaven than on such a fallen earth.  Such posts are too personally nauseating for me to link to, so I’m keeping this section brief and link-free.

I don’t want to diminish anyone’s personal coping mechanisms, and if it gives you comfort to imagine Newton’s children in the house of the Lord, that’s fine.  But to suggest publicly that the children are definitively in a better place?  That’s heartless; think of their friends and families.

Confident Faith: Repentance-focused

Bill Berkowitz provides a round-up of this brand of response to the mass shooting.  I find it profoundly troubling for many reasons, but especially its deflection of the actual cause of the shooting—a man with easy access to a gun who barged into a school and killed children and teachers—to what alleged leaders of the Christian Right believe are greater social ills.  It’s the typical Pat Robertson tripe: there are too many abortions, gay marriage, insufficient prayer in schools, violence in entertainment, etc., and God is punishing innocents as a way of warning the rest of us of the error of our ways.  These representatives of the Right see humans as profoundly fallen and believe we will see the end of such massacres only if we repent by installing their particular beliefs in the public square and in national legislation.  These followers of the “Prince of Peace” ignore the obvious (if difficult) solution to the mass killing of children—removal of the weapons of such destruction—in favor of arguing for a narrow American theocracy.

Mike Huckabee, the purveyor of some such remarks, clarified his vitriol:

“It’s far more than just taking prayer or Bible reading out of the schools. It’s that fact that people sue a city so we’re not confronted with a manger scene or a Christmas carol, and lawsuits are filed to remove a cross that’s a memorial to fallen soldiers. Churches and Christian-owned businesses are told to surrender their values under the edict of government orders to provide tax funded abortion pills. We carefully and intentionally stop saying things are ‘sinful’ and we call them ‘disorders.’ Sometimes we even say they are normal. And, to get to where we have to abandon bedrock moral truths, then we are asked, well ‘where was God?’ And I respond that, as I see it, we’ve escorted Him right out of our culture and we’ve marched Him off the public square and then we express our surprise that a culture without Him actually reflects what it has become.”

The irony, of course, is that Huckabee is expressing all of these opinions in real and virtual public squares. As a non-Christian, I can assure you that Christianity permeates the public sphere.  It’s not as if living in Christian culture automatically confers blindness about its influence, however; even many of those inside the faith can see how pervasive Christianity is in American culture.  See, for example, Joshua D. Ambrosius’s post “Sandy Hook and the Tearing Asunder of Evangelical Christianity.” Not only does Ambrosius acknowledge the ways Christianity striates American life, he also remarks that there are two popular versions of Jesus that are at odds with each other: the Jesus who is fine with gun hoarding and the Jesus who asks people to put down their swords.  “If we can’t agree that Jesus and automatic weapons don’t mix,” Ambrosius asks, “how do we agree on anything?  We must serve different Jesuses—that is the only conclusion one can take away.”

Questioning Faith: Why?

Reflecting on the Newtown shooting only three days after the event, Rev. Jennifer D. Crumpton noticed that “those who contemplated the event through some form of religious lens put these unanswerable questions in terms of God: where was God? and why did God let this happen?”  Crumpton was dissatisfied with the answers she was hearing, so she wrote an incisive, beautiful post at Femmevangelical, “The God Who Shows Up When God Disappears.”  Here’s an excerpt:

The divisive, blaming rhetoric took off like a wildfire across the Internet. I read posts on networks that made my stomach churn. My partner, who is Jewish, endured posts of friends and friends of friends who said Jesus wouldn’t show up in schools where he wasn’t welcomed, and therefore we should all expect bad things to happen, as if it were the fault of everyone who was raised in a different tradition that a mentally ill man took his mother’s legal weapons into a school and started shooting. I had to say something. Before we left for dinner Friday night, I quickly pecked out my gut thoughts and posted them onto Facebook:

In my role as a Christian minister, I have to speak up about the lie politicians and others are putting forth, that the CT shooting happened because “God has been removed from our schools.” This is a dangerous, irresponsible, and and theologically immature statement. God is not found in the rules or activities sanctioned by a school, or the doctrines that make that an issue. God is in the hearts of human beings, children included. And praying to God will not in fact avert the tragedies of our world…we’ve all seen/experienced that tragedy happens inexplicably. God does not “allow” things to happen because we do not adhere to human-concocted doctrine and superstition. Where is God? God is grieving with us. But God is not smiting children because of the separation of church and state.

Then she brings it home (emphasis hers):

Asking “why did God let this happen” is an understandable but unhelpful question, one that leads human minds used to static doctrine into a paradox. Especially as we learn many of the children who were killed were Christians who attended church regularly and prayed daily with their families, and futhermore, the shooter attended church at St. Rose in Newtown and even went to school at the church school for a while; to say God allowed this to happen because of lack of prayer in schools forces us to deeply question various beliefs and scriptures that we cite ad nasuem. Not everyone is willing to go there, to let God be the God above theism and doctrine, and so very shameful, hurtful beliefs are enforced and only hurt faith. The helpful question we can address is, why do we human beings keep allowing this to happen? And what is our image of God that we keep pointing fingers at others while never taking a look at ourselves.

