bearing blog

bear – ing n 1 the manner in which one comports oneself; 2 the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit; 3 a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~]; 4 pl comprehension of one’s position, environment, or situation; 5 the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].

Beer for beginners, part VII: Stouts and other British stuff.
(part I, part II, part III, part IV, part V, part VI)

Well, I've gotten quite behind in my beerblogging, so I thought I would check in.

Stouts

I think before I started this project I had only familiarized myself with one stout: Guinness, of course. It had been a long time since I'd had one, and with the exception of a sip here and there from Mark's glass over the past few years — back when I was still ordering wine in restaurants — I'd hardly ever tasted any other kind. But I remembered liking Guinness, so I was looking forward to revisiting it.

Stouts are dark ales, roasty-tasting, with notes of chocolate or coffee. They can look almost black in the glass, which is kind of intimidating — but fear not! Stouts are often quite low in alcohol, so they're perfect for a lightweight like me.

(Guinness, in fact, can compete with light beers in lightness:
- 16 oz of Miller High Life Lite: 4.2 percent alcohol, 147 calories
- 16 oz of Guinness Stout: 4 percent alcohol, 168 calories
Seriously, if you want a light beer, wouldn't you rather have the Guinness?)

I wanted to try a new beer, though, so I bought some Murphy's Irish Stout in a draught can and started with that. The Murphy's was… oddly boring to me. Mark liked it, but I could not shake the impression — between the teensy bubbles from the widget can, and the flat taste, that the beer was too cold to taste it properly. It was like the flavor was there, somewhere, but I just couldn't get to it. I don't think I'll buy it again.

I tried Samuel Smith's Oatmeal Stout and liked that very much. It seemed almost thick and viscous. "It's not, and you should know better," scolded Mark, "the viscosity of beer can't possibly be much different from water. It's not like it has a significant fraction of polymer suspended in it or something."

"Then what makes it that way?" I asked. "I can see when I pour it that it's not obviously viscous, but it feels that way in the mouth. Like cream." I took another pull and thought. "Could it be the bubbles?" I asked, beginning to ponder the Stokes-Einstein equation, but mostly I just wanted to drink the beer.

Then I tried Left Hand Brewing Company's Milk Stout. A milk stout has extra, unfermentable sugars added to it — usually lactose. This makes for a sweet, chocolatey sort of beer. The LHBC milk stout was nice, coffee-ish, gently bitter, and pleasant. It doesn't need food, it's good all by itself. It had that same, tricky-to-describe feeling of viscosity in the mouth, almost sort of swelling up and rolling over the tongue. I liked it a lot.

A milk stout that you might find easily in an ordinary beer store is Samuel Adams Cream Stout. It's not quite as special as the LHBC Milk Stout, but you can tell it's the same style, and it's very pleasant.

As I work my way through styles of beer, I am noticing something very useful — almost a general principle. And it's this:

It doesn't seem possible to go very wrong with a Sam Adams beer.

Practically every style I've tried, the Sam Adams version has been a sturdy, reliable, not-very-exciting, but accurate example. The cream stout is a serviceable cream stout. The Noble Pils is a decent pilsner beer. Plain old ordinary Boston Lager is a fine beer to drink if you just want A Beer.

This is very useful to know, because Sam Adams is, well, mass-market beer. You can get it all over the country, and in a lot of restaurants it might be the only beer fancier than Miller. If someone offers to pick up some beer for you and says "What do you like?" and you don't want to sound really picky or send them on a wild goose chase, you could say "You know, I like a lot of stuff, maybe some Sam Adams" and whatever they get will probably be fine.

I didn't say it would be exciting, just that it would be fine.

But I digress. After drinking some more Irish stouts and generally being disappointed with them, I stopped to get a four-pack of Guinness Draught cans so I could make some Irish stew. Opened one of the cans to drink while I cooked and —

— well, I had forgotten. Guinness is really good. There is a reason why it is the cliché Irish stout. It's the definitive Irish stout. It's full-flavored and lovely, and better than any of the other ones I tried. I don't know if I will ever buy another [Irish] stout again (at least until I visit the UK someday). Guinness, I'm sorry I was unfaithful. It's only you from here on out.

There are still a lot of other stouts left in the world to try — still haven't delved into the world of chocolate stouts — but for the time being I have to move on.

