Road to the Rhodes

Rhodes Scholarship winners were announced yesterday, and unsurprisingly, Harvard had the most of any school in the nation.  Of the thirty-two winners, four are Harvard students.

Students from public universities comprised six winners overall, and two of those were from the US Air Force Academy.  So the number of non-service academy, public university winners in the whole country is equal to the number from Harvard alone.

Harvard students are good, but they're not so good as to be heads and shoulders above the combined student bodies of the best public institutions.  The best kids at the public universitites are equal in talent, achievement, and potential as the kids at Harvard.

My guess is that students at public universities are just not getting the support and advice needed to fare well in a competition like the Rhodes.  When I applied from UC Davis to the big scholarships like this, I was the first person that most of the administration could remember who had applied for some of these scholarships, and as much as they tried, the faculty and administrators who helped me were unsure about how to do that.

There's probably also a bit of academic nepotism here.  The members of the selection committees are more likely to have gone to the prestigious private institutions, and (not maliciously) they are more plugged into that network of people and schools, knowing more about them than they would about Berkeley, Michigan, Virginia, UCLA, and such (the cream of the public schools).

But there's a serious bias here.  What happens is that kids like me, who went to the public universities because they were affordable when the private Ivies were not, not only don't get the advantages that come from smaller, more individually focused schools (such as many of the private colleges and universities are) but also miss out on being considered in the running for prizes like the Rhodes or even from getting sufficient advice on how to begin being competitive.

Yesterday's results remind us that the Rhodes Scholarship has a long way to go before one can consider it meritocratic -- it still reeks more of privilege and connection than acheivement and  merit.

And don't even get me started on where Rhodes' money came from.... *grin*

# Department: Politicks - Posted by Nate on 11/25/03; 11:40:47 AM - Comments [1] Trackback [0]

Exactly!

Republicans should be jumping on the bandwagon to legalize gay marriage, as David Brooks points out in his Saturday column.  I don't agree with Brooks much of the time, but he's a hell of a smart guy, and very worth listening to.

I hear he based this column on a piece he read on Andrew Sullivan's blog.

# Department: Politicks - Posted by Nate on 11/24/03; 12:34:23 PM - Comments [2] Trackback [0]

A response

Here's a response to my letter (and a couple of others) in the Times the other day:

November 22, 2003

Customers Can Be So Rude

o the Editor:

Re your Nov. 19 letters about self-service systems in stores:

I used to work in retail. My spouse continues to do so. When he comes home from work upset and fed up, I understand why.

Many customers are rude: they talk on their cellphones in front of the clerks trying to wait on them, toss money or credit cards onto the counter rather than putting it into the clerk's hand, speak to the clerk as if he or she is a total idiot, blame the store's staff for product problems, and then react nastily when the clerk can't solve their problem.

If customers want to have a better shopping experience, they can hang up their cellphones upon entering the store and treat the staff like the human beings they are. They will be surprised at how helpful the staff will be. They might even learn to prefer human help to automated help.  
ELEANOR S. HUDSON
Austin, Tex., Nov. 19, 2003

Eleanor's right.  But what do you do when the clerk has dealt with the jerks all day and won't respondly humanly when you initiate some sort of human contact?  What if I say "Hi!", refuse to talk on my phone when I'm checking out (my mother raised me to be much more polite than that), hand the card nicely over, say "Please" and "Thank you," and still get treated pretty shabbily?  What am I supposed to do then?  Any more ideas?

# Department: Politicks - Posted by Nate on 11/24/03; 12:22:16 PM - Comments [1] Trackback [0]

It's about power

"The diocese of Fort Worth, the whole diocese, has voted to bar any participant in the Robinson consecration from any church activity in Fort Worth."  -from an article recently in The American Spectator

Which includes me.  Because I may not have laid hands on Gene Robinson,but I assented to his ordination, along with 4000 other Episcopalians. I may not like these people, but I would be willing to commune with them, I think.  But Bishop Iker doesn't want me to do this.  He and his diocese would prefer that I don't commune with them at all.  