Questioning Faith: Who are we?

At Red Letter Christians, Craig M. Watts holds up a mirror to expose what he sees as the failings of his fellow believers.  He posits that it’s not the absence of God in American institutions and culture that’s the problem, but rather “that part of the problem is with the kind of God promoted in American church and culture” (emphasis mine).  He offers these points as evidence of this phenomenon:

  • Developed nations where God is even less officially acknowledged than in the U.S. have much lower rates of violence.
  • The U.S. is one of the most religious nations in the developed world and, far and away, it has the highest murder rate. Even more telling, both church attendance and murder rates are highest in the same region: the Southern U.S.  “In regions where God is less conspicuous in public,” Watts writes, “murder rates are lower.”
  • Self-professed Christians are more likely to be gun owners than are atheists and agnostics.
  • Those on the religious right were most eager to see the U.S. invade Iraq in 2002.  He cites a Gallup Poll: “data suggests that devotion to a religion doesn’t necessarily dictate a commitment to peace.”
  • A later survey on the same topic–sending troops to Iraq–revealed that the non-religious, non-Christian religious people,  and black Christians were most likely to oppose the war in Iraq. Because of my recent consideration of white masculinity and violence, “When only whites were considered fully 50% more Protestants supported the war in comparison to those with no religion. ‘In general,’ the report stated, ‘the more frequently an American attends church, the less likely he or she is to say the war was a mistake.'”
  • Protestants (54%), and especially white evangelicals (62%!) expressed support for torture of suspected terrorists.

Watts concludes,

When American Christians are more supportive of weapons, war and torture than their unbelieving neighbors, something has gone terribly wrong. When the greatest amount of violence is found precisely in the region of the country where church membership and attendance is the highest we might ask what kind of influence Christians are exerting. Complaints about a lack of official prayer in schools or an absence of religious symbols in the public square don’t get even close to identifying the source of the violence problem. But so long as Christians cast their lot with forces of death, they will not be seen as credible witnesses for peace.

In another sign of a crisis of Christian belief and identity, Shane Claiborne asks, “What Would Jesus Say to the NRA?”

So let’s imagine.  What would Jesus say to our nation, where these are things are true:

  • 10,000 people die from gun-related homicides each year, that’s one Sandy Hook massacre a day, every day
  • There are nearly 90 guns for every 100 people
  • There are over 51,000 licensed gunshops (and 30,000 supermarkets)
  • Guns that can shoot 100 rounds a minute, and are only designed to kill, are still legal
  • Other than auto accidents, gun violence is the leading cause of death of young people (under 20)
  • 20,000 dollars a second is spent on war

There is a reason we talk about “Peace on Earth” so much around Christmas.  There is a reason why we talk about Jesus as the “Prince of Peace”.  He consistently taught that we can disarm violence without mirroring it, and that we can rid the world of evil without becoming the evil we abhor.  So let us recommit ourselves to Peace this Christmas season and New Year — in honor of Jesus, and in honor of the holy innocents.

Social Justice Gospel

As I said earlier in this post, I’m a fan of this response to the shootings.  Here are some of my favorite postings in this genre.

Writing at the Friends Committee on National Legislation staff blog, Diane Randall writes,

In our spiritual lives, Quakers talk about being “cracked open” an internal condition that can be both painful and, eventually enlightening, because it profoundly changes us, creating new ways for us to understand, to be, to act in love. My sense is that President Obama, and scores of elected officials in Congress, state legislatures and city councils have been “cracked open” by the grisly reality of this violence in Newtown, CT.

This violence is manifested in the outrageous weapons that the murderer used to slaughter innocent children–weapons that have no place in civilized society. Working for gun control is one essential step that will require determination and courageous leadership of our elected officials who have been consistently maligned by those who want no limits to gun ownership.

At Evangelicals for Social Action, Bill Borror chastises evangelicals for placing doctrine and politics before social justice:

Christians of late have not been distinguishing themselves on the political front.  Too often our theologies,  I believe,  are made to conform to whatever our natural or chosen political leanings are.  I have seen this again and again for example in how various Christian groups and denominational leaders talk about Israeli-Palestinian issues.  Simplistic ideologies transcend all political and theological spectra.  Not only can we do better, we must do better.

I do not believe people of good will in general and people of faith specifically can remain passive.  It is time for “an ordinance of reason for the common good” to be addressed concerning our culture of violence.  It is time to no longer tolerate child sacrifices at the alter of libertarianism. As Christians, we believe that the two great commandments lifted up by Christ to love God and love our neighbor are absolute; not the First and Second Amendments to the Constitution.  My Christianity also makes me realistic and practical.  I do not believe we can ultimately  legislate or medicate ourselves to a perfect society.  But we can legislate safety and we can chose to cultivate different values and appetites.

