Tue 16 Mar, 2010
What does the picture here represent? An attitude toward the President? An attitude toward the Cross? Or (could it be?) simple ignorance of the central symbol of our country’s largest and most enduring organic institutions?
Update at 3:20 pm: The image has been removed from the NY Times web page (see comment 4). It’s still accessible at Free Republic, though. Here is how it currently appears at Google’s index page for the article:
Sun 14 Mar, 2010
3union is a band of 
three teenaged brothers I ran sound for in concert last Wednesday and again last night.* (They had an 18-year-old bass player with them temporarily on this tour, too). Here is an open letter to the band.
It’s not just for them, though. If you are a believer in Christ who has a gift from God you dream of using for his glory, I invite you look over their shoulders, so to speak, and read this letter along with them. Most of what I say here applies to you, too. If you are not a believer with a gift you dream of using for his glory, then I offer you a different message of encouragement.
To Brandon, Shaun, and Ryan,
Thank you for the privilege of working with you this week. It’s been a long time since I’ve had that much fun in concert! As you know, my early career (before I got into all this strategy and writing stuff) was in music, and it was in those days that my wife and I became friends with your parents. What I have to say now is very similar to what I spoke as you were about to head home to Indiana this morning — things you already knew, but seemed important to say anyway. You were gracious to listen to me, considering that for a rock-and-roll sound tech, I must have looked pretty uncool wearing my granny-style, old-guy reading glasses at that middle-school concert!
I hope you don’t mind if I share this publicly. Your gifts are unusually strong: your musicianship, stage presence, communication skills, and even your “look” are all remarkable. I do not say this just because of my connection to your family and your music. You (and Alesha with you) put on an incredible concert. I’ve known a lot of musicians, but very few with your mix of talents, and none to whom I have said this before: I think you have What It Takes. (To those of you reading over their shoulders, keep your eyes open for 3union: check out their website; then find them in concert near you, or if you can’t find them, call the band and book them yourself!)
I am really most impressed with your hearts. You love the Lord, and you understand that Making It Big is not the point, but rather using your gifts in service to others for Christ. Not that you shouldn’t dream big: one of your messages is to resist low expectations and dare to “Do Hard Things” (based on a book written by two other remarkable teenaged brothers). You understand, though, that God will not give his glory to others (Isaiah 42:8; Isaiah 48:11); and that to seek great things is fine, but not for ourselves (Jeremiah 45:5), for God is opposed to the proud but gives grace to the humble (1 Peter 5:5-6).
Success has its snares. Some are obvious; I will speak here of a couple that might be less so. These are not things I observed in you, rather they are occupational hazards you face. Those who are publicly successful must resist feeling entitled to special service from others; for Christ himself came not to be served but to serve, and to give all he had to give, even his own life (Mark 10:45). Temptation can also approach in the guise of feeling you are better than others, forgetting that what you are is not from yourselves but from God. The most insidious form of attack is the one wherein any of you starts to feel more important than another member of the band, or envious of one of your brothers. I urge you to guard your name: your 3union-ness.
Come to think of it, those dangers aren’t limited just to public successes.
In spite of the hazards, I pray you will follow your calling to its fullest extent, seeking God’s glory as your signpost of success. John the Baptist is a great example: always humble (John 1:15, John 1:26-31, John 3:25-30), yet fulfilling all that God had called him to be and to do (John 1:19-23). The world desperately needs the message you bring, and it needs your example, which I fervently pray will remain as excellent as it is today.
Thank you again. Say hi to your folks for us. Our family and church are missing you already!
Yours,
Tom Gilson
*That concert link is valid as of the date of writing; it may be re-purposed in a few weeks.
Wed 18 Nov, 2009
My son is an amateur magician, and last night he clued me in to Harris III, an illusionist who has a completely different take on “Illusions of Freedom.” It’s not the same philosophical question we’ve been talking about here, but it’s good stuff.
Tue 10 Nov, 2009
BreakPoint has just published my article “Intelligent Artistry: Maybe We Should Read More Poetry,” a response to the new film Darwin’s Dilemma. It’s not a review, but rather more of a reaction to some thoughts the film got me to thinking: What stories might there be for us in the record of nature? What kinds of stories are thinkable? If certain kinds of stories cannot be thought of, is it perhaps because we’ve limited ourselves in our imaginations?
Tue 6 Oct, 2009
I read Dorothy L. Sayers’s The Nine Tailors
Fri 2 Oct, 2009
First question: What on earth could Maine have been thinking?!
Bangor, ME - Today the Christian Action Network (CAN) filed a federal lawsuit against the state of Maine for censoring a fundraising letter state officials claimed contained “an inflammatory anti-Muslim message.” Maine officials fined and banned CAN from mailing any future letters under the threat of criminal prosecution. Liberty Counsel represents CAN.
Source: State of Maine Sued for Censoring CAN .
Second question: This has been rattling around since June. Where are the civil libertarians? Try doing a Google search for “Maine ‘Christian Action Network’” and see if you find any of them standing against government censorship. Or try it this way to get news from earlier in the summer, without the recent lawsuit information: “Maine ‘Christian Action Network’ -lawsuit”.
I’ve sought out independent verification of CAN’s statement on this. Pajamas Media (linked above) seems to have done a thorough job. Other than that, I’m simply led to my third question: where are the media on this? Isn’t this news? Try the two searches I already suggested at news.google.com. You’ll be quite interested especially to see how the second one (“-lawsuit”) comes out.
Fourth question: where is all this heading?
Fri 7 Aug, 2009
My college friend Rob Koons was putting together a concentration on “Western Civilization and American Institutions” at the University of Texas, but he got the plugged pulled on him in a manner that was not only unceremonious but also confused, contradictory, and educationally unwise.
He learned some lessons from the experience, including:
Our program was rightly perceived as a threat to the monopoly of what I call the Uncurriculum, which prevails at UT and at most universities today. It is the absence of required courses and of any structure or order to liberal studies. The Uncurriculum dictates that students accumulate courses that meet a “distribution” standard—a smattering of courses scattered among many categories. Even within majors, the trend has been to eliminate required sequences.
The perfecting of the intellect and the formation of character through the attainment of what John Henry Newman called “liberal knowledge” have given way to engorgement with miscellaneous information. The suggestion that higher education should have something to do with acquiring moral wisdom is invariably met with the sophomoric query, “Whose ethics?” As Anthony Kronman has so well documented in his book The End of Education, nothing in the Uncurriculum encourages students to think through the great questions of life in a systematic manner, with the great minds of the Western tradition as their guides and interlocutors.
The Uncurriculum free-for-all gives undergraduates only the illusion of choice. In reality, the Uncurriculum model is entwined with the interests of the professoriate. If there are no courses students are required to take, there are no courses that professors are required to teach.
Professors at research universities focus on the accumulation of prestige through publication, the indispensable means for acquiring tenure and increasing one’s salary (through the leverage of outside offers). By allowing students to pick what they want to study, the Uncurriculum model eliminates a potentially great distraction from the quest for publications: the burden of teaching a required curriculum, unrelated to one’s own narrow research agenda.
This is further evidence that something is wrong with the American university. I’ll have more to post on this early next week.
Hat Tip: Divine Conspiracy Blog
