11

It’s hard to believe that here at Florida State summer is already half over. Our late April to late August break puts us out of sync with more traditional parts of the country, where summer-itis is just getting into high gear and lasts through Labor Day.

One of the vanities of trying to post a blog is the idea that someone out there might be interested in your “ten favorite list.” I’m finally giving in to the temptation. It seems that over the past week two of the great Christian denominations, the Anglican community and the Presbyterian Church (USA) have reached the tipping point of whether they are going to witness to modern culture or dance to it. I’m not going to beat the dead horse of the issues involved; if you’ve followed the denominations you know what I’m talking about. Instead, I’d like to address exactly that broader issue: how do Christians faithfully witness in the culture without becoming captives of the culture. It is a question as old as Mars Hill and as new as the various Mars Hill churches around the country. Because I want to be different, here is my 11-week list of things to study about Christians and culture. In many parts of the country, these ideas will last through the last gasp of summer, until there’s just a hint of Fall in the air (something that doesn’t happen in the South until sometime in October or November).[1]

Week 1: Read The Gravedigger Files by Os Guinness. This is absolutely the place to start. In this classic book from the 1980s, Guinness nails the corrosive power that modern culture has on the Church. Furthermore, he shows the different paths of the liberal mainline churches (“trendies”) and the conservative evangelical churches (“fossils”). If there was ever a book that is fulfilled prophecy, this is it. Bonus activity: Try an “out of sample” evaluation of the “reform” groups in both camps: renewal groups in liberal denominations, emerging churches among former evangelicals. Ask if they are really reforming, or just making the same mistakes over again.

Week 2: Watch a DVD of Magnolia. Ask yourself how a director who disclaims any religious intent can make such a profound tale of sin, lack of forgiveness, redemption, and divine intervention. Talk about the bigger question: can non-Christian artists create Christian art? Bonus activity: try to catch all of the references to Exodus 8:2. [Warning: a well-deserved R rating]

Week 3: Download the lyrics of “There is a River” by Jars of Clay. Make a list of all of the Biblical references.

Week 4: Watch a DVD of Primer. Unlike Magnolia, this shoe-string budget Indie phenom from 2004 was, in fact, written and directed by a Christian, Shane Carruth. Ask the opposite question: does every film, song, book by a Christian have to have a “Christian” message. Arguably, Primer does address an important moral issue. Can you figure out what it is? Bonus activity [spoiler]: See the movie a second and third time and try to figure out which Abe and Aaron are which.

Week 5: Read Daniel in the Old Testament. This is the ultimate story of a devout man who struggles to remain loyal to God in a foreign culture. Bonus activity: Find a copy of the Apocrypha and locate the story where Daniel plays an Old Testament Sherlock Holmes.

Week 6: Watch a DVD of Lars and the Real Girl. This story is about nothing else if not the struggles of a Christian community (a Lutheran church in a small Canadian town) to balance agape acceptance and agape speaking the truth to one of their flock who has gone astray. In the end, it is all about the casseroles. Never has Hollywood allowed a Christian character to ask “What would Jesus do” with more sincerity.

Week 7: Read The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Because. You. Must. The beloved Lutheran pastor warns of the perils of a nominally Christian society infected with “cheap grace.” This book was written around the time that Bonhoeffer was running his unofficial seminary, and close to the time he abandoned his pacifism and joined an armed resistance against Adolf Hitler.

Week 8: (Nobody will believe I included this). Watch a DVD of the movie Frailty from 2001. I wish I could remember the site, but the greatest statement I ever read about this movie was that it was a high concept horror movie built around the idea that “Fundamentalist Christians with Guns” would scare the pants off of people in Boston, Brooklyn, Berkeley, and Boulder. Instead, it has the most culturally subversive ending imaginable. OK, so maybe this is “cheap thrills” week and nothing else. I can remember showing this movie to a group of horrified Presbyterians in a movie-Bible-study series. [Warning: a well-deserved R rating].

Week 9: Read the Psalms of Ascent (Psalms 120 – 134). Bonus activity: Read the companion guide A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society by Eugene Peterson.