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English Pale Ales

Right before I went to the beer store to shop for stouts, I asked Mark, "What style of beer should we try next?"

"Can't we do IPAs?" he asked.

I decided that we couldn't properly study hoppy, bitter India Pale Ales until we first explored the English ales that are their parents. So instead of coming home with a cart full of IPA, I came home with bottles of Fuller's London Pride and Fuller's Extra Special Bitter (ESB). I also had draught cans of Tetley's English Ale, "Old Speckled Hen," and Boddington's Pub Ale .

Then I got one four-pack of Samuel Smith's India Ale to appease Mark.

I thought the Fullers ESB had a pineapple-y nose, but I liked it. Similar reaction to the Fuller's London Pride. They both have a sort of fruitiness to them.

I wanted to like "Old Speckled Hen" because of its cool name and retro can, but in the end I didn't. It had a strange artificially-sweet note to it… couldn't quite place it… Cotton candy? Marshmallows? Circus peanuts, I think.

On the other hand, the Tetley's appealed to me a lot. Even though I couldn't quite say why. It's very smooth and light, easy to drink, and low-alcohol; it's pale without a lot of flavor, but still nice — like drinking iced tea, I guess. I can drink a whole pint without feeling it. It was really good with a sandwich when I was thirsty. I kept coming back to the fridge over the next couple of weeks, wondering "Maybe I still might have a Tetley's hiding in back?"

The Boddington's is probably even better, but it's really the Tetley's I enjoyed the most.

Finally, the Sam Smith. It struck me as a perfect balance between malty and hoppy. Mark still prefers American IPAs, which punch you in the mouth with hops: "Too hoppy to enjoy the malt," he said, "and not hoppy enough to be the kind of beer I like." But I thought it was just right. I have food notes for it: we had it with a chickpea-and-chicken stew, seasoned with coriander and cumin. The India Ale added a citrusy note that worked nicely. In my opinion.

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On deck: Bocks and Belgians — abbey ales, that is. Planning to open a dubbel tonight and have it with sausages and grapes.
Oct 28, 2012

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3 comments on Beer for beginners, part VII: Stouts and other British stuff.
Lillian Gilbreth, the original domestic engineer.

Neat article at Slate about how she revolutionized the American kitchen.

To quantify the efficiency of the Kitchen Practical, and a later, similar kitchen designed for the New York Herald Tribune Magazine, Gilbreth used a metric from the motion study of the production line: steps. As described in the 1931 Better Homes Manual,

The test of the efficiency of the new kitchen was made with strawberry shortcake…The cake was first made in a typically haphazard kitchen…Then an exactly similar shortcake was prepared in the Herald Tribune Kitchen, which has the same equipment and utensils as the other kitchen, but has them arranged for efficiency. The results of this test were so startling as to be almost unbelievable. The number of kitchen operations had been cut from 97 to 64. The number of actual steps taken had been reduced from 281 to 45—less than one-sixth!

…In the 1940s, what Gilbreth called “circular routing” became known as the kitchen “work triangle,” a concept that designers still rely on today.

I feel a certain kinship with this woman’s style. And if only she had gotten her way with respect to countertop heights, we short cooks would have even more to thank her for.

Oct 26, 2012

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10 comments on Lillian Gilbreth, the original domestic engineer.
Administration and reception.

Canon lawyer Ed Peters writes at First Things about the appropriateness of denying Communion to Catholics engaged in public behavior that would seem to exclude them. Mr. Peters points out that this issue has been around for quite a long time, and was first raised in the case of Catholics who have been divorced and are now living in civil marriages.

This problem of irregular public relationships has certainly not gone away, but now in the spotlight is the case of Catholic politicians who ardently support abortion, euthanasia, the redefinition of marriage to include unions that cannot possibly be marital in the sense that Catholics understand them, and other evils that (unlike harm-causing acts such as warfare and executions) cannot be reconciled with any interpretation of Catholic moral doctrine.

Many Catholics who support untraditional marriages, Pelosi’s near-perfect pro-abortion politics, or Rainbow Sash-style activism profess outrage at seeing the Eucharist “used as a weapon” against fellow Catholics. Others, however, are appalled at seeing such markedly contrarian Catholics take Holy Communion.

