Don’t Force the Celebration at Funerals | Christianity Today
Hijab-Wearing Professor who Left Wheaton College Heads to UVA | NBC Chicago
Baseball’s Endangered Species – The New York Times
Microsoft’s disastrous Tay experiment shows the hidden dangers of AI – Quartz
Busy and distracted? Everybody has been, since at least 1710 | Aeon Essays
…Then don’t read this blog post.
Still there? Good. In all honesty, I will probably watch part of tonight’s NCAA Men’s Basketball National Championship Game. I’m ashamed to say that I will probably enjoy it, especially if Villanova (the local favorite) wins.
But it’s becoming more difficult for me (and many others) to endure watching college sports when the system is designed to take advantage of the marketable skills and talents of young (mostly minority) athletes without compensating them.
In “honor” of the NCG, I’m reblogging one of my posts from a few years ago: Make a Name for Oneself. Here are a couple of links to other important stories in the same vein:
Ask yourself this: In what other industry would we tolerate a bunch of rich white dudes colluding to pay their employees far below the market value of their wages?
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A while ago, I wrote this “parable” intended to highlight the hypocrisy of college athletics. In the wake of the Johnny Manziel autograph scandal, more and more observers are beginning to agree that the system is inherently unfair. Rick Reilly writes in this stellar piece:
The NCAA has very clear rules: Everybody and their gastroenterologists can make money off Johnny Manziel except Manziel himself. The pursuit of wealth is available to every person enrolled at Texas A&M except student-athletes. The whiz pianist, the science prodigy, even the hopeful sportswriter. When I was at the University of Colorado, I worked 40 hours a week at the town newspaper, writing. Nobody threatened to throw me out of school.
Admittedly, the students represent the school in some way, and should be expected to abide by certain standards of behavior. But why should that by definition prevent any legal profiting off of their fame? Non-scholarship athletes are allowed to work, and athletes with other scholarships are allowed to work–why can’t scholarship athletes be permitted to sell their labor or brand?
What we have in college athletics is the mixture of two different sorts of services: education and entertainment. At top athletic schools, the football and basketball programs are highly profitable and are used to support the other athletic programs and the educational ventures of the university.
Without any historical background, it’s not entirely obvious why an institution should be running both an entertainment business for profit and an educational business not-for-profit (leaving aside whether a for-profit model is better for education). Professional franchises try to sell their product and drum up support by associating themselves with a city or state (or region: New England or Carolina). If another franchise moves to that region, they will be required to share profits with the established team for infringing upon their “territorial rights” in that sport.
College franchises sell their product through association with a college, which may extend the reach of their “fan base” beyond a region. College athletics is also billed as a different sort of product–anyone who follows the pro and college versions of football and basketball will know that the games are somewhat different. But there’s also the “spirit” of college athletics, a youth and excitement that the NCAA has been able to roll into a very compelling product.
College athletics began as a way for students to maintain healthy bodies with healthy minds. But with the growth of mass entertainment in college athletics, its profitability caused a specialization. Eventually, colleges ceased to care about a recruit’s academic abilities and focused only on their athletic promise. The student bodies at big state schools have “athletic specialists” whose talents are exploited by others to subsidize the “academic specialists.” This is wrong. Talented athletes should be paid based on the market value of their services.
Incidentally, other countries don’t permit their colleges and universities to be used as free farm-systems for their professional leagues. In Europe, soccer clubs can be formed at the lowest levels and can move up year by year based on their performance. There are no government subsidies for stadia/arenae and no giant college athletic programs.
Why have college athletics at all? Why not separate the two ventures? Or, we could make athletes employees of the university and just pay them based on the value they add to the school, like janitors, professors and presidents? I was amused to learn that the Chilean soccer team, Universidad de Chile, has no affiliation with the university. Let’s split off the education and entertainment businesses, allow the sports teams to use the “brand”–the name of the school–but the players will be paid and can do what they want with their money.
This won’t happen until the NCAA’s draconian restrictions on player compensation are challenged and overturned in courts. I hope that will happen soon. In the meantime, all the wealthy (mostly white!) administrators, pro franchise owners, and TV execs will continue to profit at the expense of the (mostly minority) athletes who are the product.
More interesting reading/listening:
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2012/08/roger_noll_on_t.html
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2007/01/michael_lewis_o_1.html
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UPDATE: It looks like Manziel has been suspended for a half-game–so, basically, nothing at all. Apparently, the page on which Texas A&M announced the statement with the NCAA had an advertisement from which you could purchase an autographed photo of Johnny Manziel. Too perfect. Dan Wetzel has another great column here.