Week 10: Read “The Simple Art of Murder” by Raymond Chandler. Discuss the role in our culture of his untarnished man who must go down the mean streets. Then, read a Chandler novel, preferably Farewell my Lovely or The Long Goodbye. Bonus activity: draw up a list of contemporary actors who would make a good Philip Marlowe.

Week 11: Read Colossians. This is Paul’s letter to a church fighting an infection of an unnamed heresy.

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[1] Virtually nothing in this list is my original discovery. My thanks to everyone who pointed me in these directions. I hope the readers will find as much in them as I have.

Mythbusters-busters

A couple of days ago a local U.S. Representative (who, because I don't want this to be a political post, shall remain anonymous) sent me an e-mail exposing what he called energy "myths." One of his purported myths was that increased U.S. oil and gas production would lower energy prices. His argument went as follows: there is more oil drilling in the U.S. now than when oil prices started ramping-up; thus, we see that opening more areas to oil production can not lead to lower prices.

BZZZZ, Congressman. It's time for you to attend some remedial study-sessions for my Principles of Economics class. As the above diagram shows, if supply technology for oil production remains the same (the Supply curve) but demand for oil sustains a shift in underlying demand conditions (from D to D+) the result will be both higher market prices and and more production. Such a demand shift is undoubtedly consistent with rapid industrialization of countries such as China and India. If, on the other hand, the conditions and technology of supply change so as to shift the supply curve to the right, then there will be downward pressure on price together with increased production. What would cause such a supply shift to the right? An obvious example would be discrete changes in regulatory policy that open new areas to exploration and development (that is, more areas open to drilling). Florida politicians may want to continue to argue that, unlike residents of Texas, Louisiana, California, Scotland, Norway, and so forth that our citizens are specially entitled to consume energy resources without having to look at oil platforms on the horizons, but you can't make that argument on a misunderstanding about the difference between movement along a supply curve and a shift in the supply curve. You can argue about how large the price response from increased areas for U.S. oil exploration and production would be, but that's a different question, and one that is difficult to answer in advance: MYTHBUSTED - BUSTED.

Furthermore, to pursue the broader purpose of this blog, I wonder whether we can find in Christian theology any rationale for Florida's "special" status not only in avoiding offshore drilling but also in not having a great deal of energy infrastructure such as refineries and pipelines. I recall that several local Christian pastors argued that if residents of Tallahassee weren't willing to allow coal fired power plants in our backyard, we shouldn't be proposing to build them elsewhere and then import the electricity. I think that there's something to that argument. Residents of Tallahassee arguably pay a premium in our electric bills from our "anti-coal" requirements, and I think that there is a Christian case to be made that we shouldn't try to avoid that cost by exporting that externality to other people. There is likewise a serious thought-experiment as to whether residents of Florida's coastal areas should be willing to pay a differential tax to help other people who could benefit from lower energy prices from off-shore Florida drilling.

By the way, before the Congressman's staff figures out whose e-mail I'm talking about and rushes to send me a comment that a supply/demand model is inapplicable because of OPEC, it's pretty obvious that OPEC does not have the power to "fix" the price of crude oil in the sense that it can eradicate the upward slope of the effective world supply curve.

Irresistible Revolution Underlines and Scribbles: Part 1 - Underlines

As a Presbyterian, I’m a member of a denomination that has a long and proud history of debate (which is kind of a nice way of saying pushing and shoving) on both theology narrowly defined and on how we are expected to live as followers of Jesus in the world. Presbyterians have been in the heat of these things from the Protestant reformation, through the English Civil War, the American Revolution, the civil rights movement, and today's "culture wars". Today, Presbyterians probably try to take positions on 19 of the 12 things in our society that they should.

In some ways, I have grown weary of this inside the Presbyterian denomination because the debates are so predictable that they simply mirror the external world’s dimension of political liberalism or conservatism: tell me how a Presbyterian believes about abortion and the War in Iraq and I can, with an economically respectable probability of about 95 percent, predict how they will come down on just about any other social issue: fast food boycotts, divestment from companies doing business in Israel, capital gains taxes, and so forth. So I find it interesting when I see Christians who seem to break out of these patterns: Rod Dreher has become famous for his program of “crunchy conservatism”. Likewise, I enjoyed reading the book The Irresistible Revolution by Shane Claiborne, an unabashedly Evangelical Christian who, as I think he would like to say, wants to turn our view of our labels of other Christians upside down. Shane lives as a part of an intentional Christian community (known as the Potter Street Community) in inner city Philadelphia.

