Anyway, Christine Moers is not someone you want to get cornered. I’m really going to enjoy reading her blog. [Insert gleefully wicked grin here...]
(Found via the Carnival of Homeschooling)
Never Underestimate the Mom
One of the things I love about Nicole is her periodic flashes of cheeky brilliance.
The Good Book at the Olympic Games
At the Olympics, cultures cross, and the Word goes forth:
China will provide 10,000 free Chinese-English bilingual Bibles to be distributed in the Olympic Village where the Olympic athletes and media are housed, as reported by the China Daily newspaper. The bilingual Bible text will include the CUV (Chinese Union Version) and the ESV (English Standard Version), appearing in two side-by-side columns per page. The CUV Bible is the most widely distributed Chinese Bible in the world, and the ESV Bible has recently become the fastest growing English language Bible in the world.In addition to the 10,000 bilingual CUV-ESV Bibles, 30,000 New Testaments and 100,000 bilingual editions of the four Gospels will also be made available at the Olympic Games.
Because cultural and academic leaders in China are seeking to understand the influence of the Bible on the worldview and culture of the West, there is a growing interest in Chinese-English bilingual Bibles in mainland China. ?We are especially grateful,? Crossway President Dr. Lane Dennis notes, ?that the ESV was selected by Chinese Christian leaders for publication with Chinese CUV Bible, through our partnership with the British and Foreign Bible Society. Since both the CUV and the ESV are ?essentially literal? Bible translations, they are ideally suited for a side-by-side comparison of the two languages. What a wonderful thing it would be if thousands of people would learn English?and Chinese!?by reading the Bible in side-by-side bilingual editions.?
–hat tip to C.E. Moore’s coverage at The Christian Manifesto
But there is still plenty for which we can work and pray:
In the Olympic Village, you can find religious freedom. Maybe some foreigners can worship. … But I tell you, the real crisis in China now is that there are no reformers left. The power struggle among the leadership is for power, not reform. To have real political reform, they would lose their power.
– Fan Yafeng, a law professor at the Institute of Law at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and a leader of an unregistered house church. (From The Washington Post, in a story titled “Beijing Curbs Religious Rights”)
–hat tip to Sojourners E-mail Updates
And visit bookseller extraordinaire Byron Borger of Hearts & Minds Books for A Christian View of Sport.
Posted in Margin Notes, Reading Around Tagged Bible, Body, Byron Borger, China, Culture, Language, Olympic Games, Religion, Social Justice, Sports, Translation Leave a comment
August, 1945
Sixty-three years ago this week, the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The enormity of the event, the inhuman scale of both this power and its consequences, is nearly impossible to communicate. How can one understand the power of a thousand suns unleashed upon whole cities? It became one of the defining stories for generations in every nation, the stuff of myth and legend come to trouble our real urban lives. When the bombs were dropped, at the end of World War II, my mother was twelve years old; when I was twelve, it was common knowledge among my Chicago peers that were were targeted to go out in a mushroom cloud, courtesy of the Soviet Union. My high school girlfriend had nightmares of invading armies, though she personally had never experienced any sort of war. (She had to walk out on the post-nuke invasion scenes of Red Dawn, though somehow War Games was fun.) The stories and imagery of WW II have been invoked and remixed and spun to death, and still they are important. How do we put all these pieces together, and how can we get the story straight?
So far, we’ve introduced WWII to our children with stories found here and there: The Sound of Music, from their mother’s love of musicals, Anne of Green Gables, from her love of strong redheads, Twenty and Ten from the fantastic Sonlight Curriculum, Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel of the Holocaust, Maus: A Survivors Tale when our son found it in our church library, Faithful Elephants: A True Story of Animals, People, and War which we found at Butterfly Books, and Baseball Saved Us from the Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative.
This is not yet a curriculum, just a collection of stories. But they paint a landscape of history, stories to be remembered, referred to, examined, and criticized; part of the tapestry of their lives. And when the time for a more formal curriculum comes, it will have a foundation to stand on.
Before we’re done, I expect to share with them the documentary, Trinity and Beyond, Keiji Nakazawa’s harrowing answer to Spiegelman, Barefoot Gen, and Hersey’s classic Hiroshima, along with other things we find or that you, dear reader, suggest.
But first, I think we’ll start here, with a new book, first of a series, from Ellen Klages:
- The Green Glass Sea
- by Ellen Klages
- Puffin 2008-05-01
- Average Amazon Review
Courtesy of Mother Daughter Book Club.com- loved it
Good read for most thinking persons- Overall good reading
- The Green Glass Sea
The Friendship of Girls, the Fate of the World
Two girls sort out their places in the world as they follow their families to live in a town that doesn’t officially exist: Los Alamos, California, in the days leading up to Trinity, the first ever test of a nuclear weapon, on July 16, 1945. A deep story of friendship, loss, and finding your home, in a world of awesome forces.
Today they had chosen to sit against the west wall of the commissary for their picnic lunch. It offered a little bit of shade, they could look out at the Pond, and it was three minutes from Papa’s office, which meant they could spend almost the whole hour reading together.“Dews?” Papa said a few minutes later. “Remember the other night when we were talking about how much math and music are related?”
Dewey nodded.