But in reality, that state of affairs is nothing new.  Here's the dirty secret that many conservatives in the Episcopal Church does not want you to know.  Many of them have been "out of communion" or whatever phrase you want to use to describe it these days for years now.

When I was at the General Convention of the Episcopal Church in 2000, we had a daily Eucharist, presided over each day by a different bishop.  Many days, the delegation from the diocese of Fort Worth would not come to the common Eucharist service, especially when the presider was a woman.  They simply stayed in their hotel, had Eucharist there, and then came to the sessions to participate in the political aspects of the convention.

But since they wouldn't observe the most basic sacrament of our life together, I think it's fair to question whether they are really part of our understanding of the Christian faith.  If one can't come to the Eucharistic table, the basic source of Christian unity, then what business does one have in participating in the rest of the life of a church?

The recent gay debacle in the ECUSA really only provides a legitimating cover for a group of people who have been pissed off since the 1970s about a perceived loss of power.  The theological and the political are nearly synonymous here.  Finally there's an issue that can polarize people in and out of the church.  It's hard to portray the revision of the Book of Common Prayer as a pressing moral issue. It's hard to argue that ordaining women really cuts to the heart of a "timeless moral code."  But firing salvos at the faggots wins votes from the peanut gallery in a way that liturgical renewal and non-gender discriminating ordination does not.

I've said it before, and I will say it again.  The political and the religious cannot be disentangled here, and the group of churches led by the American Anglican Council appear more interested in power and property than anything else.  They declare "war" on their fellow Christians, they refuse to be "tainted" by them, they declare that they are the only true remnant of the real Anglican faith left.  They won't accept or read the message of the Presiding Bishop of the ECUSA at their secret meetings, but they will read with approbation messages from Roman Catholic Cardinal Ratzinger (who's the Vatican's head theologian).

Maybe their motives are good (I'm not going to attempt to read minds), but their tactics don't seem any different than any other political lobby practicing a scorched earth policy.  Their theology, ecclesiology, and social stances really appear much more at ease in the Roman Catholic tradition.  Why not join that tradition?

Again, the power explanation is pretty persuasive to me -- becoming RC would mean a concomitant loss of power for the leaders of this movement.  Some of their ideas (not just the big social ones that are getting all the coverage) would also be much more at home in a Baptist or Calvinist (presbyterian governance) setting.  But again, the move to that piece of the Christian tradition would engender a loss of power.  Staying close to the ECUSA maximizes their future power, whatever the eventual theological and dogmatic ramifications.

(Again, I'm not conducting a theological analysis here, but a power politics analysis.  And the path that the AAC has taken is exactly the one that will maximize its future power, no matter what its relationship to the ECUSA eventually ends up being.)

And nothing that this group is doing is particularly unexpected.  The human desire toward the will to power is particularly common, and what we see on this side of the debate (and later, I'll try to address the will to power on the "liberal" side of the whole debate) shouldn't be surprising.  Any basic background in social theory (read some Paine, Burke, Marx, and Weber, if you want more info) makes this entirely predictable.

This "battle" is as much about power as it is about faith, perhaps even more about power than faith.  And this is entirely human.  But the stunning arrogance on both sides of this debate is discouraging.  The Christian New Testament has much more to say (by orders of magnitude) about money and living in community than it does about sex.  And the debate, after we peel away the sex-talk on both sides, often revolves more around money and living together than anything else.

Isn't Christianity (and other religions, but I speak less knowledgeably about many of them) supposed to help us find the way to our full humanity?  As the mystic Johannes Metz noted, sin and the will to power are compromises in the battle against death that God has already done.  The essence of Christianity is poverty of spirit, an emptying of ourselves, a full submission to God.  Only then can we become fully human.  That's why Christ was even more human than we are -- in refusing to sin, he became the most poor of all, never making the compromise with death that the rest of us do.  Sin strikes a compromise, wherein we take the easy way rather than the hard way that leads to God.