When I read through a book, I tend to use personal coded markings that I have to explain to people. Underlines or sidelines usually means I agree with or have learned something. Notes in my personal scribbled version of an unknown tongue usually indicate where I take issue. So it is a good thing that I finished IR with both many underlines and many scribbles. By itself that is my recommendation for reading the book. This blog is not really the place for a full-fledged book review, so I will just sketch a couple of my underlines and introduce some of my scribbles.

First, I have enormous respect for advocates of social-justice, even when I disagree with some (if not many) of their economic prescriptions, when they are obviously sincere, dedicated, and attempting to live a Christian life of peace and justice far beyond what I would be comfortable doing from my middle-class lifestyle. Shane Claiborne clearly is a person whose entire life is modeled on the sacrificial life of people such as Mother Theresa. Shane and his colleagues are as far away as it is possible to get from my stereotype of the Christian liberal who opposes school choice and globalization while driving his kids to a private school in a Volvo. I can’t in a short space do credit to the wonderful work that the Potter Street folks are doing in living and working in inner-city Philadelphia.

Theologically, Shane equally and correctly critiques the emptiness of some of the mainline (less evangelical) denominations’ worship experiences while raising crucial questions to conservatives, such as “Why should any Christian church ever have a national flag (American, British, Ugandan, whatever) at the front of the sanctuary where the most holy of Christian symbols reside?” Shane challenges our current Christian safe zones on issues such as the anonymity of charity and consumerist life styles in a way that ought to make almost any modern, Western Christian uncomfortable.

On the other hand, my overall criticism of the book is that, in spite of his desire to transcend old political labels, in his political commentary (what I associate with the broader agenda organization “The Simple Way”) Shane is much more comfortable and explicit in criticizing “conservative” rather than “liberal” Christian voices. For example, although he speaks against abortion, his words don’t carry the same sense of personal passion as his criticism of, for example, U.S. foreign policy[1]. While the day to day life that Shane leads boldly mirrors that of Mother Theresa, once he starts to systematize his ideas for what amounts to a prescriptive policy of economics, it starts to sound pretty much like warmed over undergraduate utopian Marxism. He doesn’t seem to connect his reflexive faith in “progressive” economic rhetoric with the fact that “progressive” economic policies are at the root of things like the city government regulations that cause his community so much grief. If you don't understand how wealth is created, you can't really understand how poverty can be eliminated. As an economist, I found this example of the community’s attempt to swear off of “money” both funny and instructive (p. 179):

“In Philly, we have an ongoing dialogue about creating a village of communities, bartering with one another, sharing things we need --- even creating a new currency where people exchange hours of work and are valued not because they have money but because they are willing to contribute to others and offer their time to service. One community may have a plumber but need a gardener; another may have a gardener but need blankets; and yet another may have blankets but need a plumber.”

So, having cast off one of civilization’s oldest inventions, money, Shane envisions returning to a barter economy. But the problem with a barter economy is that bilateral exchange cannot address the so-called “double co-incidence of wants”: the plumber – gardener – blankets problem. So to solve this, Shane proposes creating a “new currency” … that is to say, money. Suffice it to say that I have a new story for my principles of economics lecture on why humans use money.

Finally, let me close on a bothersome point. Irresistible Revolution has the marks of being what I would call “lightly edited” by the publisher, Zondervan. Shane’s strength as an evangelist is in cutting through theological fog with simple, powerful Biblical points. But simplification requires a discipline against distortion and factoids. The Part II of this post will elaborate on this criticism (the “scribbles”).

