Civil Commotion

A philosophy professor has resigned from the faculty of Bethel College because the school has adopted a policy specifying a literal interpretation of Genesis.

On Thursday, Bethel College released an Educational Philosophy of Origins policy, adopted by the Board of Trustees in June. Due to the controversy over the literal view of the creation of humanity, Dr. Jim Stump had resigned from the college June 26. Stump was a Professor of Philosophy at the college, and had been associated with it as a teacher or administrator since 1998. He also provided leadership for the college’s BUILD honors program.

In a joint statement released at the time of Stump’s resignation, college President Gregg Chenoweth praised Dr. Stump’s relationship with the college, and stated Stump was helping the college transition and assign new leadership for the BUILD program.

Bethel College is associated with the Missionary Church denomination …

Christianity requires so many intellectual compromises that few secular schools want anything to do with a man whose roots are in the sectarian academy. I hope Stump’s career isn’t over, because on first impression he seems like he is probably a good man.

Too many of these schools, already struggling, have persuaded themselves that, Republican Party-like, what they need to do is hew to the Eternal Truth ever more stringently. What they are in fact doing is slitting their own throats, making themselves inhospitable laughingstocks in the eyes of those capable scholars who might have been willing to join their faculties — and hastening their inevitable decline.

Yet another account of a family shredded by Christianity’s cultish demands.

They called us down to visit them at their home to confront us face-to-face about our mutual apostasy. Up until this point they hadn’t even realized their daughter had ceased to believe as well, and somehow no matter how many times we reiterated that we had each come to our own conclusions separately (in her case years before I did) this had to be my fault. They wanted me gone, out of her life immediately. Her father told me I was “a dangerous person” and from that night forward I was no longer welcome on their property.

I can’t imagine why, but out-of-nowhere I caught a bug to re-read James Michener’s Space last week. I’m glad I followed the impulse; this is the book you ought to pick-up if you’re looking for some thoughtful beach reading.

A historical fiction about America’s space program, Michener undertakes to capture the whole of a period of huge change in American life — the anti-war protests and drugs and Weathermen against a backdrop of mind-numbing technological progress. Though nobody in the history of the world has actually spoken as Michener characters speak, with 35-years distance it is clear that he was no mere entertainer; Michener saw what was coming. He foresaw the systematic looting and possible ruin of the middle class, he foresaw the political rise of the anti-intellectual evangelical right and its southern locus, he foresaw that cynics seeking political power would target gays as subjects of especial odium, he foresaw that American life would stratify into layers of knowers and resolute know-nothings.

On Michener’s telling the great engine of change turns out to be … fear. Fear of Russia drove the space program forward — there was nothing America could do, then, about Sputnik’s impudent beeps directly over our heads — and it is certainly fear that drove, and still drives, the conservative reaction against technological and social change.

We could use today a lot more of the can-do attitude that put us on the moon, and a lot less sentimental hankering after a Sunnybrook Republic that never actually existed.

Book Two: A Criticism of the Highest Values That Have Prevailed Hitherto
V: The Moral Ideal

§360   Francis of Assist: amorous and popular, a poet who combats the order of rank among souls, in favour of the lowest. The denial of spiritual hierarchy, “all equal before God”. The popular ideals: the good man, the unselfish man, the saint, the sage, the just man. O Marcus Aurelius!

Woe to America! Part One

The article it introduces is severely overwrought, but a good indication of how poorly the loonies are handling defeat.