Whose Scandal in Tax Bluster?

Scandalous!

According to Dr. Mark W. Hendrickson of The Center for Vision and Values at Grove City College, the way Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's personal taxes have been berated by the media is scandalous.

Writing in an article which appeared on Crosswalk.com last Thursday, Hendrickson breathlessly exudes:

"It is scandalous that so many journalists and commentators have gotten their basic facts wrong [by claiming Romney's tax rate is too low]. They have conflated average “effective” tax rates with statutory rates. Under our complex and convoluted tax code, no American pays an effective rate that is as high as his top marginal rate (the statutory rate on the last dollar of income). As it turns out, Romney’s effective tax rate of 14 percent is higher than the effective tax rate of approximately 97 percent of taxpayers."

So, who's complaining?  Even the New York Times pretty much agrees with you, Dr. Hendrickson.

Nevertheless, he goes on to commiserate, "an even greater scandal is that Romney’s tax rate is as high as it is."

Oh, the ignominy!

Hendrickson then jumps into an economic quagmire of class warfare soundbites and dubious assertions about money and workers that he backs with about as much research and data as the liberal media does with their own soundbites and dubious assertions.

In other words, Hendrickson writes a crassly political blurb for an evangelical website with the hopes of stoking right-wing resentment against liberals and creating the illusion that taxation - particularly at what they consider to be high rates - is unBiblical.  Ironically, the conservative business site Bloomberg.com ran a story admiring how low Romney's tax rate is.

Might Hendrickson be misunderstanding why Americans are marveling at Romney's tax rate?  From what I can tell in the legitimate business media, the surprise doesn't come from comparing his rate with average taxpayers, but by comparing it to the 24% generally paid by people in his income bracket. 

Unfortunately, even if he's precisely on-target with his assessment, Hendrickson's nonetheless bitter attack represents what's become a tired trick by politically-savvy right-wing evangelicals.  Banking on the knowledge that many modern-day people of faith understand about as much of the US Constitution and our country's tax code as they understand the Bible, agitators like Hendrickson take the practice of taxation and paint it with as heinous a brush as any bona-fide sin.

Problem is, the only thing sinful about taxation is if believers don't pay theirs.

That's all the Bible has to say about taxes.  "'Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's,'" remember?

Now, don't get me wrong:  I don't like paying taxes any more than people like Hendrickson do.  Living in America, we citizens have the right to petition for the lowest possible taxes upon which our nation can possibly function.  But whatever Romney's tax rate may be, whether it's too high or too low, or less than the average taxpayer, it is not scandalous in the faith-based sense, as Hendrickson would have us believe.

What is scandalous - and it's perplexing that a professor at a Christian college misses this one - is the fact that Newt Gingrich's charitable contributions totaled a miserly 3% of his income last year.  Romney's was 13% - almost equal to his tax rate.

Actually, that's not really scandalous, either, even though Gingrich's ingratitude for the wealth he has seems more left-wing than right.  After all, people with a healthy attitude about money aren't threatened by charitable deductions.

No, the scandal is that Hendrickson thinks people of faith need to spend our time getting all worked up over how much taxes everybody pays.

Instead of rendering to God the things that are God's.
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Might Waiting be Better than Winning?

Shhh!

It's the big question some conservatives have started contemplating.

Contemplating in ponderous blog posts and whispers in private conversations.

Do we have to vote Republican this year?  Would an Obama victory be as disastrous as we've been led to fear?  Can America survive another four years of the Obama presidency until Republicans get their act together and run a slate of candidates who can beat Obama on the merits?

After all, the Republican Party has pretty much cratered this year, offering its faithful one of the worst slates of candidates from which to choose.  Everybody knows it, although few prominent conservatives will admit it.  Now that the primary race appears to be coalescing around Mitt and Newt - blatant clues to each of their characters - the bitter reality is beginning to sink in:  can either of these guys win against the guy who captured Osama bin Laden?

Can either of these guys win against the guy with better morals than Newt, and the guy who is less elitist than Mitt?

We certainly don't want eight years of either of these two GOP guys, since if one of them lands the White House this year, we'll be forced to support him again in 2016.

Gulp!

Would 4 More Years of Obama Be Worse than 8 Years of Newt or Mitt?

So maybe four more years of Obama won't be as bad as a possible eight years of Mitt or Newt.  After all, we've weathered these past four years; not well, mind you, but America has survived.  Since none of the primary candidates wanted to remind voters of their GOP predecessor (George W. Bush, remember?) and the disappointment his eight years turned out to be, maybe we've pretty much admitted that at least some of the problems Obama has been dealing with during his first term were inherited.  Think bank bailouts, auto industry bailouts, soaring unemployment, and two unwinable wars.

Bush inflated the government's payroll wildly, fumbled immigration reform, and foisted federal "no child left behind" standards onto local school districts - which has created the oppressive test-taking culture now crippling public school education.  All Obama has done is simply fail to lead in much of anything, which is what Republicans generally hoped would happen.  Sure, his inability to forge alliances, and fear of political compromise, sparked plenty of vitriol.  He continued Bush's spending frenzy so our national debt continues to spiral out of control.  And he pandered to his liberal constituency with some blatant left-wing ideology.  But don't forget - he stunned leaders in his own party by ruling that teenaged girls should not have unfettered access to morning-after pills.  If evangelical Christians didn't disdain him so much, they'd have thanked him effusively for that unexpected show of paternal bravado.

Not that Obama has been a good president.  It's just that maybe he's not as bad as what we'd have to endure from our own so-called conservative kind.  If they beat Obama this fall, neither Newt nor Mitt will win with significant political capital, as Bush himself found out even after he claimed he had in 2004.  Those two guys have spilled so much political blood already in these early days of primary campaigning that their credibility as national leaders has likely been severely tarnished.  We know Mitt has as much of a socialist bent as Obama when it comes to healthcare, and we know Newt has no loyalties when it comes to women or even politics, since he has as long a record of flip-flopping on major issues as Mitt does.

Believers Voting Democratic, and Why Blacks Who Are, Do

I'd seen a couple of online articles and blog posts about conservatives skipping this fall's presidential election, but hadn't really taken the question too seriously until a dear, long-time friend of mine posted a FaceBook link to a watch party for Obama's State of the Union speech this past Tuesday.  My friend is a devout, born-again Christian, a devoted wife and mother of two, and black.  And she's not my only black, born-again friend who supports Obama.  What do such people whose only difference from me is their skin color see in somebody for whom I wouldn't otherwise be able to bring myself to vote?

Indeed, plenty of white evangelicals look at each other, dumbfounded, and ask, "how can anybody be a Christian and support a Democrat, let alone one who is pro-choice?"

Now obviously, I can't speak for an entire race, but I've been told in the past by two other die-hard Democrats - who are born-again Christians who happen to be black - that although abortion is the big deal-changer for most evangelical voters, it's not with them.

After all, what is it about abortion that makes it a deal-changer? 

Life, right?

Well, what do Republican conservatives do to support life outside of the womb?  They're crazy about protecting life inside the womb, but for socially-liberal believers who are members of a race which has received some pretty nasty treatment from whites for generations, life on either side of birth has equal challenges.  Perhaps blacks aren't necessarily eager to become one-issue voters when that would mean they'd be supporting a political party that doesn't have the best track record when it comes to social supports.  Generally speaking, some evangelical blacks who linger in the Democratic Party take issue with white evangelicals who refuses to acknowledge that some entitlement programs - the safety net disproportionately relied upon by minorities - have a greater validity than is popularly acknowledged.

Personally, I believe that entitlements like welfare, public housing, and other government programs need significant overhauling to make them serve their clients better, and encourage their clients to be more responsible for their own lives.  But many Republicans talk as though welfare and public housing need to be completely abolished, even though such a mindset betrays more an ignorance about the value of social safety nets than the tough-love compassion - or even a fiscal prudence - that right-wing blowhards like Rush Limbaugh like to parrot.

After all, the Bible has volumes more to say about looking after the poor, being lavish towards others with the money God gives us, being fair, and refuting racism than it does about abortion, a word that's actually never mentioned in the scriptures.  Abortion has become a political machination to cover for moral turpitude, more a symptom of societal decay than the cause of it.  Perhaps that sounds like rationalizing away the pro-choice platform of the Democratic party believers who vote Democratic tacitly endorse.  But if abortion is hatred for life, hating people on this side of the womb is equally heinous to God, since He equates such sin to murder.  

And maybe white folk like me just don't understand how proud blacks are to have Obama in the White House.  I'll be honest with you - even though I didn't vote for him, on his inauguration day, I was proud that the United States had finally - at least symbolically - broken the race barrier in the Oval Office.  It was just too bad the person was a liberal, instead of a conservative.

Uneasy Lies the Head that Has to Vote

However, with all due respect to my believing friends who are as saved as I am, and with whom all of us Elect will be spending eternity, I would far prefer having a proven fiscal and social conservative on the Republican ticket this fall.  Although things are bad in the GOP field, I consider it highly unlikely that the situation would ever become dire enough for me to vote for President Obama directly, even though a vote for either Mitt or Newt might have the same effect.