One of the things I do as a professor is review work, so because of that I’m very used to a positive review being one that both praises and criticizes the work, so please don’t be surprised when I say this is a productive, challenging book for all Christians working out their salvation with fear and trembling. For those of you with further interest, a colleague of Shane’s e-mailed Doug and me with information on a new DVD series that they have produced:

“Hey if you're a fan of Shane Claiborne and his book, then you should really check out the Another World is Possible DVD series. It's a multimedia project by Shane Claiborne and Jamie Moffett (co-founders of the Simple Way) that emerged in response to their belief that things are not right in the world, and that they don't have to stay that way. There are three DVD's, one on war, one on poverty, and one on creation. You can find out more about them at www.awip.us.”

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[1] As someone old enough to remember the well meaning but badly mistaken Christians who misrepresented what was really going on inside of the Iron Curtain, I have many reservations about Shane’s views on foreign policy, but that’s a deeply complicated issue that I may save for another blog.

"I Drink Your Milkshake"

I recently re-watched There Will Be Blood on DVD the other evening, and I made notes to myself about what appear to be the religious images and themes in the movie. I have this idea about the threads of oil, water, and blood throughout the movie, and I’ve wanted to write a post about them, but I haven’t been able to get the ideas to gel. (It is an interesting exercise to watch the movie with a Christian view of “water”, and to see the contrasting developments of such symbolism as depicted by “water” itself versus “oil”).

The surprising thing is that I am actually posting today not on the religious elements of the movie but rather on a straightforward microeconomics message: the famous “I Drink Your Milkshake” scene. (Warning: if you really haven’t watched or heard of this scene and don’t wanted to be spoiled, read no further). In this scene, Plainview is explaining drainage drilling to Eli. In brief, drainage drilling occurs because there are often many people with legal property rights (tied to surface land titles) to extract oil from a given field. In other words, underground oil fields do not respect the lines that we draw on the surface of the land as to who has what are called the “mineral rights.” Mineral rights owners with disjoint land title can be producing oil from the same production zone.

The difference between the geological reality and the surface mineral rights was exacerbated by early court decisions that applied the Anglo-Saxon common law “Rule of Capture” (originally developed for things like rabbits that run across land boundaries) to mineral rights. Essentially, what rabbits you capture or kill on your own property are yours. When applied to oil drilling, this meant that whatever oil you could get from a well on your own mineral right belonged to you, regardless of whether it actually came from “underneath” your property. This created a form of poorly defined property rights known as the “common pool” problem. If you have legal right to oil only by virtue of taking it out of a well on your mineral right, then no one person owns the right to the entire field. There is an economic incentive for me to get oil out from under the ground (where nobody owns it) into a storage tank on my property (where I own it). In other words, you want to drink milkshake out of your straw as fast as you can, lest Plainview drink it first. The result is an over-investment in drilling expenses and, it is sometimes argued, damage to the total amount of oil that can be recovered. If you have ever seen pictures of early oil fields in Oklahoma City or California (image above from Wikipedia) with a forest of drilling derricks, this is what is going on.

The solution to the common pool problem, short of a radical change in the common law, is called “unitization” which is an agreement to operate the field as though it was owned by a single person. The proceeds are then split according a bargaining agreement. Some unitization agreements came about voluntarily; in some states (Oklahoma, for example), state governments enacted laws to facilitate non-voluntary unitization. Interested readers can check out Gary Libecap’s survey article on unitization.

By the way, according to imdb.com, P.T. Anderson did not invent the milkshake story: he found it while doing research into Congressional testimony by some of the real figures in the era covered by the movie.

Charity . . . Just a Click Away

Who remembers what life was like before the internet? While it may not be difficult for some, at 23, the internet has been a reality for me for nearly half of my life. Nearly everyday the internet serves some function in my life. Today I stayed in touch with Mom and backed up files on Google's large web database. Tomorrow I may check out the scores for Playoff Basketball and read articles about the Olympic protests. It's all just a click away for me. And, as wireless becomes more prevalent I have access just about everywhere. In addition to making communication and research easier the internet has by some measure made charity easier. From facebook campaigns and website clicks to search engines and automatic withdrawls we use the internet and other resources to make giving easier. The purpose of this post is to provide a syllabus of the types of giving require not much more than the click of a mouse.

