The Quarterback Problem

Malcolm Gladwell examines the mysteries of Pro Quarterbacks, Good Teachers and Financial Advisers.

In teaching, the implications are even more profound. They suggest that we shouldn’t be raising standards. We should be lowering them, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don’t track with what we care about. Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree—and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before….

It needs an apprenticeship system that allows candidates to be rigorously evaluated.

Similarly:  what makes a good cleric?
via

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“I Don’t Blame the Pilot”

Jet Hits the Home of a Family.

Two pastoral issues:

The father, Dong Yun Yoon, lost a parent, wife and two children.  He said “”Please pray for him [the pilot] not to suffer from this accident.”

Magnanimous.

It’s true.  The pilot, perhaps, wasn’t at fault.  If Mr. Yoon had been angry, what then?  He would have been equally justified.   In the midst of such loss, there are no right or wrong emotions.  Rage, frustration, sadness … I understand the person who just wants to throw oneself on the fire, or stand stoically amongst the dead.

The heartbreaker is this: “I know there are many people who have experienced more terrible things,” Yoon said. “But, please, tell me how to do it. I don’t know what to do.”

“Tell me how to do it.”  Who could tell him how to do it?  Nobody.  No priest, grief therapist or doctor.

I often hear “it could be worse.”  I have no problem with this.   But sometimes it is also proper to say, “This blows.  My life sucks right now.  I hate it.”  We can hate death and suffering and cry and weep because there is something wrong about this.   It doesn’t matter if they are in a better place.  It is alright to shake one’s fist and plead for mercy. Other people do suffer.  They may suffer more.  But Yoon isn’t living their lives.

He can ask, “Why is the the world so fucked up?”

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Bush and Evolution

Nobody should be surprised


Being “one of us” merely breeds hypocrisy.   The Christian Conservatives were used as a political tool.  As long as they insist on purity of thought, they’ll be used.

The powerful don’t send their children to schools that teach creation.  And they want their daughters to be able to choose.  They might make temporary alliances with the Religious Right for the sake of tax cuts.

Bush’s religion was always a variation of New Age thought, a sort of optimistic pablum that you could find in any megachurch.  It was never biblical.

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The New Province

A few initial thoughts about the new province:

1) Christians getting together outside of their own church can be a good thing. They leave the provinciality of their local congregation, once founded, for example on hating Anglo-Catholics or objecting to wimmyn on the altar of God. Those edges, now revealed to be adiaphora, will be smoothed.

2) I’m impressed with an organiation where Evangelicals are hanging with Catholics, Catholics are hanging out with wannabe catholics and whites are submitting to blacks.   Those who hated the idea of Women on the altar will room with people who merely didn’t like the 1979 prayerbook.  Those who didn’t like Pike will hang out with those who only left because of some other reason, like incense.  In this way they will be kind of like TEC, except for the gay thing.

3) A new province doesn’t mean that TEC won’t be recognized. It simply means that instead of engaging with TEC on a national level, they’ll be engaging at an international level.  They’ll probably run into us in coffee shops or some Renaissance Festival.

4) Question: Does Bob Duncan secretly want to be a pope?

5) The curmudgeonly priests who didn’t like to hang out with other diocesan clergy now have a home with other curmudgeons.

6) Common Cause doesn’t quite recognize they have an image problem.  They don’t realize that an image problem might be important when dealing with the press.

7) Perhaps, now that we’re out of their system, they’ll discover that the challenges of the culture to the Christian Churches are far deeper than sexuality or reading the bible.  People are going to continue to have sex, and would rather watch the bible on YouTube.

8) They’ve got a lot of bishops. Bishops are trouble.  Mad trouble.

9) TEC’s challenge remains. Does it have the leadership to capitalize on being liberated from these continuing churches? The institutional church is dying. Can TEC reconfigure itself to make tentmakers?

10) If the liberal church dies, it is the remnant conservatives who will inherit the body of The Episcopal Church.  And they will be in a much stronger place to proclaim the Gospel.

11) Yet, if there remains a witness to an intellectually credible, progressive church, we modernists have nothing to worry about.

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What I should have said

M. comes up to me. “Can you believe it? On of my friends said she couldn’t come to St. Barts because we have Buddhists here.”

“That’s too bad. Of course, if she doesn’t want to be here, then I don’t need that kind of worry.”

“I thought maybe I shouldn’t be her friend.”

“No, you can witness to her.”

I wanted to say either:

“They’ve got plenty of churches they can join.” Which isn’t exactly a pro-growth attitude.

But really, if you can’t share the space of your church, which is easy, can you even share the gospel? Jesus only types don’t engage non-Christians very often.

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