I simply think it's a testament to the deep dissatisfaction - and even, raw disappointment - that is growing among Republicans that talk of waiting out yet another term of somebody who's supposed to be the opposition is even seeing the light of day.

Right now, let's just not even think about having to endure eight years of Mitt or Newt.  Might waiting to see if a better selection of candidates can be found for 2016 actually be in the best long-term interests of the GOP, even if there's some short-term pain?

Can you actually win by losing an election?  The fact that other people - not me! - have already started asking that question means the answer is not as clear as it should be.
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Update:  Click here to read my follow-up on this subject.

Right-Wing Duplicity Fouls the Air

Environmental regulations.

They're onerous, big-government, job-killing, left-wing farcical drivel.

Unless, apparently, they're not.

Many right-wing conservatives talk a big talk against environmental regulations.  Indeed, protecting the environment is code-language for stealth commie-pinko anti-disestablishmentarianism.

Environmental regulations are killing American productivity.  Or so these right-wingers claim.  They fight to protect industrial polluters in places like Midlothian, Texas, for example, home to several smog-belching concrete plants.  Concrete plants about which people have been complaining for years, since they contribute significantly to the air pollution with which north Texas increasingly suffers.

Yet for as long as people have been trying to force them to move to a far less populated corner of the state, these concrete plants have enjoyed fierce protection from their local Republican congressman, the ultra-conservative Joe Barton.

Midlothian is south of Dallas, a smallish blue-collar town of middle-class tract homes, fast-food restaurants, and truck stops.   Relatively conservative, mostly white, but hardly affluent, it's a far cry from the suburbs north of Dallas, and cities like Frisco, which hardly even existed ten years ago.

Ahh, yes:  Frisco, Texas.  

Today, Frisco lies on the outer bands of north Dallas' exurban halo, boasting an upscale white-collar lifestyle with high-priced restaurants, exclusive shopping, sleek corporate campuses, and sprawling gated communities choked with luxurious McMansions and foreign luxury cars.

All very white, very affluent, and very Republican.  All built around a little battery recycling plant which used to be on the outskirts of town.  Back when Frisco was just another hick village stuck out in the dusty Texas prairie.

But for all of the so-called egregious environmental rules that conservatives have managed to skirt for the concrete plants south of Dallas, conservative voters in Frisco have suddenly found value in them, hurling those same rules against the little battery plant in Frisco.  They want that battery plant gone.  It's contaminating the environment.  And destroying their quality of life.

Battles like this illustrate why conservatives have a hard time mustering credibility when it comes to the environment in general, and pollution in particular.

Exide Technologies built their battery recycling plant back in 1965 on a plot of land several blocks south of Frisco's placid Main Street.  Since then, thousands of people have moved to Frisco, and they've decided Exide isn't a good enough neighbor in a community now boasting seven-figure homes.  A neighborhood group calling itself "Get the Lead Out of Frisco" has begun agitating for Exide to shut down its operations in town.

Frankly, Exide's Frisco plant has been listed as one of the 16 top lead polluters in the nation, but its existence was no secret when developers started plowing under Frisco's old farms for new subdivisions.  It's a classic case of poor research by homebuyers, many of whom seem to have been caught off-guard by learning they've moved near a four-decades-old industrial polluter.

This past January 17th, Frisco's city council voted unanimously to begin the process of revoking the permits Exide needs to operate the plant.  For their part, Exide is expected to mount a vigorous lawsuit to keep its plant operational in Frisco.  If the plant is forced to shut down, about 135 jobs would be lost.

Either way, it will likely be years before Exide's fate is decided.  Although their Frisco facility isn't very large, it's part of a large enterprise with operations in 80 countries.  Frisco may have its state senator in its corner, the powerful Republican Florence Shapiro, but Exide has plenty of political influence itself - plus some pretty deep pockets.  It's not acting like it's going anywhere, even stating that it will continue to modernize the Frisco plant and introduce new environmental safeguards as if everything is business as normal.

That's not what Frisco wants to hear.  But it's similar to what Midlothian residents have been hearing for years.  In October of last year, Republicans in the House of Representatives voted to further delay new regulations for cement kilns based principally on Republican Representative Barton's unwavering loyalty to the cement manufacturers in his district south of Dallas County.  Although some perfunctory improvements to reduce industrial emissions have been made at Midlothian's three mammoth concrete plants over the years, they've failed to significantly maximize the available technology that can minimize pollution.

Air quality studies in Midlothian consistently affirm that pollution is at safe levels, although environmentalists and some experts say the tests are flawed.  Republicans like pointing to such bickering as proof that the fuss over cement kiln pollution is exaggerated, but up in Frisco, the lead pollution is only significantly detectable within a one-mile radius of the plant, above land mostly owned by Exide.  So why the fuss in Frisco?

This is where the double-standard in conservative politics rears its ugly head.  Why is it that the poorer, blue-collar environs of Midlothian get snubbed when it comes to questioning the pollution belched out by three enormous cement manufacturers, while the far richer, white-collar exurb of Frisco feels entitled to run out of town one of the area's long-term employers?

Surely capitalism should be allowed unfettered reign wherever it's planted in the Lone Star State.  Wasn't that one of Governor Rick Perry's presidential campaign themes?

Or, might environmental regulations simply be onerous... until they become a convenient tool for one's political base?  If it wasn't for government-mandated environmental regulations, Frisco wouldn't have a case.  And without those regulations, Midlothian still doesn't have one.

Either way, Republicans lose credibility on an issue that should be important to us all:

Clean air.
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Update:  Frisco's new residents got their way:  the Exide plant officially closed on Friday, November 30, 2012.

Works Show God's Work

Do your deeds prove your faith?

If you'd asked me that question before I'd had my devotions this morning, I'd have likely retorted, "I'm saved by grace, not works."

But that's not what the apostle Paul is saying when he explains to King Agrippa in Acts 26:20 that Jews and Gentiles "should repent and turn to God and prove their repentance by their deeds."

If you don't like how the NIV translates that verse, here are a couple of other takes on it:

From the American Standard Version:  "...they should repent and turn to God, doing works worthy of repentance."

From the English Standard Version:  "they should repent and turn to God, performing deeds in keeping with their repentance."

And from the New Century Version:  "they should change their hearts and lives and turn to God and do things to show they really had changed."

Hmm... what do I do that shows I've really been born-again?  What do you do?

From Darkness to Light

Remember, Paul isn't saying that people are saved by the things they do - or don't do.  We've got to take this verse in context, like we should do with every verse in the Bible, and not just hang it up on a clothesline like a damp shirt and treat it as some singular directive.

Paul is in Caesarea, explaining to King Agrippa why the Jews want him dead.  The apostle recounts his bizarre conversion experience on the Road to Damascus, and summarizes how, since then, he's been preaching the Gospel to both Jews and Gentiles.  In verse 18, Paul explains that God would work through him, in His own words, "'to open their eyes and turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me.'"

Wow - so it gets even heavier. Not only are we to perform deeds in keeping with repentance, but those deeds should reflect how we've been turned from darkness to light.

How do I make that leap?  By following simple grammatical correlations between the work that God does within all whom He saves (opening their eyes and turning them from darkness to light) in verse 18, and then how that work is manifested in the daily lives of believers (doing works worthy of repentance) in verse 20.  The works we're to do follow, not precede, the salvific work God does in us.  So, relax:  Paul's teaching is completely in accordance with orthodox Christianity:  we are not saved through works.

How Works Work

But works help show that we're saved.

It's a concept a lot of modern believers don't appear comfortable embracing.  I don't know - maybe we've never wholeheartedly liked the idea that our daily actions should mirror the change from darkness to light that we say we celebrate in church on Sundays.  A lot of us actually like the dark side.  It's fun, so we think, or have been led to believe.  Besides, we don't need to prove we're saved; otherwise, we risk being legalistic.

But is Paul saying we prove we're saved by doing good works, or that good works are a natural outflow of a life changed from darkness to light?  The organic goodness that emanates from our actions, and indeed our motives, should tell other people that we don't walk in darkness.

I'm reminded of that famous passage in Ephesians 2:10, where Paul explains that we're "created in Christ Jesus to do good works."  Unfortunately, it's at this point where legalists come in, and start structuring a matrix of do's and don't's to which we people of faith must adhere.  The more we grow in our faith, however, I think the less concerned we become about lists and do's and don't's, and more on why's and why not's.

Why?  Because we love God and want to honor Him. 

I suspect the more we live with that perspective, the things we do will show we really have been changed.  Changed not through our actions.  But that because of what Christ has done for us, we allow the Holy Spirit to guide us in behaviors characteristic of light, rather than darkness.

Perhaps the more we resist that concept, people living in darkness around us will be less able to determine why our faith matters to us.

If, in fact, we truly possess the faith we claim to.