Mr. Peters states that he, along with Raymond Cardinal Burke, holds the view that sometimes a minister has the duty to withhold Holy Communion. He adds, “Against Burke’s view and mine stand some scattered negative episcopal demurrals (Cardinals Roger Mahony, emeritus of Los Angeles, and Donald Wuerl of Washington, D.C., come to mind) and some short essays by academics.” Here we have Catholics disagreeing in what seems to be good faith about a matter of public import; Mr. Peters, the canon lawyer, is going to argue his side from the text of canon law.

I think Mr. Peters puts his finger on the point of contention (at least among Catholics) here:

Participation in Holy Communion is achieved by two related but distinct acts: the action of a member of the faithful in seeking Communion (reception) and the action of the minister in giving Communion (administration). These two actions are not only performed by different persons, they are governed by different canon laws. Virtually all confusion over Communion can be traced to the failure to keep these two actions distinct.

Canon 915 governs administration; Canon 916 governs reception.

Mr. Peters makes a good case that, yes, ministers have a duty to withhold Communion from certain individuals under certain circumstances, and the highly publicized cases of Catholic politicians who are either living in irregular unions or fervent supporters of legalized abortion have largely fallen under these circumstances. But he also points out that the conditions under which Communion may be withheld are, indeed, narrow.

…[T]he conditions requiring Communion to be withheld must be simultaneously satisfied before the minister may licitly withhold the Eucharist from a Catholic approaching for it publicly. To invoke canon 915 [the conditions requiring Communion to be withheld] against a member of the faithful who does not satisfy all of the terms of canon 915 is….to disregard the plain text of the law and, as St. Thomas warned centuries ago, to violate the fundamental rights of the faithful.

….[I]f a member of the faithful approaches Communion publicly and gives no indication of intending an external act of desecration, even the minister’s moral certitude that the would-be recipient suffers grave moral disarray does not permit him to withhold Communion. His grief at being a material cooperator in sacrilege may be joined to our Lord’s grief at so many unworthy receptions of himself.

This is important because the public outcry against withholding Communion has often been along the lines of “Doesn’t the Church know that everyone is a sinner? If they start withholding Communion from people who live in second marriages or have the ‘wrong’ political views now, maybe they’ll withhold it for something else less serious next!”

It is important to be clear that the minister does not get to judge the entire conscience or conduct of the Catholic who approaches for Communion. The only judgment he gets to make is what is outlined in Canon 915. Ambiguous cases, Peters argues, “must be decided in favor of receiving the Sacrament.”

One might argue that it is silly to stress the limitations of Canon 915 when, it seems, the problem we are living in is one of laxity, not overzealousness, in protecting the Sacrament from sacrilege and in protecting the faithful from scandal.

I think it is important, though, to point out that the rules, properly enforced, contain limitations which are meant to protect the right of the faithful to receive the sacrament. It is also scandalous to give the impression that bishops and pastors have the power to unilaterally and arbitrarily decide to withhold the sacrament. They do not.

That some of them appear to unilaterally and arbitrarily decide not to withhold the sacrament — in situations with no ambiguity — contributes to the impression of lawlessness. We would all be better off if we stuck to the text; it is there for a reason, in Catholic jurisprudence just as in civil jurisprudence.

Oct 25, 2012

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1 comment on Administration and reception.
Paternity.

Some time ago I was complaining to Mark about the ladies in the mall who ask me when I troop by with my four children, “Are they all yours?”

He asked me, “You’re always talking about that. Does it really happen all that often?”

“Yes, it really does,” I insisted,”almost every time I go out in public where people have a chance to talk to me.”

I could tell he was skeptical, so I went on. “I guess people like to bother women about things like that more than men. You do the grocery shopping with them all every week — doesn’t anyone ever ask you if they are all yours?”

He replied dryly, “When it comes to fathers, the subtext of that question would be a bit different, don’t you think?”

I guess he has a point…

Oct 24, 2012

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9 comments on Paternity.
Darwin’s liberal arts program.
Darwin is writing about his own ideas for a redesigned “modern liberal arts curriculum:”

Last week I tried to expand a bit on the concept of the Liberal Arts as “the skills of a free man”. I described the purpose of the ancient and medieval liberal arts education as being to develop a general and adaptable set of skills that allowed the liberally educated person to understand and reason about the world, and I attempted to contrast this type of education from being trained to perform some one task or set of tasks well.