In the Hebrew Wisdom and Poetry class I’m currently teaching, we recently discussed the character called the śaṭan (השטן) in the book of Job. Many of the students were surprised to discover that “śaṭan” in the Hebrew Bible is not a proper name, but rather a role of one of the heavenly beings (האלהים) in YHWH’s heavenly court: “the adversary.” We compared Job 1-2 with the other two references to the śaṭan in the Hebrew Bible: 1 Chronicles 21:1 and Zechariah 3:1-5.
One of my students emailed me some questions after class, asking for clarification on a few points. With his permission, I’m publishing his message and my response.
Dear Benj,
…
I found your statements very interesting, because I had never heard such arguments before, but at the same time I am also confused or troubled about these questions.
I also had the sense that actually quite many of us were surprised about you connecting God and Satan and displaying them as more or less playing for the same team, as well as stating that God is in charge over hell.
I am not sure if I correctly summarized that, so my question is whether you could possibly summarize again what you mentioned in class about Satan and his relationship to God as well as about hell? I think being able to read it would help me to think things through and to understand them better.
Dear Lukas,
Let me say that I probably didn’t present the topic of “the śaṭan” in the most systematic way. Sometimes I feel the need to be extreme in order to shift others’ perception on an issue. Here are a few clarifications.
I do believe that “the adversary/śaṭan” in the Old Testament is the same being as “ho satanas” (the śaṭan) and “ho diabolos” (the devil/slanderer) in the New Testament. However, God’s revelation in Scripture is progressive. When interpreting OT texts, I believe it is important to bracket out the “updated information” we find in the NT—at least temporarily—until we fully grasp what the OT authors are trying to say in their context.
That said, there is continuity between the OT and NT on this issue: nothing said about “the śaṭan” or “the devil” in the NT contradicts what is said in the OT. Some NT passages imbue OT passages with greater significance because we now understand that “the śaṭan” was present in the OT passage in a non-obvious way–sort of like the way we can see Christ or the church in many OT passages once we read with the lens of the NT. For example, we understand that the “serpent” in Genesis 3 and Isaiah 27:1 was “the śaṭan” because of Romans 16:20 and Revelation 20:2. When we look at Isaiah 14:12-14, immediate context indicates that the “Day Star, Son of the Dawn” is the king of Babylon—but Revelation 12 causes Christians to want to see “Śaṭan” or “Lucifer” in Isaiah 14. (I think that’s a legitimate way to read Isaiah 14, but because of typology, not by virtue of direct reference or fulfillment.)
Because of Christian tradition and popular culture, there are a lot of ideas widely held by Christians and non-Christians about Satan, angels and demons that just aren’t biblical, or which have very flimsy biblical support. One of these is the idea that all temptation comes from Satan or demons, and that humans who give in to temptation can at least partially deflect the blame for their sin onto Satan/demons. Scripture teaches that our sinful natures do a great job of tempting us to sin (e.g., Rom 7) without any help from demons, and that there is no temptation that is too great to resist for those of us who have the indwelling of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor 10:13).
Another widespread idea is the notion that Satan governs “hell” or even the present earth that has been “subjected to futility.” But the NT actually teaches that “hell” is a place into which all reprobate (unsaved) humans and demons and Satan will be cast after the final judgment. Satan and the demons don’t have power to cast anyone into the lake of fire or Še’ol/Hades; that is God’s decision—see Matthew 8:28-43 and 10:28; and James 4:12. In fact, I don’t think we can say that anyone right now is “in hell,” if we mean the “lake of fire” in Revelation 20:10-15. Unsaved persons who have died go to some holding place for the dead (Še’ol in Hebrew, Hades in Greek), while they await resurrection to eternal punishment in the lake of fire (Rev 20:11-15).
Satan is active and does have some circumscribed power on earth, as we see from passages like Acts 5:3; 26:18; Romans 16:20; 1 Corinthians 5:5; 1 Timothy 1:20; 1 Peter 5:8; Ephesians 2:2. But even in many of these passages, God is using Satan to accomplish his plans (1 Cor 5:5; 1 Tim 1:20; 2 Cor 12:7; 1 Thess 2:18). To think of God and Satan as opposing forces of nearly equal strength (with God just barely being strong enough to win out) is more akin to dualism that is found in other religions (Zoroastrianism, Taoism) or some pseudo-Christian heresies (Manichaeism).