"We must forget ourselves in order to let the other person approach us. We must be able to open up to him to let his distinctive personality unfold even though it frightens and repels us. We often keep the other person down, and only see what we want to see; then we never really encounter the mysterious secret of his being only ourselves. Failing to risk the poverty of encounter, we indulge in a new form of self-assertion and pay the price for it : loneliness. Because we did not risk the poverty of openness, our lives are not graced with the warm fullness of human existence. We are left with only a shadow of our real self."

# Department: Rayleejun - Posted by Nate on 11/23/03; 11:28:54 AM - Comments [0] Trackback [0]

Response and response

Here's a response from a friend regarding the NYT letter:

Hey Nate,

Excuse me, BUT:

If you were being paid minimum wage (or heck, anything that was somewhere

between minimum wage and a living wage by any reasonable standard), were

fighting to hold onto any benefits (if you had any to begin with), were made

to feel lucky for having any "real" job (as opposed to the sub-minimum-wage

welfare-to-"work" type thing that is increasingly common), and didn't have a

language for figuring out, or better yet, complaining about, why the so-called

American dream is increasingly just that, a ridiculous fantasy, you might not

feel like your normal cheery self, either...

And here's what I wrote back to her:

You're right, and those are exactly some of the points that the article raises.

BF and I talked about this last night, and the problem for me is that horrible old question: "What can I, as one person, do?"  And I don't know.  Going to a store where they treat their employees better is one possible solution, but all it really does is make me feel better about myself.  Doesn't help the wage slaves.

We've all been alienated by this state of affairs.  I can't do anything to help the workers, they can't help themselves.  And so I'm left to deal with the interpersonal interaction level.  But since my encounter with the human worker feels pretty far away from interpersonal interaction (because, since the worker is a cog in the machine and has become some sort of machine, the interaction is pretty much about as one would have with a machine), I move to the more pleasant of the two nonpersonal interactions.

But I don't know what I as one person can do, and I guess that I'm just not optimistic about the line of thinking that goes, "If enough people think and act like I do, then things will change."  Perhaps it's pessimism, but I don't know....

What would you do/do you do?

What do you do, dear readers?

# Department: Politicks - Posted by Nate on 11/20/03; 10:39:24 AM - Comments [0] Trackback [0]

What now?

Well, there's plenty, but we can't blow it.

Unless you're living in a vaccuum, you've heard about the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruling that the Constitution of the Commonwealth requires that same-sex couples be entitled to the rights, privileges, and obligations of marriage.

This is great.  Whatever your religious beliefs regarding marriage, the civil compact that we live under requires that we do not discriminate agaisnt other people in the legal protections that we afford them, no matter how much we may disagree with them.  A just society is one in which one's affective identity memberships do not engender discriminatory practice on the part of the state.  I.e., the state should not deny legal protections and obligations from a person on the basis of some characteristic the person contains, no matter how few people share that characteristic.  As John Stuart Mill, perhaps the clearest disciple of modern liberalism noted,

If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.

Now, the focus will be on the next step (I'd guess other states or the U.S. Supreme Court and the 1996 "Defense of Marriage Act" and its egregious rewrite of the "full faith and trust" clause), but there's an event that intervenes -- the Presidential election.

(An aside.  The President said, "Marriage is a sacred institution between a man and a woman. Today's decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court violates this important principle. I will work with Congressional leaders and others to do what is legally necessary to defend the sanctity of marriage."  What does George Bush know of the sacred?  Does he have any training in divinity or theology?  Is he a religious leader?  Is he a pastor or bishop of his church, the United Methodist Church?  Can he provide any evidence that he's in the sacredness business?  And since the answer to the above questions is "No," then I'd like to thank him to keep his nose out of the sacredness and sacramentality business.  He's the president, not the preacher, pastor, or priest.)