The classic set of liberal arts is: Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric, Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, Astronomy

Some of these disciplines are defined rather differently now than they were in the pre-modern world, and the modern world presents its own particular challenges to understanding, so I think it’s worth thinking a little on how one might update this list.

Darwin goes on to list thoughts on a slightly different set of arts: history and literature; writing and rhetoric; philosophy; language, grammar and linguistics; mathematics; natural science; computer science; and social sciences. Please go and read his thoughts; this post is my response.

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Even though I took a concentration in the sciences in high school, and went on to major in engineering, I appreciate and share the goal of producing broadly educated individuals who have a sense of the way different disciplines interrelate and who have had practice in writing, in forming arguments, and in taking account of the whole human person in their work in the world.

But I don’t think liberal arts colleges always succeed in this goal, particularly today. I think there are three major problems here:
- Number one: the generally leftward political slant of most liberal arts department in the country. Slant is inevitable, but it shouldn’t always be in one direction, and departments ought to conscientiously try to correct it.
- Number two: Education isn’t broad, general, and adaptable, and it limits the ability of the educated person to think and reason about the world, when mathematics and physical science are absent or only afterthoughts. It’s utterly ridiculous to call an education “broad” and “adaptable” when the graduates have only a vague understanding of the physical laws that govern the world they live in; a poverty of knowledge about the human body, the organisms that inhabit its surroundings, and the materials that make those surroundings; and ineptitude with the mathematical language in which we express relationships among all these things.
- Number three: the declining academic standards of those colleges. Some of this is associated with the leftist slant, in my opinion — not that leftward slants are necessarily less academically rigorous than rightward slants, but “slant” is generally expressed by ignoring whole points of view and areas of study. Theology, Western civ, and military history, once important aspects of their fields, are gathering dust. If it was a rightward slant, we’d see different things ignored. That’s part of it. Another part of it is simple grade inflation and reduced reading loads. The physical sciences and engineering just have not suffered from this as much.
[Editing note, 2025: It’s a different world out there now. And yes, different things are being ignored when the rightward slant becomes more visible!]

To sum up: I don’t think a lot of liberal arts colleges really are delivering what Darwin describes as the mission of the liberal arts.

I haven’t much advice about how to fix political slant or grade inflation, but I do know something about the sciences and mathematics. And here I will try to strengthen my liberal-education cred a little bit more: Even though in college I specialized in chemical engineering, and even though in graduate school I had to get even more narrowly specialized, at heart I am a science generalist: I enjoy being at least a little bit conversant in everything much more than I enjoyed becoming an expert in a tiny little area of materials science. This is one of the reasons why staying home to educate my children attracted me more strongly than going on to look for work in research, when it was time to make a decision. I could maybe make an argument for a liberal sciences major to complement the liberal arts major: why not develop a generally adaptable set of skills that would allow the person so educated to understand and reason about the physical world and its laws? (Bonus: the objective nature of physical laws insulates such a program, just a bit more, against political slant and grade inflation.) I could even point to my chemical engineering major and suggest that it comes pretty close to actually embodying a liberal science/engineering major, since the curriculum is a fairly broad combination of science and technology areas (particularly if you take biology electives). It’s really why I felt so comfortable there as an undergraduate.

Here are some thoughts. I am cribbing a little bit from what I wrote in Darwin’s comboxes.

Mathematics. The key to making math work as a liberal art is to think of it as a means of expanding cognitive abilities. It isn’t all calculation – it is a means of understanding the world and what is in it, how stuff moves around, interferes with other things, increases and decreases. Many people don’t get to see the beauty of mathematics, even if someone has been wise enough to show them its utility.

MrsDarwin wrote in response to that comment,

One of the ways I’ve tried to make our homeschooling different from my own experience is that I’m trying to present math as a mode of thinking, not just as an exercise in memorization….

I, like Darwin, worked my own way through Saxon Math, but although I learned much about following formulas exactly as they were presented to me, I learned little to nothing about mathematics as “understanding the world and what is in it, how stuff moves around, interferes with other things, increases and decreases”….But that could also be because math and science had never, not even in my early years at school, been presented as anything other than formulas or drudge. I do think that if I had been inculcated with an interest in, if not a love for, math from an early age, my later studies would have borne more fruit. But I also think that having a good instructor would have been key.

