GroshLink

Not very much, when you look at our DNA. But those few tiny changes made all the difference in the world This frontpage Time Magazine piece concludes: For most of us, though, it's the grand question about what it is that makes us human that renders comparative genome studies so compelling. As scientists keep reminding us, evolution is a random process in which haphazard genetic changes interact with random environmental conditions to produce an organism somehow fitter than its fellows. After 3.5 billion years of such randomness, a creature emerged that could ponder its own origins--and revel in a Mozart adagio. Within a few short years, we may finally understand precisely when and how that happened.

Sorry. I don't find the continual retelling of the random process creation myth and our ability to pinpoint the significant events in this process compelling. Looking forward to what Justin Barrett has to say in a few weeks.

In late May, for those of us who teach, the summer stretches out like the great expanse of freedom it was in grammar school. Ah, the days on the beach! The books we will read! The adventures we will have . . . we academics do have something few others possess in this postindustrial world: control over our own time. All the surveys point to this as the most common factor in job satisfaction. The jobs in which decisions are made and the pace set by machines provide the least satisfaction, while those, like mine, that foster at least the illusion of control provide the most.

Left to our own devices, we seldom organize our time with 8-to-5 discipline. The pre-industrial world of agricultural and artisan labor was structured by what the historian E. P. Thompson calls "alternate bouts of intense labor and of idleness wherever men were in control of their working lives."

I was recently offered a non-teaching job that would have almost doubled my salary, but which would have required me to report to an office in standard 8-to-5 fashion. I turned it down, and for a moment I felt like the circus worker in the joke: he follows the elephant with a shovel, and when offered another job responds, "What, and give up show business?" -- excerpted from The Summer Next Time (Tom Lutz, author of Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers and Bums in America).

I [Tom Grosh] must confess that like the author, I am drawn to the flexibility provided by laboring on campus, which makes answering the question of what do you do in a given day or week difficult to answer as the various aspects of my life blend together in a fuzzy manner . . .

Ministry Decision Draws Criticism

Dozens of students circulated petitions in Red Square on Wednesday criticizing the university's recent decision to bar six Protestant ministries from campus, following a week of extensive media coverage and complaints from alumni and students.

Members from three of the organizations manned tables and distributed letters declaring the expulsion of the groups, known as affiliated ministries, "inconsistent with the very ideals that Georgetown seeks to uphold" . . .

Some Affiliates Saw Emerging Split

"I started working with Georgetown in 1996, and I'd say for the first seven years or so, we had a great relationship with the chaplaincy," Offner said. "There were some new hires in the chaplaincy in the past few years and they have tried to move the ministries in a different direction."

Not a week goes by when I am not drawn into commenting on the sexualizing of American culture. Sometimes this happens in a very tender conversation over a cup of tea, listening to the tears of someone's heart as they tell a tale of hope and sorrow, of yearning and grief. Sometimes it is in a much more public place like a classroom where the intimacy is gone, but the issues are just as live and have far-reaching consequence.

If there is any one story that comes up again and again it is Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons, his novel about a young woman who leaves the mountains of North Carolina for the fictional yet very prestigious Dupont University, an amalgam of Duke/Stanford/Harvard.

--So begins Steve Garber's Sex in the Society: Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons as a Window into Who We Are and How We Live.

You seem to glow with the salvation-bringing fire which our Lord came to send upon the earth. -- Gregory II to Boniface

Not every one of us has to face a great throng of pagans who curse us bitterly because we are the enemy of their gods. Even fewer of us have the opportunity (or if we would have the opportunity) take an axe to fell a "shrine of our culture" such as when Boniface demolished a huge sacred oak tree which was a shrine to Thor. But maybe our salt should be "saltier" and our light "less hidden." Boniface's biographer Willibald wrote,"When the pagans who had cursed saw this [the felling of the shrine of Thor by a axe of a mere mortal], they [stopped] cursing and, believing, blessed God." And Boniface used the oak to build a chapel, which became the center of his new monastery. Adapted from a Christianity Today post.

On Sunday morning, Hayley and Ellen were transformed after their commissioning by our local congregation to reproduce the likeness of Jesus in Tiffany Witman's 1st Grade Classroom at Donegal Springs Elementary School. And what a first day of school they gave testimony to! Although young disciples such as Hayley and Ellen are but vessels of clay, may the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ shine forth through the many new (and returning) students which pour on educational campuses the next several days. For at this stage of their pilgrim journey, they have been called to be Christ in the classroom. Please join me in prayer for . . .

Just finished Jim Sire's A Little Primer on Humble Apologetics (thank-you Jim, let's make more memories!). Partway through N.T.Wright's Simply Christian (thank-you to Chris Nichols for his strong recommendation during his presentations at the Mid-Atlantic Staff Conference) and Preston Jones' Is Belief in God Good, Bad, or Irrelevant? (thank-you to IVCF-CMU undergrad staff Jason Toman for his positive review). Just placed an order for Justin Barrett's Why Would Anyone Believe in God? (thank-you to F&M Philosophy Professor Michael Murray for bringing this piece to my attention, looking forward to hearing Justin in October).

My initial thoughts . . .

Arlan for allowing me to borrow The Paradox of Choice, some of you might remember that I picked it up in a spring visit to D.C. along with Freakonomics. I'll be returning it to them at a pool party w/friends from the Grove on Saturday at Jen and Randy Brandt's. As a fitting conclusion to these posts and as a preparation for our coming time together

Perhaps most important, if you limit the number of choices you make and the number of options you consider, you're going to have more time available for what's important than people who are plagued by one decision after another, always in search of the best. You could use that time wisdely by getting to know more deeply your lovers, your children, your parents, your friends, your patients, your clients, your students. The real challenge in life is . . .

Along with the pervasive rise in expectations, American culture has also become more individualistic than it was, perhaps as a by-product of the desire to have control over every aspect of life. To be less individualistic -- to tie oneself tightly into networks of family, friends, and community -- is to be bound, to some degree, by the needs of amily, friends, and community. If our attachments to others are serious, we can't just do whatever we want. I think the single most difficult negotiation that faces young people who marry in today's America is the one in which the partners decide where their individual autonomy ends and marital obligation and responsibility take over.

Our heightened individualism means that, not only do we expect perfection in all things, but we expect to produce this perfection ourselves. When we (inevitably) fail, the culture of individualism biases us toward causal explanations that focus on personal rather than universal factors. That is, the culture has established a kind of socially acceptable style of causal explanation, and it is one that encourages the individual to blame himself for failure. And this is just the kind of causal explanation that promotes depression when we are faced with failure.

As a corollary,

CMU-ers, take note. On p.79, Schwartz (in Paradox of Choice) proposed that Herb Simon's concept of satisficing was at the heart of how to fight back against the tyranny of overwhelming choices (pay attention maximizers and perfectionists). To state the concept simply,

To avoid the escalation of such burdens, we must learn to be selective in exercising our choices. We must decide, individually when choice really matters and focus our energies there, even if it means letting many other opportunities pass us by. The choice of when to be a chooser may be the most important choice we have to make (p.104).

Furthermore, the most important factor involved in happiness is