Without Fault in a Depraved Generation

Remember where, in Philippians 2, the apostle Paul exhorts us to "work out our salvation with fear and trembling?"  Here's his exact quote, starting in verse 12:

"...Continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, 13 for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose. 14 Do everything without complaining or arguing, 15 so that you may become blameless and pure, children of God without fault in a crooked and depraved generation, in which you shine like stars in the universe..."

Here again, Paul isn't saying that salvation rests on what we can do for God.  Rather, he's describing the process of sanctification as people of faith allowing the Holy Spirit to continually mold themselves into the saints He wants them to be.  Still, we're to be God's children, "without fault in a crooked and depraved generation."

And then Paul revisits the imagery of light he used with King Agrippa, calling for us to "shine like stars in the universe."  Stars whose light, which is the reflection of the Son, pops out into our sight against the blackness of space's void.

May God help us to shine for Him in all we do.

So even our works testify of God's work in our lives.
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What Paterno Avoided Became His Epitaph

"Man, that was quick."

As America responded to the passing yesterday of legendary college football coach Joe Paterno, this seemed to sum up the general theme.

He'd only been diagnosed with lung cancer this past November.  He'd only been fired from his historic position at Penn State literally days before that.

Back then, the country was still reeling from news about his former assistant coach, Jerry Sandusky.  Accusations of child molestation, a 50-count indictment, and lurid testimony from a fellow coach about a horrific shower scene he stumbled upon involving Sandusky and a young boy.

All in a football program whose motto, zealously crafted and guarded by Paterno himself, was "victory with honor."

After a 46-season career, building all of Penn State - not just its football program - into a national powerhouse, everything for the 85-year-old icon seemed to implode within a matter of days.  And now, merely three months later, Paterno is dead.  Yet another victim of lung cancer.  And probably a broken heart.

When Good Men Do Almost Nothing...

Officially, Paterno was never charged with any crime.  He had no clue about Sandusky's alleged pattern of child abuse until Mike McQueary, who witnessed the despicable shower episode, went to him with the news.  Paterno acted within the the requirements of Pennsylvania law - if not the spirit of ethical accountability - by simply reporting McQueary's testimony to his own superiors at Penn State.  He did nothing more about the matter, even though he could have.

Couldn't he?  Paterno wielded significant influence and authority at Penn State.  One would think that a man as devoted to his family, personal morality, community pride, and the school's honor as Paterno was would be as eager to make sure justice was secured regarding one of his former coaches as he was promoting the school's athletic and scholastic integrity.  Why didn't he, then, either confront Sandusky himself, or repeatedly pressure the school's senior administrators to do so?  Even if he didn't want to get personally entangled in the process, he would be excused for allowing the chain of command at such a large organization to deal with such accusations, if for no other reason than to legally protect both one's own self and the organization as a whole.  Indeed, the administrators who should have pursued the allegations against Sandusky didn't, and they've been rightfully charged with crimes.  But by all accounts - including Paterno's - he made a perfunctory, obligatory report, and never revisited anything related to McCreary's account ever again.

What may to him have seemed a satisfactory response at the time proved to be his own undoing.  Because even though it wasn't illegal for Paterno to shrug off McCreary's report, one would hope that a person as responsible for the welfare of young people as a college football coach is supposed to be would have had the same zero-tolerance for disreputableness among his coaching staff as among his players.  When Paterno was fired, it wasn't because he had broken any laws, it was because people were so incredulous that he could literally pretend the accusations against Sandusky in no way affected him.

Just over a week ago, on January 14, the Washington Post published an exclusive interview Paterno gave to Post reporter Sally Jenkins, in which the cancer-stricken, wheelchair-bound former coach provided some insight as to how he could assume such a thing.  Both he and McQueary have admitted that the account McQueary shared with him wasn't as graphic as what McQueary would later tell a grand jury convened to bring charges against Sandusky.

"You know, [McQueary] didn't want to get specific," a contrite Paterno recalled about the conversation they had regarding the Sandusky shower. "And to be frank with you, I don't know that it would have done any good, because I never heard of, of, rape and a man. So I just did what I thought was best. I talked to people that I thought would be, if there was a problem, that would be following up on it."

By all accounts, Paterno is an old-fashioned Italian when it comes to matters of personal intimacy.  And, sure, there's nothing wrong with living a life in which you try to remain distanced from sordid tales of social dysfunction.  But Paterno was a college football coach at a major institution, and it was part of his responsibility to know about factors that could impact the kids he coached.  And that includes what his coaches were doing to other kids.

It Takes the Diligence of a Village

Undoubtedly, Penn State provided seminars to staff members on recognizing, reporting, and preventing child abuse.  Every large school conducts these programs not only at the behest of their insurance companies and human resource departments, but out of sheer desire to protect those who may not be able to protect themselves.  There's no way Paterno was not aware of the existence of child predators in society, and the abuse of power over kids by authority figures, even if such topics sent shivers up his spine whenever mentioned within earshot.  Such topics should rightly send shivers up anybody's spine, but that doesn't mean you pretend they don't exist.

Yet how many of us do the same thing in our own spheres of influence?  For example, how many of us scoff at church rules down in the childrens ministry areas designed to prevent unauthorized people from interacting with kids?  When I worked at a large church in the 1990's, at the dawn of modern child protection systems in large churches, it wasn't uncommon to have an unauthorized adult pitch a fit when they were refused access to a specific area, or told they couldn't sign-out a child because the parent who checked-in the child hadn't approved it.

If you're really interested in protecting your child, you'll follow the rules.  And if the rules don't make sense, then work with whomever's in charge to fix them.  More than likely, however, it's not the rules that are as onerous in these cases as are the parents.

One time, a parent involved in a heated custody battle after a protracted divorce fight tried to claim their child against the wishes of the other parent.  Thankfully, the person manning the discharge desk enforced the church's policy, and likely prevented the child from being abducted by the unauthorized parent.

Read more here: http://www.star-telegram.com/2012/01/14/3660331/paterno-didnt-know-which-way-to.html#storylink=cpy

I didn't work in the childrens ministry, so I didn't witness any of these situations first-hand.  I worked in the accounting office, and the only reason I heard about these problems was because parents complained to the church administration when they couldn't fudge the rules to benefit themselves... more often than not, to the detriment of child safety.

Now, obviously, rules imposed by churches and other organizations entrusted with the care of children are only as good as their logic and enforceability.  Stupid rules don't necessarily keep anybody safe, because of the irresistible temptation to ignore them.  And unenforced rules might just as well not exist at all.

But these are conversations that organizations need to have, regardless of the comfort level among affected parties.  The aloof Paterno-esque disposition that likes to pretend such crimes never happen cannot coexist with reality.  And even people of such mythic or idolized status as Joe Paterno cannot be held in such demagogic esteem that raw testimony such as McCreary's cannot be shared, however uncomfortably, with them.  Paterno could have even asked McCreary to follow-up on the incident if he was too baffled by it himself. 

As we all now know, McCreary did Paterno no favors by not being completely descriptive with what he saw.   And neither one of them did the victims in this situation any favors, either.  Whether the victims are the boys who've made allegations against Sandusky, or even Sandusky himself, who may yet be innocent of these allegations, no matter how unlikely that may currently appear.

Don't Walk Through Life Wearing Blinders

If Paterno's fall from grace teaches us anything, it is that if a person was ever able to march through their chosen career or life walk, doing whatever they wanted to do without allowing themselves to get bogged-down in the nitty-gritty dirty ancillary work involved with responsibility and accountability, you can't live that way any longer.  These days, all of us need to be aware of things happening around us.  If something is brought to our attention, even an unsubstantiated allegation involving possible harm to somebody else, we need to at least stop and make sure we do what we can to remediate the situation.

Apparently, Paterno wanted to coach, and that's all.  Unfortunately, he neglected to realize that coaching is much more than teaching kids how to excel in the mechanics of football.  It's nice - albeit quaint - that he was held in such high regard by his assistant coaches that McCreary apparently thought it would disrespectfully embarrass Paterno if he told him everything he saw.  But nice and quaint don't cut it anymore when we're talking about child abuse.  Nice and quaint isn't the world in which we live.

Yes, the response, "well, that was quick" may have been the first thing people thought of upon hearing of Paterno's passing yesterday.

But then, "it's just so sad" pretty much sums up the rest of everyone's reaction.

So sad, because for Paterno's legacy at least, it's an epitaph that didn't have to be.

So sad.
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Bow Wow, Kodak

A sampling of reader comments from the New York Times story of Kodak's bankruptcy announcement:

• "First Twinkies, now Brownies. My childhood is going bankrupt!" - Wasting Time, DC
• "How could Kodak be so over-exposed?" - Technic Ally, Toronto
• "Kodak's recipe for decline parallels that of all too many companies too many MBAs and too many corporate lawyers running things, and not enough visionaries and technical people - this, no less, from the company that pioneered digital imaging." - mancuroc, Rochester NY
• "Excellent, part of Kodak's corporate turnaround strategy is to become a patent troll suing other companies." - omalley69, Toronto
• "A note to Perez - it's too late to sell patents to buggy whips." - Shining Light, North Coas

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Was it management incompetence?

