CLIMBING THE WALLS

I know what you’re thinking. This post is about the recent “Varsity Blues” scandal involving wealthy parents (including at least a few Hollywood stars) bribing elite colleges and universities to admit their children.

But it’s not about that, really.

It’s not even about the broader scandal of college admissions in general (such as race-based and legacy admissions) or the scandal of easy access to federal loan money which not only has left countless students with crushing debt, but has led to steep increases in tuition (well above the cost of living) and directly abetted the vast expansion of campus building projects and high-end amenities (in order to compete with other colleges similarly flush with this same loan money). And don’t get me started on the consequent and exponential increases in staff and faculty!

The real scandal, I would submit, is how colleges and universities have all but lost their original purpose, their very reason for being.

Continue reading “College Scandals”

For decades I’ve listened to well-meaning people in the church (mostly pastors) tell me we need to change. Change, change, change. It’s all the rage, I tell you. And it’s presented as if it’s pretty much the solution to all that ails us.

And what is it that ails us? The implosion of the Protestant mainline church, for one. As these churches have struggled for decades with diminished numbers, stressed budgets, and an increasing loss of public relevance, the default solution is…change.

Often such change is foisted on long-standing church members who aren’t quite sure what all this change-talk is really about.

Years ago, I served as interim pastor at a historic downtown church. As the fortunes of the city declined over the years, as people fled in great numbers to the suburbs, and as the weed of secularism spread its tentacles over ever-larger swathes of America, the church was struggling.

Continue reading “Cut Flowers and Mighty Oaks”

G.K. Chesterton, referencing the Modernist era, once said: “A madman is not someone who has lost his reason but someone who has lost everything but his reason.”

As you may recall, Modernism, beginning with the Enlightenment, sought to replace tradition with Reason. All human problems would thus be fixed. Me thinks Chesterton was on to something.

Today we live in a bifurcated culture. One might even call it schizophrenic. Which is to say there exists two camps where never the twain shall meet: socialism and capitalism. Both, believe it or not, are kissing cousins.

Capitalism, in a generalized sense, is the Enlightenment’s idea of the free market which sought to empower the individual over and against the feudal system of land owner and serf.

Continue reading “The Empty Shrine”

It was an old farmhouse, probably from the early 19^th century, the road it was set upon then somewhat busier, yet still maintaining a relative quiet. It was there that I would visit one of our oldest church members.

We’d sit in his living room, its furnishings largely untouched for 50 years or so. There he’d talk about olden times, not in a breathless, impatient fashion, but thoughtfully and perceptively. All of life’s bumps and rough edges had been smoothed over by the ensuing years, replaced by perspective, the calm inscrutable wisdom born of time.

When my wife and I first met, we discovered we had something a bit unusual in common. We both were drawn to older people. When I was a kid, in fact, and at a social gathering, I’d invariably find myself talking to the older folk. Linda said she’d done the same thing as a child.

I’ve always thought this attraction is because older people are far less apt to play games. They have nothing to prove. They don’t need to show off or command anybody’s attention. They’ve seen life in all its varying forms. Nothing is wholly new. They are witness to the vast expanse of life. In essence, they’ve leaned to simply be.

Continue reading “The Future of Permanence”

Fresh with a mostly useless degree in American history and without a clue as to what to do with the rest of my life, I took a job in a gritty factory town just west of Chicago working at a sheltered workshop for retarded adults. Today we’d call them the developmentally challenged.

I was a supervisor for a small group of “clients,” maybe a dozen or so, whose job was to count out 10 plastic picks and bundle them with rubber bands. To this day I don’t know who these bundles were for and thus why we needed to bundle them, but that was what we did.

I learned a lot from the clients. They were like children except that they weren’t. They certainly had their challenges, ones we “normals” typically don’t have, but there was something truly compelling and, indeed, attractive about them.

For one thing, they were real.

Continue reading “The Scandal of the Particular”

It’s been a while, so the specifics are a bit vague, but I can tell you it was plush, believe you me.