From these passages (OT and NT) and what we can infer about the differences between the degrees of moral autonomy granted to humans and angelic beings, it seems that at some point before the creation of humanity, God did offer some measure (or moment) of free will to angels, and many—led by one that we now call “Satan”—chose to rebel. Yet God is still using those fallen angelic beings for his purposes, as we see in 1 Chronicles 21:1; Zechariah 3; Job 1-2; and the NT passages mentioned above.
Anyway, granting Satan and demons more freedom (as many try to do) does not absolve God of responsibility when we consider the problem of evil, because ultimately we must ask why God chose to create angelic and human beings with some capacity to choose evil.
I would encourage you to read more in the area of systematic theology to see what other scholars have to say about the śaṭan. With the world of “theological scholarship,” I am quite consciously an Old Testament scholar trying to “protect” OT texts from systematic theologians trying to import an NT perspective on the śaṭan. And yet, I am a Christian, so I must acknowledge the whole counsel of God and the consistency of OT and NT! But from what I recall from my Intro to Systematic Theology courses back in undergrad and seminary days, I think you’ll find what I’ve said about the NT’s presentation of “the śaṭan” to be in the mainstream of evangelical scholarly opinion (even though at odds with popular understandings). Let me know if I’m mistaken about that.
An excerpt from N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 711-712.
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The early Christian understanding of Easter was not that this sort of thing was always likely to happen sooner or later, and finally it did. It was not that a particular human being happened to possess even more unusual powers than anyone had imagined before. Nor did they suppose it was a random freak, like a monkey sitting at a typewriter and finally producing All’s Well that Ends Well (after, we must suppose, several near-misses). When they said that Jesus had been raised from the dead the early Christians were not saying, as many critics have supposed, that the god in whom they believed had simply decided to perform a rather more spectacular miracle, an even greater display of ‘supernatural’ power, than they had expected. This was not a special favour performed for Jesus because his god liked him more than anyone else. The fact that dead people do not ordinarily rise is itself part of early Christian belief, not an objection to it. The early Christians insisted that what had happened to Jesus was precisely something new; was, indeed, the start of a whole new mode of existence, a new creation. The fact that Jesus’ resurrection was, and remains, without analogy is not an objection to the early Christian claim. It is part of the claim itself.
The challenge for any historian, when faced with the question of the rise of Christianity, is much more sharply focused than is often supposed. It is not simply a matter of whether one believes in ‘miracles’, or in the supernatural, in general, in which case (it is supposed) the resurrection will be no problem. If anyone ever reaches the stage where the resurrection is in that sense no problem, we can be sure that they have made a mistake somewhere, that they have constructed a world in which this most explosive and subversive of events – supposing it to have occurred -can be domesticated and put on show, like a circus elephant or clever typing monkey, as a key exhibit in the church’s collection of supernatural trophies. The resurrection of Jesus then becomes either ‘a trip to a garden and a lovely surprise’, a happy ending to a fairy story, or a way of legitimating different types of Christianity or different leaders within it. No: the challenge comes down to a much narrower point, not simply to do with worldviews in general, or with ‘the supernatural’ in particular, but with the direct question of death and life, of the world of space, time and matter and its relation to whatever being there may be for whom the word ‘god’, or even ‘God’, might be appropriate. Here there is, of course, no neutrality. Any who pretend to it are merely showing that they have not understood the question.
I haven’t posted in a couple of weeks. It is with sorrow that I must report that my father-in-law, Rev. Joe Hesh, passed away last Tuesday afternoon, March 8, 2016. On Sunday, he took a turn for the worse, and by Monday afternoon it was apparent that his kidneys and liver had shut down. He passed away peacefully, not in any apparent physical pain, surrounded by family and close friends.
Even though we have hope of resurrection because of what Christ accomplished, death’s sting is still bitter right now. We are grateful for the support of family and friends as we grieve together.
I have copied Joe’s obituary below.
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Joseph McLean Hesh, 61, of Perkasie, PA, died on Tuesday, March 8, 2016 at LifeQuest Nursing Center in Quakertown, PA, after a three-year battle with brain cancer.
He was the loving husband of Claudia (Wallies) Hesh for 40 years. Joe was born in Macomb, IL to the late William L. and Charlotte (McLean) Hesh. Joe will be greatly missed by his daughter, Corrie Giffone (Benjamin) of Telford; his grandchildren, Daniel and Elizabeth Giffone; his brother, Andy Hesh (Jeri) of Pekin, IL; and many beloved aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, cousins, and in-laws.
Joe was raised in Pekin, IL, and graduated from Pekin High School, Class of 1972. He then earned degrees from Illinois State University (B.S., Music Therapy, 1976) and Dallas Theological Seminary (Th.M., Old Testament, 1981).