Take a look at the selection of opinions above.  I've never said right-wing capitalists are wrong when it comes to the moderate business mindset of the New York Times and its readers!

Whereas capitalists esteem Capitalism as a power that can do no evil, the Times and its readership aren't always so sure.  Classic proof of this can be seen in such responses to Kodak's bankruptcy filing, in which management gets skewered for completely bungled the switch from film to digital photography over the past couple of decades.

According to information reported in the Times, part of Kodak's proposed restructuring under bankruptcy protection will be to aggressively sue other companies allegedly violating Kodak's copyrights on a vast assortment of technologies.  Not exactly a textbook gameplan for long-term fiscal sustainability, is it?  They've already been trying to sell some of their patents, even though it's unclear how patents they couldn't profit from themselves could be so valuable to anybody else.  Kodak also intends to complete what many consider to be a misguided transformation from photographic film inventor into a desktop printer manufacturer, much like Apple's transformation, shifting from laptops to iPods.

Trouble is, according to skeptics, Kodak's current CEO is no Steve Jobs.

No Longer on a Roll

Perhaps not surprisingly, however, reader comments to the same news from Kodak has been decidedly different on the Wall Street Journal's website, where a pronounced defense of the MBA culture - plus some hostility at Kodak's rank-and-file employees and professional engineers - runs through many posted opinions.

It's a popular ax for pro-management pundits to grind, even as they're likely trying to protect the value of their own MBAs:  Kodak is yet another big business that has suffered at the hands of its workers.

Considering how many tens of thousands of its employees Kodak has laid off over the past decade, isn't that argument a bit dubious?  But then again, Kodak's besieged CEO, Antonio Perez, has replaced most of his executive suite's old guard since taking over in 2005, and that hasn't helped the company yet, either.  So deciphering which employee group is to blame for the storied corporation's fall from grace may be left for history to confirm.  Indeed, while it's certainly obvious that the film producer completely screwed up its response to society's digital transformation of photography, how it could and should have anticipated and engaged with digital imaging will likely be the topic of debate for some time.

Actually, the debate has already started!  Across the Internet, highly-educated engineers who have either retired from Kodak, or were fired from it during incessant waves of layoffs, have written articles for business websites and blogs about the intransigent corporate culture at Kodak's storied headquarters in Rochester, New York.

Although the company could attract engineering and executive talent from around the globe to that smallish urban outpost near Lake Ontario, once executives became ensconced in the city Kodak's founder built, they tended to congeal into a boardroom groupthink.  While engineers down in the labs kept on churning out inventions - including, to Kodak's everlasting shame, the digital camera itself - company management scoffed at the notion that its core film business would ever go bust.

The Tail Wagging the Dog?

Yet herein may lie yet another culprit for Kodak's inability to re-invent itself.

The legendary George Eastman didn't invent photography, but he invented roll film, which brought photography to the masses.  He founded Kodak and developed it into an economic powerhouse by hiring gifted inventors who continuously improved his original product.  Kodak thrived on innovation, but it was innovation fueled by gifted engineers, more than the boardroom machinations by MBA's.  Eastman treated all of his employees well because he understood that innovation is best nurtured within contented employees, and executives don't mix photographic chemicals to create the products from which profits are derived.

However, as current CEO Perez has been thrashing about, trying to salvage Eastman's legendary brand, it doesn't appear that he's realized the secret to Eastman's success.  Did Eastman announce a goal, and then push his engineers to pull products to support it out of a hat?  Or did Eastman hire brilliant engineers, build state-of the-art laboratories, and let his people tinker, innovate, and bring their inventions to his executives to sell?

Granted, Eastman died decades before Kodak began to fall apart at the seams, but he created a culture of discovery and development that his predecessors ultimately turned on its head, where the tail started wagging the dog.

Witness Steven Sasson's digital camera, which he invented in 1975.  Kodak's executives obviously weren't looking to bring a digital camera to market.  They didn't know what to do with it, primarily because they had already succumbed to the corporate groupthink that would bring the company to this day of bankruptcy.

Ever since the rumor mill started churning through Kodak bankruptcy gossip last year, Perez has been under fire for what observers claim has been his inept leadership, but isn't it possible that his tenure at Kodak has simply been too little too late?  Didn't Perez inherit a corporate culture that no longer knew what to do with technology or how deep innovation should run?

If corporate management is supposed to know how to assess trends, evaluate new opportunities, and capitalize on product development - even products consumers might not yet know they need - then the legend of Steve Jobs, who never finished college, let alone got an MBA, provides a compelling parallel to the dysfunction in Kodak's corporate suite.

Can Innovation Burn in this Crucible?

Not that an MBA, in and of itself, is a bad thing.  It simply isn't the magic elixir corporate America thinks it is.

And maybe all of the things the Journal's readers criticize Eastman for - free dental care and other generous employee benefits, plus lavish civic philanthropy, for example - are unsustainable in today's corporate world.  At least for a purveyor of ultra-competitive consumer technology.

But might one of Eastman's strategies - letting his cracker-jack engineering department set the pace for his company's products - be something today's Kodak should consider re-implementing?

Perez has said he's pushing whomever's left in his engineering labs to develop new products to fit his new business model for Kodak, but not only does Kodak not have a good track record with change, it's never had to scramble to meet such top-down changes.  Does Perez not understand that inventors can't always react immediately to orders for making square pegs fit round holes?

To the extent that Perez may actually be making more of a valiant effort to keep Kodak afloat than many people are willing to credit him with, then hopefully, this bankruptcy will give him the time and, unfortunately, the finances salvaged from collateral damage to employment and pensions, to succeed.

But in how many ways is Kodak not at all like Apple?  It's older, with a more deeply-ingrained methodology, and what must be a severely disillusioned and threadbare workforce.

Engineers and inventions used to lead the company, and corporate followed along to find and stock markets for their innovations.

Now corporate is trying to engineer a re-invention of the company by commissioning innovations that have historically occurred through scientific experimentation, not bankruptcy timetables.

Can the tail wag this dog back to good health?
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Sopapillas Would be More Effective

As a citizen of the Internet - which is what you are, since you're reading this online - you've undoubtedly been inundated today with messages regarding SOPA-PIPA.

And if you're tired of it already, I'm sorry, because you're gonna get an earful from me about it as well.

Because SOPA-PIPA isn't simply an altruistic legislative scuffle, or fodder for jokes about fatty, starchy Mexican pastries (sopapillas, anybody?).  It could severely impact the way you use the Internet.

By way of full disclosure, there's also an international anti-piracy law in the works, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, but that doesn't fit in cleverly with acronyms which sound like wholly unhealthy - yet delicious! - sopapillas.

Anyway... as you may already know, the combined term SOPA-PIPA refers to two bills in Congress that propose pervasive restrictions on, and penalties for, certain types of Internet content.  Individually, the acronyms stand for the House of Representative's Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and the Senate's Protect IP Act (PIPA).  But however you slice them, they're both chock-full of restrictions, penalties, and outright censorship tactics that will virtually shut down innovation currently exploding all over the Internet.

Innovation which, by the way, is being indisputably led by entrepreneurs in the United States.  This is our baby.  We created it, thanks in no small measure to government scientists (take that, you anti-government Tea Partiers).  We have the most active users (so far, anyway).  And American companies already generate the most online profits of any other country.

Indeed, my sole source of revenue comes from what I write for the Internet.  So you'd think that it would be to my benefit to support SOPA-PIPA, since I have a vested interest in stopping online piracy, which is the ostensible objective of both of these bills.

And I do think online piracy should be fought.  I believe that anybody who creates intellectual property should automatically own it, or at least be able to control it.  The articles I write for Crosswalk are technically theirs for at least a year, but I agreed to that in the contract I signed with them.  I know where my content is supposed to be, and I trust Crosswalk to use it properly.  If I didn't want to abide by that arrangement, I was under no obligation to sign the contract.

But with Internet piracy, I lose control of my intellectual property... or, perhaps more accurately, the property I consider to have intellectual value.  Granted, with the stuff I write, few other people would ever want to claim it as their own.  And if anybody else can figure out how to make more money off of it than what Crosswalk pays me, then I'd be all ears!

Flaw Number One

Plenty of other Internet content, of course, is worth far more than mine.  Intellectual property like feature movies, TV shows, best-selling novels, photography, graphics, songs, and music videos have all been pirated online.  But is this really a new problem?  The illegal distribution of counterfeit products has been the bane of the intellectual capital world for generations.  And it's usually been up to the creators and distributors of that original content to devise ways of protecting their products at the point of distribution.

But the Internet is not actually their point of distribution.  And this is where the fallacy of SOPA-PIPA first appears.  The Internet is a distribution mechanism, but for any product, the last line of defense against product piracy is before it leaves the factory, not as it's being distributed.  In other words, the Internet is like the truck that delivers content to you, much like the truck that used to deliver movie reels to a theater in Des Moines, or modern DVD's to a Best Buy in Schenectady.