Mind you, not every scientist or engineer winds up with the attitude toward math that I have. But my experience was that (except for proof-based geometry and much later, in graduate-level continuum mechanics, which sounds like science and was taught by an aerospace engineering professor but is really math) it wasn’t in my mathematics classes that the “beauty” of math happened. It was in science and engineering classes. It is in the study of “stuff” that it becomes clear how math works its magic on it: setting limits on the world, describing how that stuff moves around, increases and decreases. Writing a mass balance on a differential element of a spherical shell — a basic problem in introductory chemical engineering — always felt beautiful to me.

Yeah, I am kind of a weirdo. Please don’t roll your eyes at me.

That being said, I would think that proof-based geometry would tie in neatly to the liberal arts curriculum. You could easily put a historical emphasis or logic emphasis on it, or even use it to substitute for a different type of logic course. I plan to use proof-based geometry as the main way of including logic in my homeschool curriculum.

But geometry is so useful with such wide application that it goes beyond logic. Geometry, the calculus specific to understanding related rates, and maybe a study of functions — any of these could be applied to a wide range of intellectual activities.

Sciences. If you have to only have one science, I nominate physics. For one thing, it gives you a shot of putting all that mathematics in context — of working together with mathematics to demonstrate how we use it to grasp the world. For another thing, even elementary Newtonian physics does a good job of demonstrating how things are not always as they seem — how we become fooled by the specifics around us into misunderstanding general laws. Air resistance and friction and frames of reference create so many red herrings! For a third thing, it’s the most “generally applicable” of all sciences. Biology is just chemistry at bottom, and chemistry is just physics at bottom. For yet another thing, it encourages the contemplation of the fundamental nature of the material world. It is the interface of creation.

But since “general” is the aim, it might be better to have a little physics, a little chemistry, a little bio, and then maybe an elective in some other area of science.

How to design such a course in order to create scientifically literate citizens would be instructive. And difficult: to take two whole semesters of the chemistry program, for instance, barely scratches the surface of chemistry. You would want to design it from scratch, not just rely on the introductory material that science majors have to take. You want a “chemistry for liberal arts majors” that isn’t just code for “chemistry for people who hate math and need an easy way to get the science credit the stupid college says they have to have.” And in many universities that would be hard: the chemistry department will want to save its best teachers for its own students (the chemistry majors). So unless you have buy-in from the department chair, and professors who have a passion for sharing their subject with students in other majors, it’ll be so hard to put together a quality science series.

Languages. In countries where English is not the spoken language, I would require the study of English for the same reasons that the medievals studied Latin and Greek: it is a modern-day lingua Franca. But here in English-speaking North America, I would advise learning a second language: not so much for the ability to converse in the language or to read its literature, but for the cognitive development and deep knowledge of “how language works” that comes from translating one’s thoughts into another idiom. I don’t think you can really understand your own language until you have studied a different one for long enough to get its grammar and it’s mode of thought. Sure, you could learn about language by studying linguistics instead. I have never taken linguistics, so I can’t really judge. But my instinct is to say that you can learn enough of what is generally applicable about language by delving into the process of learning one language well.

Computer science. Darwin had some thoughts about this in his post. I agree with them. If you are going to have a basic understanding of the social forces that shape the modern world, then at this point in history you need to have an understanding of computing. I suggested “a notion of the algorithm” as the fundamental concept around which to build a liberal computing art. Darwin has some more ideas. Whatever you include, I think it would be instructive to include a little bit of computer programming: just enough to demonstrate the thought process that goes into instructing a computer to execute step-by-step instructions. See how a loop works, and an if-then command. Experience the frustration of accidentally dividing by zero. Debug something: discover how important accuracy really is when you are dealing with a machine that cannot guess what you really meant. Understand a tiny bit of what makes human intelligence so unlike machine language, and appreciate the human accomplishment that is inventing computer languages.

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I think what I have written here demonstrates a piece of my educational philosophy, or maybe you could call it a bias, or a theme that pervades my understanding of learning. It is this: To acquire mastery of a skill is a way to acquire generally applicable knowledge.