“Well, there was a quote I couldn’t quite recall, and I just found it. Listen.” He began to read, very slowly. ” `Music is the hidden arithmetic of the soul, which does not know that it deals with numbers. Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.’ That’s exactly what I was talking about.”
“Who said it?” Dewey asked.
Read the full excerpt at the author’s site, EllenKlages.com.
hReview by CircleReader , 2008/08/07
Posted in Continuing Stories, Mind & Society, Reading Around, Science & Technology Tagged Books, Ellen Klages, Engineering, Girls, Hiroshima, History, Holidays, Keiji Nakazawa, Los Alamos, Math, Nagasaki, Reviews, Stories, Trinity, War & Peace Leave a comment
Teach Your Children Well
Crunchy Con Rod Dreher takes up the challenge of The American Scene’s Noah Millman in explaining The Iraq War for Kids:
How, in narrative terms, would you explain the Iraq war? On the assumption that you didn’t want to say either that, “Iraq is only one front in World War IV, the global struggle against Islamofascism” or “We went to war so the President could get back at the guy who tried to kill his dad, make money for his buddies in the oil business, and protect Israel.”
Suggestions?
One of the things that I have enjoyed about raising and teaching my own kids is the way it has challenged me to explain complex, controversial things to them with integrity, i.e., as wisely and well to them as I can, avoiding propaganda while giving due respect for the different points of view that are out there. I often end up understanding my own opinions better, because I want to have respectable response for them.
But can I put this one in the back of the line for a few weeks, while we tackle nuclear weapons, evolution, and sex ed?
Posted in Margin Notes, Reading Around Tagged BOF, Iraq, Noah Millman, Rod Dreher, War & Peace Leave a comment
Camp Is Where the Heart Is
Our eldest boys have just returned from camp. They’ve been away (excepting Saturday nights) for two and a half weeks, first at the Ed Bryant Scout Reservation (thanks, Troop 333!), then at The Island at Covenant Point (thanks, Grandma Barbara!), and last at Camp Fire (thanks, Michelle!) at Paradise Park.
- Happy Campers I
- Happy Campers II
- Happy Campers III
- Happy Campers IV
- Happy Campers V
- Happy Campers VI
Roger Bennet and Jules Shell write in Camp Camp: Where Fantasy Island Meets Lord Of The Flies:
The more interviews we held, the more we were staggered by the sheer breadth of impact the institution of camp has had on our generation. We began to understand that every camp is a unique compressed world with its own rhythm and traditions. Camp is also enhanced with more ritual than your average Shriner Temple. The variations between these worlds were vast, effectively making the choice of camp a life-changing decision… The critical element that set summer camp apart from high school and college, and that shaped so many lives, is that it was expressly designed to make sure that everyone became part of a community, at a time when traditional pillars of community?clubs, places of worship, and even bowling leagues?were all in sharp decline.
(An interview with Bennet is here: NPR: Are you ready for summer? Camp, that is.)
Summer camp is not really about recreation, but about learning the practices of the group–not affluenza, but apprenticeship. For me, Covenant Point was where I learned to love creation and its Lord, and to see his character and presence in the counselors & campers there. So I asked our boys, “At each of these camps, what did you learn? What did you practice?”
Read More
Posted in Continuing Stories, Local Life, Mind & Society Tagged Boy Scouts, Camp, Camp Fire, Community of Practice, Jules Shell, Mentors, Paradise Park, Religion, Roger Bennet 1 Comment
There’s Something Happening Here…
With apologies to Buffalo Springfield:
There’s something happening here
What it is ain’t exactly clear
There’s a man with agunbook over there
Telling me I got to beware…
In the current issue of The Atlantic, Nicholas Carr writes in Is Google Making Us Stupid?
Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going–so far as I can tell–but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy… Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online…
His article (a beautiful piece of writing, by the way) has set off a huge, lengthy debate on the web (of course), which you should dip into (or settle down with, as is your wont) at the Brittanica Blog’s forum on Your Brain Online.
But just so you know what you’ll be getting into, here is how one participant in this conversation, Kevin Kelly, began his post on the Fate of the Book:
Attention Conservation Notice: This is a long stream in an unordered distributed debate. It may not make much sense unless you’ve read the discussion that is taking place on various websites indicated in the following paragraphs. There are many strands in the conversation. The one I am following here is about whether books will be dethroned from their centrality in culture.
You’ve been warned. Now go forth and read.
Civility on the Web (or, If you talk, be polite)
The New York Times explores calls for a Code of Conduct (like this from Jimmy Wales, or this from Tim O’Riley) on the web, as well as the motivations and secret lives of the Trolls Among Us; and Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, explains why A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy.
Essential and Subversive: Parents in Education
Dana Henley at Principled Discovery quotes a Florida newspaper story, Home schooling grows by 80 percent in state in past decade which, following a decent enough overview of the experiences of its example family, and a debunking of the socialization myth”You know you are a homeschooler,” goes the old joke, “when your six-year-old can explain the term socialization.”, caps off its coverage with some data: historical trends in homeschooling, legal requirements in Florida, contact information–and a “balanced” list of Pros and Cons of Homeschooling, apparently pulled from the author’s head. The first “Con” is this:
to which Dana responds:
And she’s right. Here is New York University’s Anne T. Henderson, author of Beyond the Bake Sale describing the findings of her research:
But however beneficial we understand parent involvement in education to be, the system we have is not integrated, but segregated. Read More »