I’m referring to the “classroom” where we met one fine day in the office of the “master” of one of Yale’s fourteen residential colleges. (“Master,” I’ll have you know, was recently changed to “head of college,” to accord with the current fashions of political correctness.)

Normally, the class was held up Prospect Hill, at the divinity school, but on this particular day we were treated to the master’s palatial digs. It was opulent in that understated, clubby way – stuffed chairs and muted academic tones, as if a Hollywood set. Cigars and snifters of brandy would not have been out of place.

The occasion was a lecture by an acquaintance of our professor’s, a gentlemanly psychiatrist hailing from Lima, Peru. For the full hour, we were granted entry into the appalling conditions found within the slums of Lima. It sounded truly horrific, and I have no doubt what he reported was accurate, if not insufficient in describing the human tragedy born of such degradation.

Continue reading “The Slums of Lima”

In the opening scene from the 1993 movie, Shadowlands, we see C.S. Lewis (played by Anthony Hopkins) lecturing students at Cambridge University (UK).

A lapsed Christian and onetime atheist, Lewis returned to the faith at the age of 32 while teaching at Oxford. He went on to become the greatest Christian apologist of the 20^th century.

At the start of the movie, Lewis is lecturing his students on Christian doctrine concerning death and eternal life. His tone is authoritative and confident, his words reassuring and redolent of orthodox, New Testament beliefs.

Later in the film he meets an American, Joy Davidman Gresham, whom he married in 1956. Four short years later, however, in 1960, she had died of cancer. Lewis’ experience of this loss eventually inspired the book, “A Grief Observed,” a classic in bereavement studies.

Continue reading “The Cost of Discipleship”

This past Sunday our local professional football team, the New England Patriots, played a conference championship game against the Kansas City Chiefs. Naturally, the game was televised.

Having watched football on television from an early age, I’ve seen many changes in the coverage, most of it due to technological advancements.

Back “in the day,” there was no such thing as an “instant replay.” The play happened in “real time” and that was it. You either saw it or you didn’t. Reliance on the referees, those on the field, was essential in getting the call right. Today, there are cameras all over the place. Each play is captured from multiple angles. And in slow-motion to boot!

On a day noted for questionable calls (especially the penalty NOT called at a critical juncture in the Saints/Rams game), there was one play during the Patriots’ game that seemed especially notable. To the naked eye, the play appeared to go one way but on closer inspection just may have been the exact opposite.

Continue reading “Armchair Quarterbacking”

The 20^th century is over. On the face of it, this seems pretty obvious. Very few are unaware of this fact. But do we really think and act as if it is?

In 1844, James Russell Lowell wrote a poem entitled, “The Present Crisis,” itself an argument against slavery. It later inspired the hymn, “Once to Every Man and Nation.” The poem reads as follows:

New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth;
They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth;
Lo, before us gleam her campfires? We ourselves must Pilgrims be,
Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate winter sea,
Nor attempt the Future’s portal with the Past’s blood-rusted key.

In case you haven’t noticed (though I’m sure you have!), I frequently object to the mainline church’s embrace of the Social Gospel, a movement that began in the mid to late 19^th century but hit its stride in the early 20^th. Its effects are with us still.

Continue reading “Our Present Crisis”

Years ago, I went to the local hospital to visit a church member who had been admitted into the ICU (intensive care unit). As per protocol, I went into the waiting room and dialed the nurses’ station to be admitted. The person on the other end asked me what my relationship was to the patient. I said I was his pastor.

After I hung up, someone in the waiting room immediately sought me out. “I’ve always wondered,” she said, “what does the word ‘pastor’ mean?” The answer, of course, is “shepherd.”

The pastor is the shepherd of the flock. Yes, I know, it sounds a bit clichéd, if not cornball, but it has real import. The shepherd is called not only to feed the sheep, but to protect them.

Continue reading “Fairy Tales”