The issue of the place of gays in our society is going to be the hot-button culture wars issue of 2004.  There are people convinced that Western society and the Republic will both fall if we don't keep the gays from equal treatment and "preserve marriage."  (Although, straight people, you've done a good job with fucking up marriage on your own, which makes me wonder sometimes why we gay people want to get in on the deal....)  If we push too hard (which might mean "at all") in the next 12 months, then that could solidify a Republican victory in the election.  People who regard this as at all important and who oppose the extension of this basic equality to their fellow Americans will vote with the Republican party next year.  (A coda: don't misinterpret me and say that I think that Republicans are opposed to the extension of this basic equality; while most probably are, not all Republicans are.  But all those who regard opposition as an important issue will vote Republican.)  And, fair-weather friends that the Democrats have been, they're much more likely to take the just course of action in the end.

But please, my dear gay activist friends, please don't file any suits until 3 November.  Let us get someone in office who will do us a favor in legislation approval and judicial appointment.  Keep as much of the gasoline as possible away from the fire that we'll see in the next election cycle -- it's likely to burn us otherwise.

# Department: Politicks - Posted by Nate on 11/19/03; 10:43:54 AM - Comments [0] Trackback [0]

It's up!

The Times saw fit to print my letter this morning.  Here it is.

# Department: OnTheWeb - Posted by Nate on 11/19/03; 10:12:14 AM - Comments [0] Trackback [0]

She's starting early

Her parents are starting my goddaughter early....



No, it's not actual coffee.  She's mostly just interested in the plastic lid.  But I think it's a good sign.

# Department: Day2Day - Posted by Nate on 11/19/03; 10:03:48 AM - Comments [0] Trackback [0]

Yes, I'm a curmudgeon

So the New York Times ran a story about electronic checkout machines this morning, which you can find here.  One of the concerns expressed by some psychologists and sociologists is that such machines lead to further social atomization, as we have to interact with other people (especially, perhaps, across class lines) less and less.

But I can't say that I've found that to be the case.  Here's the letter I wrote to the editor:

To the editor:

Although some critics are rightfully concerned that the trend toward electronic kiosks in the service industries reduces human interaction, my experience has shown that the human workers themselves have minimized their human interaction with customers.  At my local grocery store and drugstore, while ringing up my items, the clerks appear hard-pressed to greet me, to look at me, to thank me for my custom, or to address any word to me besides saying "That'll be $21.43."  Much of the time, they simply continue their conversations with their colleagues, content to ignore me pretty much entirely.

It may not be technically more interactive, but the checkout machines certainly feel more interactive, and they are definitely more polite.  The machines, at least, seem capable of saying "please" and "thank you."

Star Market and CVS!  I'm talking about you!

# Department: Politicks - Posted by Nate on 11/17/03; 12:05:28 PM - Comments [2] Trackback [0]

KtB weighs in

Here's an article from the online religion journal Killing the Buddha. It's really good reportage of the consecration, written by someone who's (by appearance at least) not an insider....

And from the same site, "Cash has died, Cash has risen, will Cash come again?"

Sorry I haven't posted many of my own thoughts lately, but I've been feeling a bit lazy and even uninspired....

# Department: Rayleejun - Posted by Nate on 11/13/03; 11:29:34 AM - Comments [0] Trackback [0]

Finally!

Here it is!  A guide to Friendster photos and what they mean....

# Department: OnTheWeb - Posted by Nate on 11/12/03; 3:35:52 PM - Comments [0] Trackback [0]

Every blogger's fear...

I don't normally get too jazzed up by The Onion.  But this article puts all of our fears right out there, dear blogging friends.

If any of my family is reading, stop.  Now.

# Department: OnTheWeb - Posted by Nate on 11/12/03; 10:55:04 AM - Comments [3] Trackback [1]

Center and Margins

People have asked me several times how I felt at the consecration on Sunday -- did I feel joyful or happy or hopeful?  What was it like?

I can't honstly say I felt anything at the time.  It just seemed most important to be there.

It was like an ordination.  It was unusual in some aspects -- the objections, for example.  Or the pregnancy of singing "The Church's One Foundation" (which includes the following words "Though with a scornful wonder, Men see her sore distressed, By schisms rent asunder, By heresies distressed, Yet saints their watch are keeping, Their cry goes up, "How long?", And soon the night of weeping, shall be the morn of song."), knowing that schism could occur as the result of misunderstanding what the action there was about.