Hunger Site: View themselves as a leader in online activism against global poverty. Started in June of 1999. In the about section of their page Hunger Site states that their "Click Here It's Free" button has, ". . . given 300 million cups of staple food" to needy. This is financed by their sponsors. And really, all you do is click on the button and food will be distributed to those in need through Mercy Corps (America's Second Harvest).

Facebook: If you're on facebook occasionally you receive invitations for groups where a person will state that they will give $1 to Charity X for each person that joins. Facebook, in case you didn't know, is a social network where people can communicate with each other in a variety of ways other than a vanilla email.

Good Search: I just found out about this one thanks to an email from Mary. It has been around since 2005 when, "Ken Ramberg (the former founder of JOBTRAK, now a division of Monster.com) and JJ Ramberg (an MSNBC anchor and the former Director of Marketing at Cooking.com) asked themselves a few years ago. After realizing what a fraction of the $8 billion generated annually by search engine advertisers could do if it were directed towards organizations trying to make the world a better place". Just pick your favorite charity and search for something and about a penny will go to that charity. Like some of the people who covered the launch of Good Search said, "This is a business model waiting to happen." If the charity you should give to is not obvious check out Charity Navigator, one of a crop of new agencies that seek to inform the public about the efficiency of the charities that they give their hard earned cash to support.

This is not an exhaustive list. If there are more that were unmentioned please let me know. To me it is just fascinating that charity has become so easy. Now that summer is here I will be posting once weekly on some subject that strikes me. I apologize for my long absence and hope that some of these posts strike your curiosity. Thank you.

There Will Be Old Men

Wow. It's amazing what final exams and Christmas break will do to a posting schedule. It's fun to be back, particularly when I decided to post on one of my favorite hobbies, the movies.

Over the past couple of weeks I have seen two very good movies, No Country for Old Men directed by the Coen Brothers (of innumerable terrific movies' fame) and There Will Be Blood directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, whose Magnolia is one of my favorite movies of all time. Yesterday, these two led the pack in nominations for the Academy Awards. Interestingly, the movies have a similar theme, evil. Evil and sin should an important part of our Christian theology, but they are something that a lot of Christians don't like to talk about. I think these two movies would be a good pair for a church fellowship group DVD party. [Warning, No Country deserves every part of its R rating. It is one of the goriest non-"horror" movies I have ever seen. Blood on the other hand is quite the opposite. Although there is violence, it happens mostly off of the camera view. In Britain, Blood, according to imdb , was first rated as the American equivalent of PG-13. In a highly unusual movie, the movie's producers appealed and were awarded the British equivalent of an R rating.]

So how do these movies differ in their treatment of evil. In No Country EVIL appears in capital letters with fangs. It is the evil of serial killers and mass murderers. In There Will be Blood the evil ends up being as massive, but it derives from the long corrosive attack of every man's sinful nature (the main character's last name is the simple Plainview). At least for me, the fear I felt in No Country is the fear you have when you are awake at night and alone and you hear something rattling around upstairs. The fear I felt in Blood is the fear you have when you are awake and alone at night and your hear something rattling around in your soul.

Of course as Christians our deliverance from that fear is the blood of the cross. The blood of Jesus is clearly one of the "bloods" in the movie. Yet P.T. Anderson has never, in anything I have read, claimed to be crafting a Christian religious message, particularly with regards to Magnolia. His message has always been that if that's what people see in his movies, that's fine, but that's not his intent. Nevertheless, there are two clear messages to me in Magnolia: first) the necessity of healing "salvation", which requires divine intervention, and second) a denial of the universality of that healing, which appears to be withheld from at least two people in the Magnolia landscape. In There Will Be Blood the canvas is reversed. The movie's focus is on two people who do not receive grace and salvation. I believe that a good bible verse to go with a study of There Will Be Blood is Mark 3:28-29.

"I tell you the truth, all of the sins and blasphemies of men will be forgiven them. But whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven: he is guilty of an eternal sin."