Does Hollywood sue all of the world's trucking firms because some of their products get pirated?  No, but they can sue an individual firm if they can prove that its employees were actively engaged in stealing freight and re-selling it on the black market.  Otherwise, if the Hollywood studios cannot prove the freight companies were culpable in hiring criminals to pirate intellectual (well, for Hollywood, we'd better just stick to "creative") property, then it's up to them to thwart the piracy by ensuring the product is protected both in-transit and even after delivery.

After all, stealing DVD's out of the back of a delivery truck likely isn't as common as a person buying a DVD retail, and then pirating the DVD's content for illicit re-sale in the black market.  That's hardly the freight company's fault, is it?

With SOPA-PIPA, in effect, Hollywood is saying it is.

Those of us against SOPA-PIPA believe that just as it's Hollywood's responsibility to protect its product before it's distributed in the bricks-and-mortar world, it's their responsibility to protect its product in the online world.

Does this mean that organizations which host content on the Internet - the web's "trucking companies," if you will - bear no responsibility for any pirated content their users may upload?  Perhaps currently in practice, but not in theory.  It's just that the "fix" for the lag between technology and law enforcement does not exist in SOPA-PIPA.

Flaw Number Two

Remember when people would sneak into movie theaters and videotape first-run movies from their seats?  Bootlegged videos would then show up a few days later.  But did Hollywood go chasing after the theater owners, forcing them to close because a bootlegger had been using a seat in one of their venues to ply his illicit trade?

Or take the pirating of music videos.  Has the recording industry gone after the electric utility companies which provided the electricity which enabled the music video pirates to play the videos in the first place?  Wouldn't that be completely stupid to blame the electric company, or the television manufacturer, for the crimes some people committed with the aid of ancillary equipment?

Penalizing the Internet would be just as incongruous.  The Internet is a public utility.  It has become almost as essential to modern American life as electricity, even if not everybody (like my Luddite mother) takes advantage of it.  The Internet is just the latest venue through which criminals have been able to develop their thievery of commodities that don't belong to them.  But the Internet isn't like a store that the Feds can raid and shut down.

Those of us opposed to SOPA-PIPA believe that since the Internet serves a vastly broader purpose than disseminating intellectual property, sweeping laws with draconian effects on all sorts of content would basically shut it down.  Just as you can't ration electricity to just households which promise not to pirate software or DVDs, you can't ration the Internet.  It is, or it isn't.  It's on, or it's off.  People either have rights to it, or they don't.

Does this mean that we just throw up our hands and say intellectual property rights don't exist on the Internet?  Of course not.  But neither does it mean that just because we haven't figured out a better way of protecting property rights, we need to turn the Internet into a police state.

Creators of any material that could end up on the Internet need to understand both the rewards and the risks of our online world.  Right now, for many creators of intellectual property, the risks appear to outweigh the rewards, and that has led to the unsustainable proposals inherent in SOPA-PIPA.

But just because we don't yet have a workable alternative to something as drastic as SOPA-PIPA, should we just run with what we've got?  Absolutely not, because just as intellectual property is valuable, so is intellectual freedom, and the ability to create and consume the very intellectual property we value.

Shutting down one of the world's greatest inventions because our laws can't keep up with parts of it does not make for logical public policy.

So... do you like honey with your sopapillas?
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No Wonder They're in Love

Traveling is not my thing.  Some people seem to live on jet airplanes, or in their automobiles.

Me?  I haven't been on a road trip since, um... about 2003, I think.  And the last time I flew was to Detroit for Christmas in 2009, the same year Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to blow up his family jewels.

On those rare occasions when I do fly, it's almost always on American Airlines, out of their massive hub here at the sprawling Dallas - Fort Worth International Airport.  Ever since American Airlines relocated their corporate headquarters to Texas from New York, they've been its dominant carrier.  I flew Continental to Houston on a business trip once several years ago, and it was the oddest feeling, almost like I was betraying a long-time friend.

Not that American Airlines is a friendly airline.  It consistently ranks last in consumer satisfaction surveys, and it's the last of the legacy airlines that got so big they could demand business by virtue of the sheer scale of their flight schedules.  To have them currently in bankruptcy protection has disappointed some people, but surprised far fewer.  I've even heard hopes that this bankruptcy will feed American a steady enough diet of humble pie that when they emerge from Chapter 11, they'll be hungry enough to want to woo their customers instead of ostracize them.

Where's the Love?

Against this backdrop of me hardly ever traveling by air, and when I do, almost always traveling on American out of what we call the "Big Airport" here in north Texas, I found myself experiencing a bit of culture shock last night.  A friend of mine who hasn't been in town for about seven months was due back last night, and while a mutual friend was officially scheduled to pick him up, I happened to be in Dallas, so I swung by the smaller airport, to the terminal of a smaller airline, and received an unexpected lesson in how customer service is done in another sector of today's airline industry.

Back before Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport was constructed, the Dallas metropolitan area was serviced by a typical 1950's-vintage municipal airport, Love Field, located a little north of the city's downtown business district.  Fort Worth had an even smaller municipal airport, Meacham, on its north side as well.  But in those days, Cowtown was still, well, Cowtown, whereas Big D really was growing in population and prestige.

Growing so much, in fact, that Love Field couldn't keep up with it all.  Landlocked by residential neighborhoods and an aging industrial district, there was no room for it to expand.  Meanwhile, Fort Worth wanted part of the corporate relocation action Dallas had been enjoying, and regional planners in north Texas were working with state leaders to get funding for a new airport better designed for international travel.

In the early 1970's, what was then a state-of-the-art airport complex was opened on a wide patch of scrubland between the two cities, and whatever was left of passenger service Meacham Airport quickly dried up and blew away.  Today, it's a respectable commercial aircraft services facility, but little more.

Dallas' Love Field, on the other hand, managed to retain much of its passenger business.  You see, although the western flanks of the airport were quickly degenerating into strip clubs, liquor stores, and rusting warehouses, Love Field's eastern side was enticingly close to the city's two most prestigious enclaves, Highland Park and University Park, where scores of business owners and corporate executives lived.

Sure, the new international airport wasn't too far away, but if you were just needing to fly domestically, why bother schlepping practically to Fort Worth when Love Field is in your back yard?  Several years earlier, Southwest Airlines had been launched at Love Field, and its management was busy building it into what has become one of today's most popular no-frills airlines.  Why not keep Love Field going, Dallas leaders rationalized, as a domestic, convenient alternative to the Big Airport?

Dallas Loves its Airport

Fast forward to last night, when, after Bible study at a friend's home about ten minutes away from Love Field, I drove down the old airport's main entrance boulevard, well-paved, well-lit, and attractively landscaped.  Plenty of signs directed me to where I assumed I needed to go; Southwest having only one terminal, and one baggage claim pavilion.  After all, you don't need to know a passenger's arriving gate anymore, do you?  You just need to know where they're going to be picking up their luggage.  And fortunately, the only escalators from the arrival mezzanine at Love Field's Southwest terminal is right next to the hallway towards baggage claim.

Not that I've ever flow into or out of Love Field, but I remembered what the layout was like from the couple of times I've dropped-off friends there in the past.

The parking garage was well-lit, also.  I'm commenting on how illuminated everything was at 10:00pm because, remember, Love Field is owned and operated by the City of Dallas.  And Dallas isn't known for replacing streetlights - or low crime rates, for that matter.  Sure, about two blocks to the east, the McMansions of Dallas' Park Cities elite grace well-tended neighborhoods of ease and tranquility, but right across the airport's western fence lie abandoned buildings and auto lube shacks which were closed - at least for the night.

A well-tended walkway - again, well-lit - guided me from the clean, modern parking garage to Southwest Airline's main entrance (yes, the terminal is small enough to have multiple doorways but only one main entrance).  Being 10:00pm on a Sunday night, the terminal was almost empty, with only a Cinnabon shop still open for the late arrivals.

Several cleaning crews were making their rounds, as well as security guards, and a few airport personnel, apparently just going off shift.  I found the baggage claim area to be the only place humming with any considerable amount of activity, as passengers were quietly getting their luggage off of the old-style loopy-patterned conveyor belts.  Dallas-Fort Worth International has wide, oval-shaped luggage carousels slanted to look like Mayan temples, and they clatter and scrape something awful.  It was almost absurd to notice what appeared to be original equipment at the much older Love Field barely making a humming noise as luggage glided past.

Things I Saw at the Airport

My friend's flight was running early, according to the electronic flight messaging board, but still, I'd have to wait for about 40 minutes.  I knew I was early anyway, so I didn't really mind.  I soon discovered that I'm a dying breed:  of the several flights which arrived while I waited, only two other people came to meet arriving passengers.  Maybe more people were idling in their cars outside of the baggage claim doorways, but only three of us came inside.  I remember the days when waiting areas (up at the arrival gate, remember?!) would be terribly congested with loved ones anxiously awaiting sight of their deplaning family and friends.