But the Episcopal Church has always been OK for me, and so I haven't had the same experience of exclusion that many of my fellow Episcopalians.  Coming from the tradition that I did, the Episcopal Church, especially in the places that I have lived (mostly university towns), has always accepted gays.  An openly gay bishop was only a matter of time, as far as I could tell.  So it was just a fairly normal event to me.  Not only that, but all of this stuff has been playing out in the news for so long, that it's not like there were surprises.  We knew there would be objections, that the press would be there, that all this would happen about as it did.  I guess it's one of the advantages of being a liturgical church -- one does not have to worry about how events will transpire and how one will react to them.  The liturgy constrains the form of the events, so that one has the freedom to know what's behind them, to understand, to make preparations for all.

Two of the sets of remarks at Sunday's consecration played on the theme of center and margins.  Most importantly, they reminded us that when we pull the margins in to the center, bringing those people who are not remembered into the larger fold, we also bring the center to the margins, helping those in the mainstream know what it's like to live on the edge.  And I think that's what the Christian message is supposed to be about -- uniting center and margins so that each becomes more like the other.

Right.  Done for now.

# Department: Rayleejun - Posted by Nate on 11/7/03; 12:03:15 PM - Comments [1] Trackback [0]

Consecration and consternation

So, if you're a regular reader, you're not surprised that I was in New Hampshire on Sunday to see the Rev. Canon Gene Robinson ordained to the episcopate.  My friends and I were hardly about to miss out on a historic moment in the life of the local and global church.  But first, some background on why this is monumental.

Anglicans, like Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christians, believe in an episcopal structure (from the Greek word episkopos).  What this means is that we have bishops as overseers and pastors for a collection of priests, deacons, and laypeople in a particular geographic area, called a diocese.  It requires three bishops to lay hands upon another person (for Orthodox, Romans, and many Anglicans in the South and to a much lesser degree in the North, that means men) to consecrate a new bishop.  We believe that there is an unbroken line of laying on of hands from the first bishop (St. Peter) to the most current bishop.  (Is this historically tenable?  I don't know, but the stress on the unbroken line of succession is less for some sort of magic touch passed down from Peter and more to stress the continuity of the contemporary church with the historic church.  It's all one church, whether past or present.)

Gene Robinson is by no means the first gay bishop in our church or any church.  He's simply the first gay bishop who is open and honest about his sexuality at the time of his consecration.  There have been Roman Catholic and Anglican gay bishops before, who, for whatever reason, have not been out of the closet.

For an event such as this one, the protest was muted, at best, and the people who had legitimate grounds on which to protest (i.e., they were actually Anglicans of some sort) were generally polite, made their thoughts known, and then left.  These people below were pretty marginal.

There were about twenty of them, total, in two groups.  Not only that, but they're not Episcopalians or Anglicans.  If they were willing to show up, be part of our church, come to table with us, and try to be one of us, working this out in our peculiar way, then maybe we'd listen to them.  But they seemed to be intentionally fringe players.  Notably, they (and non-Episcopal supporters) were kept in special pens, to keep them separate and to keep them from disrupting the service.  The local supporters, from UNH and New Hampshire, numbered about 200, by my count.  One nice thing about the supporters: at the end of the service, as we walked out of the hockey arena and the white sign guys above were trying to be loud and vocal and yell at us, the supporters made sure they were louder, clapping and cheering for us, making sure they drowned out the yelling of the protestors.  They thanked us for being there, and I thanked them back.

These people are more problematic.

These are evangelical Protestant Christians who are not Episcopalians holding a candlelight vigil to support the dissident Anglicans.  They are not part of our branch of the church.  I think that we should politely listen to their concerns as fellow Christians, talk with them about their concerns, give them a full hearing.  But I don't think they should have any real weight in our decisions about how to govern our branch of the whole church.  They have made the choice to be different sorts of Christians than we are, and I don't think that we're under any real obligation to give them weight in our deliberations about our common life. Their differences with us are more substantial than just whether gays should be in the church in general or not. If they want a voice in our piece of the church, they need to be part of us. Otherwise, I think that a smile and best wishes for working out their own challenges is pretty much all we need give them. They;ve got no significant legitimacy for our polity.