This has certainly played out in my own life. I could not appreciate the general beauty and utility of mathematics until I exercised my mathematical knowledge in wrestling with physics and engineering problems. I could not have taught myself Latin and Spanish (enough to teach them to children) without the experience I had being taught French — a specialization! — to fluency. To the extent that I understand the notion of an algorithm, the process of formulating a problem in the way a machine can understand, and other abstract aspects of computer science, I understand them because I have written computer programs, and struggled to debug and improve them.

I think you can’t really learn linguistics until you’ve learned to speak a language. I think you can’t really say you appreciate music until you’ve attempted to play an instrument well.

You might argue, well, linguistics is more than learning the grammar and vocabulary of one single language. Music is far more than convincing a French horn to emit the notes written on the page. Mathematics is more than a mass balance. And so forth and so on. You need context.

Yes. You need context. But I think it isn’t so terribly hard to start with a practical skill and work outward to generalize it. One could argue that the necessary context is provided by acquiring practical skills in a variety of fields — as mathematics, physics, and philosophy work together to create context for the understanding of creation.

Or we could put it this way. The liberal arts are supposed to educe an individual who has a general and adaptable set of skills. I argue that to be able to specialize — to be able to dig deeper — to be able to apply knowledge — to make the abstract practical and concrete — to check one’s theories against the problem of the physical universe is itself a “generally applicable skill” that is utterly necessary in order to reason about the world.

And you can’t acquire that generally applicable skill without practice specializing, without practice developing expertise in something, without practice in “practical skills” here and there, without asking yourself if reality confirms that your thoughts are correct.
Oct 22, 2012

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No comments on Darwin’s liberal arts program.
The suspension of reliability.

I pray the Divine Office only sporadically, but today I managed to get away to the Perpetual Adoration chapel long enough to “do” Prime and Lauds back-to-back. The D.O. always feels to me as if it’ll be a chore to get through, right up until the moment that I finish arranging the bookmarks (or in today’s case, a crumpled index card and a stubby pencil) to mark the day’s pages and settle in to begin. Then I am always instantly glad, fed and watered when I didn’t know my own hunger and thirst. I don’t know why this experience has to keep repeating itself; you would think I would have learned by now; but that “chore” feeling comes back day after day, even though it is always followed by the “refreshment” feeling — that is, when I do manage to trudge over to the chair and open the book. I don’t always make the trudge. And every time I do, I wonder why on earth not.

Because of this conversation I keep having with myself, I typically experience the Invitatory Psalm (Ps. 95, the opening psalm for each day’s prayer) the same way every time I pick up the breviary: sheepishly, like a kid who’s been reminded for the umpteenth time about the same fault.

“Today, listen to the voice of the Lord: Do not grow stubborn, as your fathers did in the wilderness, when at Meriba and Massah they challenged me and provoked me, although they had seen all of my works.”

Complain, complain, complain. That’s me. And surprised every day to taste water in the desert.

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It’s unusual that the Invitatory sparks a new thought, but it happened to me today, so I’ll share. The Invitatory psalm contains this text, excerpted by me to highlight what jumped out at me today:

Today, listen to the voice of the Lord:

Do not grow stubborn, as your fathers did in the wilderness…

I said, “They are a people whose hearts go astray and they do not know my ways.”

So I swore in my anger, “They shall not enter into my rest.”

Today (Saturday, week IV) the antiphon repeated after each stanza is

Let us listen to the voice of God; let us enter into his rest.

I got to thinking about the cause and effect implied in these stanzas, and how we are to read them.

One of the problems of interpretation of the Old Testament is how frequently it explicitly depicts God changing his mind about things, reacting in response to some action or plea of human beings. So, for instance, we have God “repenting” or “regretting” that He had made man, in Genesis 6 (the story of the flood); and we have the book of Jonah, where it says God “relented” or “repented” of His threat to destroy Nineveh. Here is another one, where God is angered — has a change of heart, so to speak — in response to the stubbornness of the people.

It is not philosophically straightforward to deal with these images of a God who can change His mind, at least not when you take it as an article of faith — as Christians do — that God is eternal, perfect, unchanged and unchangeable. Christian philosophers can and do deal with it, but it is one of those mysteries that can be approached many different ways.