Joe served as youth pastor at Scofield Memorial Church in Dallas, TX, and then at Pulpit Rock Church in Colorado Springs, CO. He moved to Pennsylvania in 1995 to serve as Pastor of Arts and Worship at Calvary Church in Souderton, and later at Chelten Church in Dresher, retiring in 2015.
A professional musician from a very young age, Joe played classical and pop/jazz music on piano, guitar and clarinet. He was also a songwriter, composing and performing hundreds of original songs, and recording over a dozen albums. He performed at countless church services, retreats, mission trips, conferences, and concerts.
As a significant part of his vocation as a Christian minister, Joe embraced his calling to serve many young musicians and artists as both teacher and mentor. Formally, he served as adjunct music faculty at Cairn University (Langhorne, PA) and Immaculata University (Malvern, PA). He also taught private lessons in piano, guitar, and composition. In 2010, he founded a non-profit, Joe Hesh Ministries, Inc., with the mission of helping churches, worship leaders and artists in the establishment, development and growth of church worship ministries.
In the last few years of his career, Joe returned to his training in music therapy, researching the effects of music on the brain. He composed several albums of instrumental music informed by recent academic research on brain trauma, and his music is currently used in educational settings to aid students who have experienced significant trauma.
Relatives and friends may meet the family at Chelten Church, 1601 N. Limekiln Pike, Dresher, PA 19025, on Monday, March 21 from 5:00-7:00pm, or on Tuesday, March 22 from 1:00-3:00pm. A memorial service will be at 4:00pm on Tuesday, March 22, followed by a private reception.
Memorial contributions may be made to a project that was dear to Joe’s heart: the Music Therapy Program at Lakeside Educational Network. Checks may be made out to: Lakeside Educational Network (memo: “Music Therapy Program”), 240 New York Drive, Fort Washington, PA 19034.
Arrangements by: Anders-Detweiler Funeral Home & Crematory, 130 East Broad Street, Souderton, Pennsylvania 18964. To send online condolences to the family, visit http://www.andersfh.com.
New Video Series Shows The Reality Of Abortion Procedures | The Daily Caller
Will robots cause massive unemployment? | Johan Fourie’s blog
South Africa: Student Protesters Force Their University to Close – The New York Times
The real danger of Brexit | The Economist
Mixed marriages are changing the way we think about our race – The Washington Post
Desmond Tutu’s warning shot: Jacob Zuma and ANC worse than Apartheid Govt
RIP: Was Justice Scalia the Last Great Supreme Court Justice? | Cato @ Liberty: “Now, two qualifications are paramount for possible Supreme Court justices: 1) youth; 2) ideological conformity. The grueling nomination process also means that prospective nominees must have led ideologically milquetoast lives, never having said too much to push the wrong people’s buttons, but having said just enough to convince the party that they are a predictable, party-line vote. Certainly, a Scalia nomination today would have no chance of winning approval. Truly brilliant legal minds like Scalia help create the intellectual framework for our judicial system, and I fear that we will not see many more like him.”
Two stories about privacy and cybersecurity:
News from Eastern Europe: cause for concern, or overblown?
Who’s advising these people on PR? Maybe they just can’t help themselves: The best response yet to the pro-abort freak-out over that Doritos Superbowl ad | Blogs | LifeSite
How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did – Forbes
“What happens when 334 linguists, lexicographers, grammarians and etymologists gather in a stuffy lecture hall on a Friday night to debate the lexical trends of the year? They become the unlikely heroes of the new gender revolution.” She? Ze? They? What’s In a Gender Pronoun – The New York Times.
The latest chapters in the Wheaton-Hawkins controversy:
The Pope and the Patriarch of Moscow are meeting in Cuba:
Happy International Septuagint Day!
I’ve been fascinated by the LXX (Septuagint) for many years, but only recently started studying it in earnest.
If you’re new to the Septuagint, read it and read about it here.
I’ve collected links to some of my older writings on the LXX.
I presented a paper at the national meeting of ETS in November that grapples with some of the uncomfortable implications of Septuagint studies for conservative Protestants.
What Arab Christians Think of Wheaton-Hawkins ‘Same God’ Debate | Christianity Today
Thurber: a man ahead of his time. Donald Trump and “The Greatest Man in the World” – LA Times
Important news: Dunkin’ Donuts, Baskin-Robbins Brands Expand to South Africa – NBC News
“The NFL divisional playoff action once again demonstrated that NFL coaches are terrible at basic win-maximizing tactical decisions.” NFL Coaches Are Getting Away With Crimes Against Middle-School Math | FiveThirtyEight
think hard, think well 