I agree with all three of Borror’s calls to action to some extent:

  1. “Hand held weapons of mass destruction must be banned.”  I like this legal solution.
  2. “Voluntary boycotting violent entertainment and reassessment of First Amendment protection of the industry.”  I’m not one to tinker with the First Amendment.  But I wholeheartedly agree that people (myself included) should be more conscious about making informed economic decisions that are in line with their core beliefs. (Personally, I tend to see violent entertainment as an effect of the real violence in American life rather than a cause, but that’s a subject for another post.)
  3. “More Christian community support for individuals and families facing issues around mental health.” Yes, yes, and yes—though as I mentioned in my post on whiteness, gun violence isn’t correlated with mental health issues–in fact, only about 4 percent of the violence in the U.S. can be attributed to the mentally ill. Still, Americans need to have a more open conversation about mental illness and mental health care.

American Catholic bishops were even more specific in asking Christians and others to call for extensive gun control.  They expressed condolences for the families of the slain and then reiterated a stance first articulated in 2000:

In their memory and for the sake of our nation, we reiterate our call made in 2000, in our statement, Responsibility, Rehabilitation and Restoration: A Catholic Perspective on Crime and Criminal Justice, for all Americans, especially legislators, to:

  1. Support measures that control the sale and use of firearms
  2. Support measures that make guns safer (especially efforts that prevent their unsupervised use by children and anyone other than the owner)
  3. Call for sensible regulations of handguns
  4. Support legislative efforts that seek to protect society from the violence associated with easy access to deadly weapons including assault weapons
  5. Make a serious commitment to confront the pervasive role of addiction and mental illness in crime.

As we long for the arrival of the Prince of Peace in this Advent and Christmas season, we call on all people of goodwill to help bring about a culture of life and peace.

At Red Letter Christians, Morf Morford invokes Moloch—and in particular Allen Ginsburg’s incarnation of the Old Testament god—to describe American society’s acquiescence in the slaughter of our children by firearms:

Turning swords into plowshares is a sign of God’s kingdom (Isaiah 2:4). Investing our personal, as well as our national budgets – and our national attention to weapons is just another indication of our allegiance to death.

We don’t need an enemy, we are killing ourselves, but the gun apologists would tell us not fast enough.

[…]

But if I were the parents, or grandparents, of any of those children killed, I would, for years, feel as if I had been pulled inside-out with an aching seemingly eternal numbness.

And it is out of respect for them, and their 100% preventable pain, that I urge the rest of to stir our petulant Congress to put aside their ideologically driven agendas and legislative inertia and step up in courage, and yes, even sacrifice to do what our nation’s soul cries out for.

[. . .]

We have been captive to fear long enough.

I don’t mean to make the social justice gospel seem an easy thing to implement, particularly when it comes to gun violence in a gun-saturated society.  At the Quaker Universalist Voice, Mike Shell captures the difficulty in articulating exactly how our deeply-held truths might inform our individual actions and public agenda:

We come away from the world’s noise and busyness to a gathering where we need not voice out loud our intimate conversations with that benevolent Wholeness—whatever we name it—which gives us hope, resilience, meaning and joy. Then we stumble, going back out, because we do not know how to speak or write publicly about that heartfelt Truth which transcends language.

There is immense difference between the knowing silence of waiting worship and the awkward silence of unready witness. Friends often understand with great clarity how their private faith and practice guide or even drive their public actions. Even so, at the rise of Meeting we struggle to reduce into words what is boundless and complex in our hearts.

A way forward

Once again, the past two weeks have made clear that the kind of Christianity–evangelical, fundamentalist, politically conservative–that most often gets shouted in the American public square is not going to be of much use to us in stemming the bloodshed caused by gun violence.  We need a response from people of all faith traditions, and in particular we need evangelical Christians to consider that maybe, just maybe, works matter to our individual and national salvation as much as faith.

After all, the Social Gospel, at least as I learned about it years ago in its late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century manifestation, is about establishing the kingdom of God on this earth.  And how can we do that—establish some semblance of peace and social justice—without difficult conversations and hard work?  It’s time, in short, to honor the old Quaker saying “Let your life speak.”

Again, this is not me saying to Christians, “We must take the politically liberal path to solve this problem.”  It’s the one I prefer, yes, but one of the tenets of my particular brand of progressivism is a commitment to all kinds of diversity.  I’m willing to sit with anyone who brings a serious solution to the table, and to work toward consensus on how to bring the level of gun violence in the U.S. more in line with that of other developed countries.

What about you?

What responses and conversations to Newton are you encountering in your own faith communities?  What role do you think religious people, and Christians in particular, should be playing in preventing future massacres and protecting all victims of homicide?

 

Image is a detail from a stained glass photograph by Fr. Lawrence Lew, and is used under a Creative Commons license.