After noticing how people don't greet planes anymore, I was tempted to mentally meander into the social reasons for that.  Maybe flying has become so ordinary?  Maybe the lack of sufficient seating for people who want to wait, since non-ticketed folks are now banned from the main part of airport terminals - has virtually erased the once-common sight of airport reunions.

Anyway, I soon realized that in addition to the changing habits of air travelers and their loved ones, I was witnessing what a lot of frequent Southwest Airlines passengers have been raving about for years:  no-hassle flying.  I've known Southwest customers love their airline, but I thought it was mostly because of their reasonable fares.

Like clockwork, a group of about forty or fifty people would glide down the escalators from the mezzanine, most of them obviously tired, but few of them agitated or stressed-out.  Some of them had their one bag with them (no, not their spouse!), so they headed straight for the exit doors, which were only a few feet away from the escalator.  The majority of passengers - obviously frequent travelers through Love Field - turned automatically to their right, down the hallway to baggage claim.  Hardly anybody talked - only a couple of people were chatting softly on their cell phones.  Many of them - both young and old, although the majority of passengers were young - were texting busily, hardly watching where they were going, taking that automatic right turn like they were programmed to do so.

No anxiety, no stress, no anger; just the periodic wave of humanity washing down the escalators and turning towards baggage claim.  Where they got their bags and left.

Wave, after wave, after wave.

After a while, I couldn't help but notice how orderly the baggage claim process was going.  Maybe last night was a fluke.  Maybe it was the first time in ages that things have run that smoothly at Love Field.  Maybe the fact that Southwest's workforce is non-union - nope, they've got all the traditional unions at Southwest, so that can't be it. 

Granted, Love Field is not a large airport with dozens of flights arriving at the same time, and this was a Sunday night, after 10 pm, on a day with good weather, and most of these travelers were Dallas-area residents.

Although I did here one guy complaining to a security guard that he couldn't get any of the cabbies lined up outside to drive him to Oak Cliff, a dicey Dallas neighborhood, especially at night.

Yet even as multiple flights were disembarking and having their luggage combined on two carousels, there was hardly any talking.  Hardly any grabbing for luggage, hardly any pushing, and hardly any nose at all.  At American Airlines, at our Big Airport, in Detroit, and especially at New York's LaGuardia - the three airports which I've most frequently experienced - there's usually any number of shovers, violent grabbers of unwieldy luggage, shouting and raised voices, noisy luggage carousels, and generally, a higher level of anxiety than one might expect from people simply picking up their baggage.

At Love Field's baggage-claim, however, throngs of passengers would traipse down the long hallway, stand silently near the carousels, and within minutes, watch as bags popped through the little openings in the wall.  Almost at some secret signal, every piece luggage would be claimed, and people would be on their way.

There were no stacks of unclaimed luggage.  And there were no groups of disgruntled passengers having to file claims over missing baggage.  Yes, Southwest Airlines had a luggage service counter open, but - and get this! - it was for people who had arrived early for their originating flight, and their luggage had managed to get to Dallas on an earlier plane!  How often does THAT happen these days?

Something Special in the Air

By the time my friend's flight arrived, aside from marveling at how calm things were running, I was seriously bored.  There had been no drama of any sort, except maybe for the guy who couldn't get a cabbie to take him to Oak Cliff.  I'd estimate that several hundred people had made their way through the terminal just while I had been there, and everything was running like it was supposed to.

My friend said that whenever he could, he avoided using the Big Airport, preferring the low-stress vibes at Love Field - even though, due to a bit of crafty legislation known as the Wright Amendment, which sought to curtail Love Field's popularity, many destinations further away from Texas cannot be non-stop.  Like many travelers, my friend is willing to endure the inconvenience of longer travel times to and from Love Field so he can avoid the agony of Dallas - Fort Worth International and the legacy airlines like American which dominate it.

On my drive home afterwards, I got to thinking:  maybe this was a taste of what the "golden age of flight" was like?  When planes arrived on-time or early, when you didn't need to hike across acres of marble flooring to get from your gate to baggage claim, and when baggage claim was effortless and everybody left happy.  No noise, no drama, no fuss.

No wonder most of these travelers appeared to be seasoned Southwest Airlines customers.

No wonder American is in bankruptcy.
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Review My Reviews

Thanks to my generous editor at Crosswalk.com, I'm beginning to write more book reviews.  I've created a separate page for them on this blog, and you might want to check them out!

And, if you'll allow me a moment to gush, I'd like to share with you the feedback I received from one of my earliest authors to review, Erin Healy.  She wrote, "Tim, thanks for giving my fiction a try, and for rewarding me with such a thoughtful and articulate review. I appreciate the personal depth with which you approached the story--no author could ask for anything more. Thank you."

How cool is that?

Oh yeah; I'm tinkering with the name of this blog again, too.  Please bear with me, and send along any feedback you might have.
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Millennials Aren't Occupying Church

They're probably the most over-named group of people in history.

North America's current twentysomethings.  Also known as Generation Y, the Millennial Generation, Millennials, Generation Next, Net Generation, and Echo Boomers.

Good grief - if anybody is entitled to an identity crisis, it's these folks.

Of course, in every generation, whether it was in 411 BC or 1972, older people usually cast aspersions at twentysomethings.  They're fresh out of college, or otherwise "on their own" for the first time in their relatively young lives, and they tend to act in ways older generations don't consider entirely appropriate.  That's one reason, for example, car insurance rates are higher for twentysomethings than sixtysomethings.

So perhaps it should come as no surprise that of all the worries older generations have of our Millennials, one of them involves church attendance.  And why so many young people have begun leaving the organized church.

That was a question posed recently by Relevant magazine, a publication geared to today's religious-leaning twentysomethings.  Why aren't young adults coming back to church when they graduate college? Whereas in previous generations, a reliable percentage of churched teens disconnected with church after leaving home, these days, that reliable percentage is increasing dramatically.  Some church growth experts fear this will soon spell a drastic decline in church attendance, and have begun wringing their hands over how to stop it.

From the Mouths of Babes

Perhaps some helpful perspective on the situation can be gleaned from this generation's church drop-outs themselves, twentysomethings who responded to Relevant's article in feedback comments.  Here's a brief sampling of their opinions, typos and all:

"I think our generation seriously questions the validity and effectivness of institutions in cultivating community, accountability, teaching and worship. As such, we're disenfranchised with such institutions and desparate to find any alternative."

"God's Church is not a Denomination, a Building, or an institution, or a big business with a CEO fulfilling his vision....We are His Church...God's Church is His Bride, The Ekklesia, One Body in Intimate Relationship with Jesus, finally getting to Know who God really is and Just how much He Loves us, smothered in Grace and Love ,not man made religion or mans agendas....These things can only keep people locked in for a time... a Hunger for Freedom will hopefully always break through the lies."

"I suppose the criteria for choosing whether to stay or leave a local parish has not been whether the majority of parishioners agree with me; but whether they respect my freedom to respond to God's Grace as my conscience dictates even when my convictions pose a challenge to their psychological comfort zones."

"i think it's as simple as making friends. watching movies together. having bbqs. just hanging out. without the pressure to shake hands with those around you right before offering is lifted. once the relationships become intimate enough you feel comfortable to read and pray together." 

"Please don't stay frustrated with us, but be thankful that we care SO MUCH about Jesus and following him that we aren't willing to 'stick it out' in the institution that we believe has more of a focus on budgets and fancy programs than on the basic aspects of community and our relationships with Jesus."

"I think the number one reason that many young adults leave church is because a 'up front show' style of church doesn't mesh with their priorities of intentional relationship...  This generation wants relationship and they want to see the gospel 'work' practically in real life - community is what they are looking for and can't seem to find on Sunday mornings."

"I left because of people who are constantly judging my life, and what I do with it. (Not gently giving wisdom, but judging. The difference is subtle but important)."

Oddly enough, some of the excuses sound just like the ones people in every generation have used for not going to church.  One young woman bluntly complained, "I'm not a morning person and I've never gotten much out of Sunday morning services."

Perhaps it's proof that the more things change, the more they really do stay the same!

What Are They Saying?

Then too, it may be that today's twentysomethings really are the first generation of socially-disenfranchised automatons.  So individualized by years of cultural dissonance that they can't grasp the concepts of community, shared responsibility, sacrificial love, extending grace to others, or even the definition of grace itself.  Life is entirely about them.

Generally speaking, they think they know what intimacy is, but they don't.  They're too narcissistic and impatient to be deferential, which is what genuine intimacy requires.

Reading these responses, the dearth of Biblical knowledge betrayed by many of these young people who claim to have grown up in church is depressingly striking.  For the past twenty years, many churches and churched parents apparently have completely wasted their opportunity - and privilege - of teaching their children from and about the Bible.  All these Biblically illiterate twentysomethings provide painful proof of that.

And while an intellectual immaturity has always seemed to exist in young adults, simply because of their relative inexperience at life, perhaps that immaturity has been exacerbated in today's iteration of this cohort by public education's emphasis on test-taking instead of acquiring wisdom and extrapolating information.

