Geoff's Miscellany

Miscellaneous Musings

Archives for May 2017

Why I don’t resent the Walmart crowd

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One of the most startling elements of modern evangelical academia is how disdainful many of them are of the average parishioner. I sensed this happening to me in seminary and once I realized it, I started to see it in books. Then Twitter was invented and I started following more of these scholars to whom I looked for advice about Biblical interpretation and the like, and I discovered the outright disgust with undergraduate students displayed by those with doctorates, the foul modes of speech they used to talk about those they disagreed with, and the way they made fun of what I would call normal people. I have a social science hypothesis:

Christian academics become socially disassociated from the Christian church (and often their families) and instead become concerned with approval seeking from the academy. Social media exacerbates this by allowing approval seeking behavior in real time.

The recent election made things much worse. I began to see people whose jobs are almost entirely funded by endowments from private universities funded by normal Christians making fun of them with abandon. The level of mockery, dismissal, and hatred was outrageous. I’m trying to avoid naming names or giving too information, but I saw calls from Christian academics to move out of states which voted republican, to personally mock anybody who voted for Trump, mock members of congregations which they used to pastor, associations of Christian conservatives with the “fat slobs and losers at Walmart”, a Methodist academic on Twitter routinely started posting about genitalia almost daily when it came to Trump, etc. I’ve been in the home of a Christian academic when people started talking, seriously, about the possibility a person present (not an academic) destroying the property of suspected Trump supporters when he made house calls, etc. I’ll hear people criticized for beliefs I know they don’t have or read people insist that Christians who lean right hate the poor. It’s so funny to read Christian academics make fun of anybody who believes that the Bible is inerrant while insisting on concern for the poor. But anytime I meet a Christian at a homeless shelter or a recovering addict housed by a Christian, those Christians tend to all believe in inerrancy. It’s almost like the resentment is pure projection.
The list goes on.

I’ll go ahead and air a sense of moral superiority. If you hate the church so much and people in it who disagree with you that you refuse to discuss with them (or mock them despite not even attending church), just leave. Most academics don’t believe in God anyhow. If you want the atheists of academe to approve of you, just hang out with them.

 

Science fact of the day: No such thing as healthy obesity

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While I have my questions about the BMI scale and its ability to predict health for those with low body-fat percentages, it has proven a remarkable predictor of health in the general population (low body-fat people are rare in the United States, after all).

Anyway, in a study published in 2016, the authors concluded that:

Low aerobic fitness in late adolescence is associated with an increased risk of early death. Furthermore, the risk of early death was higher in fit obese individuals than in unfit normal-weight individuals.

Now, this study doesn’t distinguish between “fit obese” individuals who are obese because of muscle mass above average and individuals with a high body fat percentage who happen to be good at aerobics.

 

 

Quick-Sand Memory: Lecture to the Wall and Beyond

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Introduction

Many young people are challenged to study harder to succeed, but very few of them are given any helpful guidelines for studying. Below are two helpful study techniques and one piece of research that support them.

Lecture to the Wall

“The Overnight Student” by Michael Jones which can be found here. The book is wonderful. Read it, it only takes about an hour. Jones recommends doing things this way:[1]

  1. Take a bite – Read a manageable portion of your source material.
  2. Use Your Tongue – Explain what you’ve just read out loud to an imaginary audience without looking at the book or at any notes. Take note of everything that you cannot explain. You do not understand those things.
  3. Reread – Read your source material again asking yourself consciously, “what does this mean, how can I explain this to an audience, to what does it relate?”
  4. Repeat steps two and three until you have mastered the material.

Lecturing to the wall makes you embarrassingly aware of your gaps in knowledge, but with a plus! You’re embarrassed at home with nobody around to hear it but you (or a roommate). This is far better than being embarrassed by not knowing the material on a test, at a job interview, when giving a speech, while defusing a bomb, during a hostage situation, while fighting Godzilla, or during a group project.

Update: In a 2014 study, John F. Nestojko found that “participants who expected to teach learned more from a passage than did participants who expected to take a test.”[2] In the experiments, subjects did not actually teach, but were told to study material as preparation for teaching. So, the expectation of teaching primes learners to learn more, probably because they expect to have to explain things. This goes nicely with the fact that we learn while we teach. So lecture to the wall is not only anecdotally effective, but it has more scientific support than I had initially supposed.[3]

PQ4R

Another technique, which is similar to Lecture to the Wall, but less helpful is PQ4R.  It’s from Richard Restak’s Think Smart:[4]

  1. Preview – Skim through a chapter of material, noting the headings, vocabulary words, and concepts.
  2. Formulate Questions – Ask questions about the material you have read.
  3. Read – Read the passage looking for answers to the questions you’ve asked.
  4. Reflect – Think about what you’ve read and how to apply it as well as its relationship to the subject at hand and its relationship to other subjects.
  5. Recite – Repeat the material from memory after you’ve learned it. Do this with the text book closed, and only open it to check your accuracy. Put it in the exact language of the text as well as in your own words.
  6. Review – Try to recall and summarize the same points.

Restak’s system is helpful, but it is slightly disorganized. For instance, how can you know what questions to ask about the material until you’ve read it more carefully? I think that Preview, Read, and Formulate Questions should be somehow in the same step. It’s also too many steps to remember. You’d have to study the method to utilize it.

References

[1] Michael L Jones, The Overnight Student (Bellingham, Wash.: Louis Pub., 1990), 44-60.

