Occupying Sunday
The sun was shining right in my eyes almost to the point of pain. It was Sunday in downtown Lancaster and the "church" I have been attending was holding a Bible Study for Occupy Lancaster. This service came at the request of the leaders of Occupy Lancaster. I put church in parentheses because this is faith community that seeks to break down the walls of Christian and Non-Christian by routinely getting out from behind our walls. Sometimes we forget how hard it is to go into a church building if we have not been there in a long time.
We make Prodigals clean and shower up and be reverent like Boy Scouts before they can enter in.
I put up a post on Facebook about how I was touched by the sincerity of those who we met at Occupy Lancaster. Almost everyone was employed and not a rabble-rousing free-loader mooching for a free meal. Leave it to Lancaster to have a respectful and kind group of protesters. Someone living in California replied pretty quickly about the nefarious and noxious Occupy Oakland movement as if the actions of that group would bear on my assessment of the local Lancaster folks. It really didn't. I try to judge people individually and not as aggregates. And even if the moral and ethical standards of the local movement in Lancaster were suspect, it leads to a greater question:
When did we start to believe that Jesus only came for good people? Like us? This is a very serious question and one that had better penetrate to the core of our souls and deflate our self-righteous puffery. I often fear that we do not take Jesus's warnings about self-justification seriously enough. It is as if we are blind to the contemporary playing out of first century Jesus interactions in our midst and we miss the moral of the stories by thinking that we are moral. Our morality blinds us to our destitution.
The pastor of the church preached on the Sheep and the Goats (Matthew 25:33). Both had a blindness. The Goats were blind to how Jesus identified in his humanity from infancy in a barn to his crucifixion with criminals in his death with the most broken, and even the worst, of us. When we care for our fellow man and honor the Image of God in them even if they themselves don't, we are acting like Jesus. But, we may not very aware of it. Our graciousness like the sun just shines forth. We give because it is now in our redeemed nature to give. We are not calculating on the scales of salvation how much we need to give to be good enough to escape hellfire. That issue was settled once and for all on the Cross and we had better not forget it. The goats were/are blind to their evil (sins of omission) and the sheep are blind to their charity of commission. Most certainly better to be blind because of the second cause rather than the first.
Comments
-Warren
http://volokh.com/2011/11/09/reforming-higher-education-incentives-stem-majors-and-liberal-arts-majors-the-education-versus-credential-tradeoff/
Reforming Higher Education: Incentives, STEM Majors, and Liberal Arts Majors — the Education versus Credential Tradeoff
I would suggest another option; if you can't cut STEM at a top tier school, get a STEM degree at a mid-tier school, drop the bar until you can get B's and walk out with a degree. I'm sorry, but getting a degree in Sumerian Poetry just so you can get into an MBA program is really stupid advice. If you plan to be a manager, you're going to be managing PEOPLE doing STUFF, you will not be managing or litigating Sumerian Poetry. A degree should lead directly to a job, and you should get a degree leading to a job in something that you are good at or like doing, and it should be a job that requires a degree and/or a job that pays well enough that a degree becomes worth the money you spent for it. Other than this minor quibble, I thought this was a great article!
-Warren
Corporations, a la Dilbert, tend to pay MBA's more than anyone. Thus, the market skews towards that and away from the hard sciences.
I like the acronym STEAM. The Arts are important for imagination, which Einstein noted is more important than intelligence. Steve Jobs took a class in calligraphy at Reed...and that turned into fonts.
So, it is not an either or but all subjects, with some eye on what the employment needs of our culture are as the parameter for Guidance. Plenty of engineers and computer scientists have lost jobs due to overseas outsourcing so there is very good reason why people fear working so hard for a degree where companies can do the end around.