Meanwhile, reading these responses with a Reformed perspective reveals the same old misunderstanding about what church is supposed to be that has permeated conventional evangelicalism for the past 50 years.  The same twisted purpose for church that spawned the seeker-sensitive travesty and many rock-concert trappings of contemporary "worship."  Corporate worship is no longer oriented towards the worship of God but the entertainment of an audience who can write off the experience on their taxes.  To the extent that most of today's evangelical churches perpetrate these fallacies, it shouldn't surprise anybody that today's twentysomethings - the first generation to be weaned on technology and artificial stimulation, and desperately seeking legitimacy - avoid them.

Why This Phenomenon Likely Won't Matter Much

At the same time, however, a Reformed perspective also provides some rationale for dismissing virtually all of these excuses from today's twentysomethings for not attending church.  Because after all, aren't these opinions by Relevant's readers merely petulance disguised in false piety?

Are these twentysomethings so much better than the Baby Boomers and thirtysomethings who love the rock-concert worship services?  Are they that much more grounded in their desire for an Acts-type early church experience?  They so crave a sense of community that they're willing to obfuscate the methodologies which helped nurture previous generations of saints in the Faith and punish us by not attending.

Spare me such impertinent overtures of sanctimony!  I don't like rock concert worship any more than most of these Millennials, but I don't loathe the Boomers and Busters who do, or claim their faith is inferior to mine.  Misguided, yes; but not intrinsically inferior.  Aren't these insolent cries of a purer faith from Millennials nothing more than another way for the Devil to wiggle into the hearts and minds of people to further undermine the Body of Christ?

Nevertheless, while I scoff at much of the entitlement expressed by these commenters, I don't fear it.  God's Elect will always be claimed by Him, regardless of whether - or where - they go to church.  A lot of the people who stayed in church after college in previous generations may have done so out of obligation or some other compunction other than true faith in Christ.  So perhaps what we're seeing now is a literal weeding out of the chaff from the wheat, as today's twentysomethings perform in our faces the divestiture of the unsaved from the saved.

Not that church attendance proves a person is saved.  Or that not attending church proves they're unsaved.  It's just that if you don't have faith to begin with, and you don't have the cultural proclivity to attend church just because its the socially-acceptable thing to do, then I don't blame you for not wanting to go.  And it's not a crisis for the church if you don't.

No matter how you slice it, the evangelical church is probably shrinking not because fewer people are being saved, but because God's true church is simply losing a lot of the hangers-on that have traditionally occupied pews and deacon boards - and even pulpits - in congregations across North America.

Seeker Church Is No Longer Contemporary

And yes, I admit finding some satisfaction in seeing how the defiance of non-churchgoing twentysomethings supports some of my own contentions about North America's contemporary church.  Many of Relevant's readers complained about the polished rock concerts, the drive for performance perfection and the amount of money it costs, the vapid praise music, the trite sermons, the fashionably beautiful worship leaders, the impersonal campuses, and everything else that creates more of the dissonance between faith and community that I join Millennials in loathing about contemporary churches in general and seeker churches in particular.

You know the popular saying in these contemporary churches that "we strive for perfection in all we do to honor God?"  I've known since day one that it was code-language for "our pastor is a type-A micromanager who wants to impress as many people in as many ways as possible."  And sure enough, it's been an exceptionally off-putting dogma for today's jaded young adults who think they want perfection, but know it's too elusive to be real.

So to hear these things from the very target audience towards which churches have been tilting for years now - the young hipsters - is actually refreshing.  Chasing the youth market is a never-ending - and ultimately, ineffective - battle, since that market is always shifting away from you.  Youth is forever racing into the future, while all of us - even today's youth, and tomorrow's - incessantly age.  It was interesting to note how one Millennial scoffed at the 1990's music in the church he left, music which was cutting-edge during the early frenzy of the seeker movement, but awkwardly dated today.  It proves what I've claimed for years:  church based on a singular demographic simply doesn't work, particularly if that demographic is all about youth.

The Take-Away From this Paradigm Going Forward

The value of listening to these twentysomethings lies not in their imperious snubbing of the hypocrisy in church - hypocrisy to which they're inadvertently contributing by their duplicitous estimations of their own spiritual condition, since they think they're actually benefiting from abandoning church - but in the proof that it provides regarding the purpose of church.

If you're attending church to make friends, to feel significant, to check off a religious activity for your works-based salvation, to help solve social ills in the world, or to be validated no matter what you think or do, then you're going to church for all the wrong reasons.  No matter how old you are.  And no matter the congregation you're proud of dismissing as irrelevant.

Corporate worship is for the unadulterated adulation of the Trinity by its redeemed Elect.  Then it's for instruction, then for service and discipleship.  In the process, worshipping alongside like-minded saints who are also on their journeys of sanctification, you'll probably become friends with some of them, and you should be placing yourself under the leadership of disciplers in your congregation who are also helping you disciple others.  And so on, and so on.

In fact, it's at the point where you're not thinking about yourself, but about God and others, that you'll probably find yourself less concerned about why church may not be relevant to you, but more encouraged that it's become an intrinsic part of your life.  Because when all is said and done, not forsaking the assembly of ourselves together may be a bit messy at times, and not always edifying, yet it's something the Bible instructs us to do.  It's a way we demonstrate to God and the world that we worship because He loved us first.

Corporate worship is all about Him.  Not you, not me, or anybody else.

And if you can't believe that, then maybe the Holy Spirit is not in you.  Because there's no other valid reason to attend church.  It could just be that we've hit a generation of unsaved twentysomethings who are too calloused by pretense to care about putting on a charade in church and lack the Holy Spirit's urging to attend anyway.

And you know what?  That's OK.  Because now, the rest of us have a clearer understanding of who our mission field is.
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An Epiphany of the Epiphany

Greetings on this glorious feast day of Epiphany!

At least, it's a glorious day here in north central Texas, where the temperature is about 70 degrees and there's not a cloud in the sky.

Yet even if our weather here was as nasty as winter weather can get, even for Texas, January 6 would still be a day for glorious celebration of the Epiphany, or the welcoming to the world of the Christ child by the wise men.

Not that the wise men actually found the Christ child 13 days after His birth; Epiphany, like Christmas itself, is more symbolic than literal. Epiphany, which can mean the same thing as "stunning realization" or "new truth," commemorates the wise men being the Bible's first documented foreign visitors to the Christ child. Why is this important? Because it signifies how Jesus was born to save not just one class of people, or one race, or one caste or social group, but that as God incarnate, He would not be a respecter of persons. Anyone of any race, ethnicity, economic status, or even prior religion, can be saved through Him.

Hallelujah?

Indeed, Christ's very first visitors were the humble shepherds, called to the manger from the hills around Bethlehem.  They were most likely Jews, or at the very least, people who had relatively close ancestral links to the lineage of David.  But the wise men from the East were obviously of a far more distant people group.  It has been estimated that it took about three years for them to "come to the place where the child was," which by that time, was in Nazareth.

And just to be clear:  nowhere in the Bible does it say there were three kings.  They were men of nobility, probably, and importance, obviously, but they could have been their generation's version of NASA scientists, and there could have been two of them, or dozens.  We just know there was more than one of them, and they came from the East.

Christ is indeed the Savior of the world.  And at least to me, that's what Epiphany celebrates.  Cross-cultural missions, which is the extension of the significance of Christ's international purpose, is part of what Lutherans celebrate at Epiphany, which I think is appropriate.

Christ's Gospel is for His elect, but His elect is scattered across the globe.  His elect is comprised of the rich and the poor, and everything in between.  That's why it's fitting that before Christ ever "officially" began His earthly ministry, he'd already been greeted - heralded, even - by people representing the spectrum of human existence.

Isn't that incredible?

In the Christian Calendar, the season of Epiphany started last night, with what's called "the Twelfth Night," corresponding to the traditional Twelve Days of Christmas.  Epiphany will run until the Sunday before Ash Wednesday, upon which day Lent begins.

Twelfth Night and the Start of Epiphany

Last year, I attended my first- ever Twelfth Night service at a relatively conservative Episcopalian church in Dallas' tony University Park enclave called St. Michael and All Angels.  It started at dusk, and ended well after nightfall.  After the service inside their towering, 1950's-vintage sanctuary with the massive marble wall across its chancel, we congregants were led outside to a mobile metal altar, where boughs and branches of evergreens had been piled high.  These had come from decorations which had been arranged throughout the church during Advent and Christmas, which meant they were dry and brittle - perfect kindling.

About two hundred of us gathered around the mobile metal altar, underneath the spreading branches of grand live oak trees (they're called "live oak" because they keep leaves all year long).  After a short prayer, one of the priests, wearing a striking white robe in the surrounding darkness, lit the stack of evergreens, which had already been doused with lighter fluid.

FOOMPSSSHHH!