I also don't understand some reviewers who believe that Anderson provides only a one-dimensional parody of Christianity. First, my father spent his life in oil fields doing what a lot of people in this movie are doing to earn a living, and I don't think the movie suggests a one-dimensional picture that all oil men are evil. I am certain, from my father's stories, that he saw many of the shady things that go on in this movie. Likewise, just because of the complicated and not at all one-dimensional life trajectory of one character, it's a huge mistake to believe that the movie says that all Christians are foolish. In fact, that assertion is factually wrong. Anderson does have his agents of grace in this movie as in Magnolia, and they are quite obviously Christian. It is just that in this movie, unlike in Magnolia, Anderson's concern is with the ultimately reprobate.

So which movie do I think should win the Academy Award? Well it's like being offered two different cars as a gift. One, No Country for Old Men, is like a beautiful new silver BMW. It's stylish. Every part functions perfectly, and the parts fit together in breathtaking harmony. Your other choice, There Will Be Blood, is like a Classic Series 2 Camaro. It's a gawky yellow, its engine is too big, and the parts sometimes clunk together when you slam the door. But it is awesome fun to drive.

Whatsamatta U

Two bible verses to preface today's post.

First, Jeremiah 9: 23-24:

23 This is what the LORD says:
"Let not the wise man boast of his wisdom
or the strong man boast of his strength
or the rich man boast of his riches,

24 but let him who boasts boast about this:
that he understands and knows me,
that I am the LORD, who exercises kindness,
justice and righteousness on earth,
for in these I delight,"
declares the LORD.*

And Doug brought to my attention Proverbs 19:2:

2 It is not good to have zeal without knowledge,
nor to be hasty and miss the way.*

Not surprisingly, the Bible gives us a both/and lesson. It is not good to have zeal without knowledge, but it is also improper to boast about knowldge. One can easily imagine what Jesus would say about people who were either boring intellectual snobs or who showed a dangerous lack of knowledge or wisdom.

The inspiration for today's post is a recent Wall Street Journal article on the 50 or so top highschools ranked by who places the most students at the so-called "elite" schools. I find a perhaps unBiblical fascination about reading about people for whom attending a "non-elite" private school or a public university (or, shudder, waving-off of college to become a comedy writer or an auto mechanic) is some kind a personal tragedy. And the article itself was full of many unanswered questions:

What does anyone get, at the margin, out of attending an so-called elite university?

What does it mean that so many of these schools are either: 1) expensive Northeastern private schools; 2) high stakes admission parochial or public magnet schools; 3) public schools in high income areas?

What is the purpose of lists such as these? What good does it do to tell someone in a grindingly poor rural school district that if only they lived in the Washington D.C. suburbs their chances of going to Princeton would be higher?

Do we next see a list of the top 250 middle schools to get into the to 50 high schools to get into the top elite colleges? Where does it end---admission to college prep kindergardens to get into the top 1000 elementary schools to get into the top 250 middle schools to get into the top 50 high schools to get into the top colleges? (Oh wait, that's already happening.)

And, as with so many of these exercises, this may confuse correlation with causality. Just because you play football in the NFL doesn't mean that your last name changes to Manning. Many of these schools undoubtedly have great "success" precisely because of who they have as students.

There's almost an endless discussion about education reform that could follow on this topic, but I'd like to turn back to the opening bible verses. Sometimes the economist's skill at defining institutions must yield to the Christian's imperative to change people. For students and parents involved in the college admission process, I think it is imperative to ask "Where is God in all of this?" If you believe that your calling is as an actor and going to Yale for drama is the logical and best path, so be it. But the Christian life should not be about credential elitism, snobbery, career anxiety, or making meritocracy one's personal God.

I also think there's something to be said to people such as myself in America's universities. It is not clear whether we are captives or instigators (I believe largely captives), but universities are now and have been for some years caught in a destructive obsession with the rankings sytems that drive student admissions. We all know that this stuff is phony and nonsense, but we are caught in a prisoner's dilemma where no one university can afford to say, like Eric Cartman, "**** you guys, I'm going home."

The quote from Jeremiah suggests that an end to boasting about knowledge would mean not only more justice but also more kindness. I don't know if that's a correct match for the verse to this problem, but it seems to me that we have a system that is neither just, nor righteous, nor kind.

* NIV from Bible Gateway.