[2] John F. Nestojko et al., “Expecting to Teach Enhances Learning and Organization of Knowledge in Free Recall of Text Passages,” Memory & Cognition 42, no. 7 (October 2014): 1045

[3] K. J. Topping, “The Effectiveness of Peer Tutoring in Further and Higher Education: A Typology and Review of the Literature,” Higher Education 32, no. 3 (October 1, 1996): 321–45

[4] Richard Restak’s Think Smart: A Neuroscientist’s Prescription for Improving Your Brain’s Performance, (Riverhead Books, 2009), 109.

People Believe This

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An article on the BBC posited that heterosexuality is a mythology invented to preserve a way of life which helped us survive, but isn’t really necessary any longer. The author concludes:

The line between heterosexuality and homosexuality isn’t just blurry, as some take Kinsey’s research to imply – it’s an invention, a myth, and an outdated one. Men and women will continue to have different-genital sex with each other until the human species is no more. But heterosexuality – as a social marker, as a way of life, as an identity – may well die out long before then.

It’s funny how sexual intercourse or just sex is re-expressed as “different-genital sex” as though it weren’t biologically inherent in our species. The author, Ambrosino, makes one good point:

Debates about sexual orientation have tended to focus on a badly defined concept of “nature.” Because different sex intercourse generally results in the propagation of the species, we award it a special moral status. But “nature” doesn’t reveal to us our moral obligations – we are responsible for determining those, even when we aren’t aware we’re doing so. To leap from an observation of how nature is to a prescription of nature ought to be is, as philosopher David Hume noted, to commit a logical fallacy.

Nature, in many arguments of a moral sort, has been badly defined. There are Aristotelian definitions of nature to which we often hold as presuppositions when it comes to scientific investigation but which we apparently abandon when it comes to ethics.

The main point is that heterosexuality isn’t an invention, it’s a necessity. There would be no us to say stupid things about heterosexuality if there were not any such thing.

Taking ethics or religion out of the equation (you never really can), non-heterosexual sex of any sort is, by necessity, a deviation entertained by the smallest segment of the human population.

When the wage gap closes in on you

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I find people wielding the wage gap as proof of oppression in the United States tiresome and stupid. But this article which acknowledges that it is close is ridiculous on a new level. In it the author observes:

Women want an equal partner, but there are increasingly fewer candidates to choose from. The census reports that “the average adult woman in the US is more likely to be a college graduate than the average adult man.” Moreover, today’s young, childless female city-dwellers [editorial chuckle] with college degrees are out-earning their male counterparts by 8 cents on the dollar. Their higher incomes may be why they are less likely (29 percent) to be living with their parents than single men (35 percent).

Theres’ more:

Almost 60 percent of women rate successful parenting as one of the most important parts of life, while only 47 percent of young men do, according to Pew.

But the problem is that despite the negligible wage gap, the author posits that women don’t want to marry men the same age as them who make 92 cents on the dollar. After all of the lobbying for employers, colleges, and governments to end the wage gap, now that it’s over and women aren’t interested in men who make the same amount as them:

The trouble with all this finger pointing [at women] is that it leaves out half of the baby-making equation: men.

Thankfully there are large swaths of society who never hear any of this nonsense.

The Human Side of Spiritual Formation

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In Paul’s letter to the Philippians he passes over the intellectual difficulty of human and divine agency in spiritual growth with no effort to resolve the apparent contradiction contained in his statement:

…with fear and trembling, work to acquire your own salvation; for God is the one working in you both to will and to work his good pleasure. (Philippians 2:12b-13)

Paul speaks of both elements of salvation in his letters, both God working and us working. My theory is that one cannot claim that God is working in them unless they’re working and that one cannot also claim that their work is effective unless they acknowledge God’s work in them. It’s a back and forth. But all of that aside, what does Paul say about the human side of spiritual growth in Philippians? There is one passage in particular that says a whole lot:

12 Not that I have already received it [the resurrection] or have been made perfect, but I seek to make it [perfection] my own because Christ has made me his own. 13 Brothers, I do not consider myself to have made it [perfection] my own. But I do one thing: forgetting what lies before me I strain forward 14 in accordance with the goal I seek the goal of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. 15 Therefore, if anybody has been made perfect, let us think this way; and if anybody differs in thought, God will reveal even this. 16 Only, let us hold firm to what we’ve already attained. (Philippians 3:12-16)

Paul outlines a paradigm for personal growth in Christ-likeness:

  1. Admit your imperfection.
  2. [Implied] Have a vision for your life as perfectly Christlike.
  3. Seek to make that perfection your own.
  4. Leave your imperfections behind you rather than dwelling upon the. (Paul struggled with this, he mentions his persecution of the nascent just earlier in the letter)
  5. Strain for the perfection of Christian character. In 3:11, Paul says “if somehow” or “if by any means.” In other words, do what it takes to be like Christ. And since the metaphor is of running, think of “any means” like the any means of running away from danger and toward safety.*
  6. Not only should the appeal of the good life in Christ motivate us, but also the ‘prize’ or the rewards God offers to Christians should motivate us as well.
  7. Don’t get resentful of people who don’t get it.
  8. Hold fast to what you’ve attained. Don’t go backwards…but with step one in mind, don’t insist that where you are is perfect either. Anybody can be wrong. Sometimes your understanding of life in Christ is what needs to change before you can change.

Paul says more about the human side of things, but the passage above is a good summary of his point of view. If you grab a Bible and read the rest of Philippians, you’ll see that he also recommends meditation on good examples, pursuing assistance from other Christians, avoiding obsession over food, seeing the Christian church as your tribe/nation, and prayer for help.

 

 

*Note: When I was a senior in high school, I went for a job one night after karate practice. In our neighborhood, late jogs weren’t that uncommon. But a rottweiler escaped somebody’s front door and started chasing me and I climbed up on a stranger’s car and jumped onto the other side waiting to climb back over if the dog ran around. I was willing to do whatever it took not to die.