The entire pile of dry evergreens went up in a flash of white, orange, and yellow; a grand burst of light, energy, and heat.  The conflagration initially looked high enough to torch trees whose branches hung about twenty feet overhead, but the mobile altar had been strategically placed beneath an opening in the trees' canopy, and soaring fingers of flame licked up through the opening, probably another ten feet or so, until dying down to just below the canopy ceiling.

Impressive?  You bet!  Rush-hour traffic which had been crawling along the street in front of the church (does rush hour ever really end in Dallas?) practically came to a halt as passers-by stopped in amazement.  They knew it was a controlled burn of some kind - the church's forecourt was crowded with people, and the priests with their white vestments stood near the street, one of them holding a sparkling brass crucifer.

The reaction amongst us in the crowd was equally noticeable.  We gasped and shrank away at first, when the initial flash consumed the evergreens.  Then we quickly grew comfortable with the drama of the fire, and even appreciative of it, since it was chilly outside - yes, even Dallas gets cold around Christmastime - and the warmth contrasted so nicely with the winter air.

Officially, the service was over, but it took several minutes before the first few people started to walk away, either to the parking lot and leave, or to the church's fellowship hall, where a 12th Night "feast" had been prepared.  As I stood, lingering, letting the glow of the fire caress my face, even as my backside continued to complain about the cold, it struck me:  what symbolism from this fire, and the fire of the Holy Spirit!

I got it.

It was its own epiphany!

Not the Holy Spirit - I've had Him ever since I was saved, just like any believer.  No, what I "got" was the symbolism that many of us evangelicals have thrown out along with our very ambivalence to liturgical ceremonies like the 12th Night and Epiphany.  How more dramatic staging of the work of the Holy Spirit than a pile of dead evergreens ignited in the darkness?

This Little Light of Mine

What kind of witness could we be to our world - wherever in the world we've been called to serve - if we let the light of Christ, through the power of the Holy Spirit (depicted as a flame in the Bible) shine through us?  Of course, if we're just a flash-in-the-pan, like this symbolic bonfire was, then we wouldn't be much use at all.  But that's not the point of this little tradition, is it?  Obviously, we've got to put the fire out.  St. Michael and All Angels probably had to obtain a permit from the University Park police to even have an open flame outdoors like that.  But can't you stop and enjoy the imagery?

Here we are - by outward appearance, we look green, like those evergreen branches did, even though, upon further inspection, you could tell they were dead, brittle, and dry.  Useless except for being turned into mulch, perhaps, or better yet: fire, light, and heat!

Traffic on the street outside the church practically stopped, remember?  Surprised, yes, but also intrigued by the impressive flame and the light it gave off.  Those of us standing around were soothed by the heat, even though none of us wanted to get too close!

If you'll permit me one of the axes I can't help but grind, a hallmark of seeker-sensitive, contemporary churches is refuting tradition so that our tactile, object-oriented culture can "relate" to the Gospel.  Meanwhile, I say that the 12th Night observance is just the traditional object lesson our seeker-sensitive churches, despite their cynicism of tradition, could use.

Sure, the 12th Night is extra-Biblical.  No, it's not a necessary component of worship.  And if you can't do it if it's raining on January 5, it's no huge loss to anyone's faith.

But it certainly helps, doesn't it?  And what's wrong with that?

"So, Mr. Liturgy-Lover," you may be asking, "if this 12th Night was so great, why didn't you go back this year?"

Because in his homily last year, the rector preached that the reason Christ came to Earth was so that we could communicate better amongst ourselves.

That's what he said.  No atoning sacrifice.  No propitiation for sins.  Nothing but being the equivalent of the first cell phone, or Mark Zuckerberg.

What pitiful theology, right?  To cap it off, an elderly gentlemen down in the front of the nave actually had the temerity to elicit a satisfied "Amen!" at the homily's conclusion.  An amen that echoed like a hollow punctuation mark in what was a grand room, yet a room I realized held little true faith.

And that's the problem with liturgy, isn't it?  Not that the liturgy itself is a problem, but that it's mostly faith-less churches that perpetuate the liturgy.  Liturgy that should be owned by God-led, God-worshipping, and God-preaching congregations.  In order that the glory of His name can be broadcast in at least a fraction of the gloriousness with which we describe days like this one here in Texas.

So... in Lone Star State parlance: happy E-piffnee, y'all!
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Judging is Biblical

Yesterday, I used the "J" word.

"Judging."

It's one of the things many Christians think we're not supposed to do.  We're supposed to be loving and supportive, even if it means ignoring flagrant sins in the body of Christ.

But how accurate are passages like "judge not, lest ye be judged" when we strip them of their Biblical context and hang them out to dry all by themselves?

Well, let's see, shall we?

Here's the famous "judge not" passage from the book of Matthew.  Sure enough, "do not judge" anchors this whole section, but do those three words exist apart from the rest of what Christ teaches?

"Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye."  (Matthew 7:1-5)

This is not a trick question:  Does Christ actually teach us to not judge others?  Or, does He teach us to judge without hypocrisy?  It's the latter, not the former; right?  We're to "first" repent of our own sins "and then... remove the speck" from the person we're criticizing.  In other words, exhort your brother with humility and with a regard for your own sin.

Don't believe me?  Then check out a similar passage where Christ's doctrine of correct judgment is expanded:

"Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven.  Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you."  (Luke 6:37, 38)

What is expected of a believer who feels compelled to evaluate the actions of another believer?  And basically, since Christ is teaching His disciples here, we can assume these instructions are primarily for those of us in His fellowship, although they're also useful when evaluating people outside our community of faith.

Christ expects people to make judgments based on the Fruit of the Spirit, doesn't He?  Love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, goodness, meekness, self-control.  In the case of making judgment calls, that means that we can be stern yet loving, convinced yet contrite, and even angry, as Christ was on occasion, but always self-controlled.  After all, throwing out the money-changers from the temple required Christ to make a judgment call on their behavior, didn't it?

Paul helpfully explains why judging others is essential within the body of Christ:

"But now I am writing you that you must not associate with anyone who calls himself a brother but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or a slanderer, a drunkard or a swindler. With such a man do not even eat.  What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside?  God will judge those outside. 'Expel the wicked man from among you.'" (1 Corinthians 5:11-13)

Wow - Paul instructs us to not even eat with people who get drunk or who are greedy.  In the Presbyterian church, drunkenness and greed get winked at a lot!  But we're not even to share a meal with people who make a habit of these acts.  Instead, we're supposed to "expel" them because they're "wicked."

We don't hear that preached very much these days, do we?  Might I be taking any of this out of context?  Paul says right there to "judge those inside" the church.  Seems pretty contradictory to me, if people still insist that Christ tells us to judge not.

Which isn't what Christ tells us, is it?  But then, perhaps we should look to Christ as our model for what a good judge is, and not just take my word for it!

"A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.  The Spirit of the LORD will rest on him - the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding, the Spirit of counsel and of power, the Spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the LORD - and he will delight in the fear of the LORD. He will not judge by what he sees with his eyes, or decide by what he hears with his ears; but with righteousness he will judge the needy, with justice he will give decisions for the poor of the earth."  (Isaiah 11:1-4a)

Christ judges with righteousness, and He treats us all as needy beggars, the poor of the earth.  I suspect this terminology hearkens back to how we are to judge each other in a forgiving and giving manner.

Which means that I have some work to do myself on the way in which I judge and evaluate the trends, people, and circumstances among evangelical Christianity.  You can judge me on that - I've never claimed to be perfect, and I don't mind being proven wrong.  But the emphasis has to be on the "proven" bit.  Just saying I'm wrong without backing that up with facts - which, you'll notice, I try hard not to do when I say others are wrong - is unBiblical, because nowhere in any of these passages does the Bible teach that unsolicited criticism for the sake of personal preference is helpful for the body of Christ.

Look, I struggle with the concept of grace like most believers do.  Some of us err on the side of not dispensing enough of it, and some of us dispense too much of it.  Very few of us dole out grace in appropriate measure most of the time.

But I've learned that I cannot use "do not judge" as a defense for something I may find disturbing, or challenging, or targeted at me personally.

Because the Bible teaches that we should.  As I wrote yesterday, Christ expects His followers to use discernment, to evaluate the words of those who claim to follow Christ, to exhibit holiness in their lives, to follow His teachings, to judge fairly, and to separate themselves from people who follow false doctrines.

Like you, I want to honor Christ by what I say and do.  So if you catch me lacking discernment, exhibiting a lack of holiness, judging unfairly, and advocating false doctrines, you need to judge me.  And if you do it properly, it will be for my own good.

Whether I like it at the time, or not.

By God's grace, we'll grow in grace together, and perhaps the more effective we become at judging, the less conflict our fellowship of faith may experience.  After all, judging doesn't always have to involve conflict, does it?  Making judgments is simply evaluating the reality we see.  We judge both the good and the bad.

Maybe the more we judge the bad, more good can take its place.
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Note:  Perhaps you might be more convinced by this snappy post on Marc5Solas, or John MacArthur's use of the term defamation to more accurately describe the translation of "judging" in James 4.