Re: On being a noncombatant in the culture wars

I thought it was a brilliant article, written with a lovely understated
humour and irony. It is not to be interpreted with a literal hermeneutic and
there is a definite accommodation to Harvard in it.

What he was arguing for was education not only as giving a skill and a
training but a broad outlook on life and the world. I agree with all his
principles
For Ted, one thing I like about your approach is that you are not partisan
and you are willing to make your mind up about whatever issue. At least I
don't know what you are going to say until I have heard it.

Michael
----- Original Message -----
From: "Bill Hamilton" <williamehamiltonjr@yahoo.com>
To: "Ted Davis" <tdavis@messiah.edu>; <asa@lists.calvin.edu>
Sent: Friday, March 03, 2006 8:00 PM
Subject: Re: On being a noncombatant in the culture wars

> Ted
>
> Pardon my density, but I don't understand what you're driving at here. I
> can
> only characterize the article you posted as dripping with sarcasm. Am I
> missing something?
>
> As for you not committing to one side or the other wrt ID, I understand
> your
> position. There is much to be said in favor of teaching philosophy of
> science,
> and ID has a place in philosophy of science. Teach the controversy -- yes.
> But
> in the appropriate venue: philosophy, not science.
>
> --- Ted Davis <tdavis@messiah.edu> wrote:
>
>> One of our campus ministry staff posted the following column from the NY
>> Times. I think there is much food for thought here, and I offer it as an
>> apology (in the older meaning of that word) for staking out a middle
>> position on the ID controversy that is so divisive in many places right
>> now.
>> I realize that the ground I occupy on that issue is pretty small, and I
>> don't expect it ever to be much bigger. Partly I occupy that ground b/c
>> of
>> my own convictions about what the truth actually is, but I also occupy
>> that
>> ground b/c of the kinds of things talked about in the second and third
>> paragraphs below. Discerning readers will see which parts of this apply
>> to
>> the context in which I am using it, and they will begin to understand why
>> I
>> find the politics of this issue so discouraging.
>>
>> Ted
>>
>> ****************
>>
>> Harvard-Bound? Chin Up
>> The New York Times
>> March 2, 2006
>> Author: DAVID BROOKS
>>
>> I've got great news! You're young and you're smart and next year you're
>> beginning college. Unfortunately, I've also got bad news. The only school
>> you got into is Harvard, where, as Peter Beinart of The New Republic
>> notes,
>> students often graduate "without the kind of core knowledge that you'd
>> expect from a good high school student," and required courses can be "a
>> hodgepodge of arbitrary, esoteric classes that cohere into nothing at
>> all."
>>
>> But don't despair. I've consulted with a bevy of sages, and I've come up
>> with a list. If you do everything on this list, you'll get a great
>> education, no matter what college you attend:Read Reinhold Niebuhr.
>> Religion
>> is a crucial driving force of this century, and Niebuhr is the wisest
>> guide.
>> As Alan Wolfe of Boston College notes, if everyone read Niebuhr, "The
>> devout
>> would learn that public piety corrupts private faith and that faith must
>> play a prophetic role in society. The atheists would learn that some
>> people
>> who believe in God are really, really smart. All of them would learn that
>> good and evil really do exist -- and that it is never as easy as it seems
>> to
>> know which is which. And none of them, so long as they absorbed what they
>> were reading, could believe that the best way to divide opinion is
>> between
>> liberals on the one hand and conservatives on the other."
>>
>> Read Plato's "Gorgias." As Robert George of Princeton observes, "The
>> explicit point of the dialogue is to demonstrate the superiority of
>> philosophy (the quest for wisdom and truth) to rhetoric (the art of
>> persuasion in the cause of victory). At a deeper level, it teaches that
>> the
>> worldly honors that one may win by being a good speaker can all too
>> easily
>> erode one's devotion to truth -- a devotion that is critical to our
>> integrity as persons. So rhetorical skills are dangerous, potentially
>> soul-imperiling, gifts." Explains everything you need to know about
>> politics
>> and punditry.
>>
>> Take a course on ancient Greece. For 2,500 years, educators knew that the
>> core of their mission was to bring students into contact with heroes like
>> Pericles, Socrates and Leonidas. "No habit is so important to acquire,"
>> Aristotle wrote, as the ability "to delight in fine characters and noble
>> actions." Alfred North Whitehead agreed, saying, "Moral education is
>> impossible without the habitual vision of greatness."
>>
>> That core educational principle was abandoned about a generation ago,
>> during a spasm of radical egalitarianism. And once that principle was
>> lost,
>> the entire coherence of higher education was lost with it. So now you've
>> got
>> to find your own ways to learn about history's heroes, the figures who
>> will
>> serve as models to emulate and who will provide you with standards to use
>> to
>> measure your own conduct. Remember, as the British educator Richard
>> Livingstone once wrote, "One is apt to think of moral failure as due to
>> weakness of character: more often it is due to an inadequate ideal."
>>
>> Learn a foreign language. The biographer Ron Chernow observes, "My
>> impression is that many students have turned into cunning little
>> careerists,
>> jockeying for advancement." To counteract this, he suggests taking
>> "wildly
>> impractical" courses like art history and Elizabethan drama. "They should
>> especially try to master a foreign language as a way to annex another
>> culture and discover unseen sides to themselves. As we have evolved into
>> a
>> matchless global power, we have simply become provincial on an ever
>> larger
>> stage."
>>
>> Spend a year abroad. Shibley Telhami of the University of Maryland
>> believes
>> that all major universities should require a year abroad: "All evidence
>> suggests this, more than any other, is a transforming experience for
>> students that lasts a lifetime."
>>
>> Take a course in neuroscience. In the next 50 years, half the
>> explanations
>> you hear for human behavior are going to involve brain structure and
>> function. You've got to know which are serious and which are cockamamie.
>>
>> Take statistics. Sorry, but you'll find later in life that it's handy to
>> know what a standard deviation is.
>>
>> Forget about your career for once in your life. This was the core message
>> from everyone I contacted. Raised to be workaholics, students today have
>> developed a "carapace, an enveloping shell that hinders them from seeing
>> the
>> full, rich variety of intellectual and practical opportunities offered by
>> the world," observes Charles Hill of Yale. You've got to burst out of
>> that
>> narrow careerist mentality. Of course, it will be hard when you're
>> surrounded by so many narrow careerist professors building their little
>> subdisciplinary empires.
>>
>> But you can do it. I have faith.
>>
>>
>> Edition: Late Edition - Final
>> Section: Editorial Desk
>> Page: 27
>>
>> Index Terms: Op-Ed
>>
>> Copyright (c) 2006 The New York Times Company
>> Record Number: 2006-03-02-814830
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
> Bill Hamilton
> William E. Hamilton, Jr., Ph.D.
> 586.986.1474 (work) 248.652.4148 (home) 248.303.8651 (mobile)
> "...If God is for us, who is against us?" Rom 8:31
>
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Received on Fri Mar 3 16:02:09 2006