You may have heard about the Anglican objectors.  Overall, their objections were the same ones they have offered since the beginning of this affair.

• This consecration is unbiblical, as Scripture explicitly condemns homosexuality in any form.  A man living in violation of Scripture (as they understand it) does not live the moral life required of a bishop.
• This consecration will impair the ECUSA's relationship with the rest of the Anglican Communion, as there are other national churches that will "break communion" with us.  (Briefly, this means that they will no longer share sacraments with us and regard any of our sacraments as invalid.  Thus, our ordinations, baptisms, and Eucharists will all be considered invalid.)  If that doesn't happen, then our communion will be "impaired" (which has no technical meaning, as far as I can tell but does indicate that they're unhappy and suspicious).  (Of course, no one seems to mention that for many of these churches, both in the Third World and the very conservative West, the communion is already impaired over the ordination of women, as most of these churches and people refuse to recognize the validity of women preists and bishops.  Even the Church of England does nto have women bishops yet.  So there's already problems on this front....)
• The consecration is against our church polity.  This is clearly untrue.  Everything that occurred did so "by the book."  The Episcopal Church has many checks and balances, from the local to the national level.  There are plenty of places that the approval of this ordination could have stopped, at various points.  And the idea that "liberals" foisted this upon the church by below-the-board politics is a hypocritical charge coming from conservatives in the church who are bankrolled by a multi-millionaire, have secret meetings, and engage in underhanded, hurtful tactics against their oppositions.  Furthermore, the idea that people are "just playing politics" and that that means they are not trying to work out God's will is pretty ridiculous,  Whoever said God couldn't do what He wants through human politics?
• We all should wait until everyone is on the same page.  I think that this demonstrates a fairly non-Anglican understanding of our common life.  Anglicans only require belief in four things: the Scriptures as received historically in the church, the two primary sacraments, the creeds, and the historic episcopate.  We don't mandate how people read the Scripture, how they are to pray, or what they must believe regarding the four items above.  We're intentionally not into the grand philosophical system and uniformity of practice in the Roman Catholic Church, nor are we interested in the uniformity of belief that the confessions of the many Protestant churches.  We're intentionally poetic rather than prosaic.  And our religious history is one of moving for thousands of years between various pieces of Catholic Christianity and then Protestantism and Roman Catholicism.  For us, faith is not about uniformity of belief; we prefer uniformity of practice with lots of room for the local variation.  We pray together, we commune together, but we don't always believe together.

At the center of the photo below, there's a woman in teal-colored robes.  That's Barbara Clementine Harris, the first woman bishop in the Anglican Communion (she's also black, which is demographically interesting in the Episcopal Church).  Her consecration in 1989 engendered (pun not intended) much of the same reaction worldwide that Gene Robinson's did.  Some of the churches that declared themselves to be unhappy with Sunday's occurrences did the same 14 years ago.  And technically, they are still mad about it.  But we're all still moving along together, as we agreed (in the end) to disagree about this issue.

More later....

# Department: Rayleejun - Posted by Nate on 11/7/03; 11:18:25 AM - Comments [6] Trackback [0]

Bastard out of the Inter-ether

Here's an e-mail I just received:

Subject: Coco Chanel
From: David Van Virden <david@davidland.com>

...of course if you could think for yourself, you wouldn't really need religion, would you dear?

out of the ether,

David Van Virden

San Francisco

Here's my response:

Such an original thought, David!  So witty and funny!  And your stupendous insight made me reconsider everything I think and believe!

I'll just note that you sound like every other pseudo-intellectual out there on the topic of religion.  Glad you can't think for yourself and that the thoughts in your head don't exist.

-N

Do we really need to flame, people?

# Department: OnTheWeb - Posted by Nate on 11/4/03; 9:00:36 PM - Comments [4] Trackback [0]