The antiphon “Let us listen to the voice of God; let us enter into his rest,” which is, by the way, a prayerful response to Scripture rather than Scripture itself, is not just a response we can make with our voices; it’s also a suggestion for a response we can make with our intellect to the “problem” of an eternal, perfect being who nonetheless responds and reacts to mortal, imperfect ones. The antiphon voices absolute confidence that, if we listen to the voice of God, then we will enter into His rest. The one follows the other naturally — as day follows night — well, maybe it is really “supernaturally,” but what I want to get across is this idea: that the very nature of “listening to the voice of God” is that it forms you into a being who “will enter into His rest.”

If that’s so, then we can look at the Psalm and perhaps perceive the opposite side of the coin, the choice. The opposite of “listen to the voice of the Lord” is “grow stubborn” like the people in the wilderness, specifically as in the episode at Meriba and Massah (see Exodus 17 to delve more deeply into the allusion). A person who fails to listen, who grows stubborn in this way, who “challenges” and “provokes” God despite having seen His works, perhaps causes himself to become the sort of person whose heart goes astray, who doesn’t come to know God’s ways — note that the people have “seen all of [his] works” but “do not know [his] ways,” an intriguingly deliberate distinction.

It is because of the condition of their hearts and intellects that God is said to swear in His anger that they shall not enter into His rest.

And here I think maybe the “anger” of God is, from within a more primitive concept of God as changeable, anger-able, a way of expressing a consequence that is written right into the nature of human beings and therefore into the nature of the relationship between God and human beings (because that relationship is part of our nature). If we do not listen to the voice of God, if we grow stubborn and our hearts go astray, we will not enter into His rest — we simply will not because we cannot, because listening to Him is a prerequisite for acquiring the capability.

That the writers of the story understood this as a face of God’s “anger” may have been poetic. It may have reflected the limited way that they could conceive of a divine being. But it would be consistent with a belief that God was predictable and reliable. Remember Psalm 19, where the heavens declare the glory of God? Or in Psalm 50, where the heavens proclaim his justice, for God himself is the judge? The heavens are beautiful, vast, and the source of all our light — but I think maybe the defining characteristic of “the heavens” for ancient peoples was their regularity: the rising of the sun and its setting, the swinging of the stars through the years: the reservoir of lodestars and timepieces; of constellations that appeared exactly where people looked for them, as long as anyone could remember. If the heavens declare the righteousness of God, then surely one aspect of this righteousness is reliability, predictability; each day has its night, and each failing has its consequence.

If this is one way of interpreting the manifestation of divine anger: as the consequence that is only to be expected; well, then what can mercy be but a miracle?

Oct 20, 2012

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5 comments on The suspension of reliability.
Political roasting and self-roasting.

This year's keynote speakers at the annual Alfred E. Smith ("Al Smith") memorial dinner, an extremely high-end charity fundraiser for Catholic charities in New York, were the two major-party presidential candidates. Both President Obama and Mr. Romney delivered funny speeches, each aiming barbs at himself as well as at the other. You can watch them below (each is 8-10 minutes long):

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Sorry about the ads, if you see any.

A couple of thoughts about this kind of thing.

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Yeah, they don't write their own speeches. But there are two things that speech writers can't provide:

(1) Delivery and comic timing.

(2) The final decision whether to use, or not use, a joke that is simply bad: mean, or inappropriate, or unfunny.

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I don't often let my kids (all twelve and under at this point) watch political rhetoric, whether in stump speeches or in debates. At this age, I like to expose them to reliably good rhetoric, and to form them in the idea of what politics and debate should be. Respectful of persons, even though cognizant of differences; logically structured; comprehending the opponent on his own terms rather than setting up strawmen.

But I was glad to show these videos to my two oldest children. I think it displayed both men at their best, coming together with good humor for a good cause, but without ignoring (in fact, highlighting) the real differences between them. I also thought the ends of both speeches, where they turned serious to pay tribute to the good work done by their hosts, neatly demonstrated some of the differences between the men. Mr. Romney's hat tip to the protection of the unborn, and the applause it received, did not go unnoticed.

+ + +

There was some discussion of this at Ann Althouse's blog. Commenter "Jeffrey" wrote:

By the way, this mixing of humor and seriousness is very American. I never really thought about it until I lived in other countries where, for example, a local newscast would never jump from reporting a tragic accident that ends in death to a funny one about an animal rescue. In the US, newscasters jump effortlessly from delivering the sad story with a serious face to, the next second, a smile and a chuckle about that animal rescue.

You also find it in certain types of sitcoms (like "M.A.S.H.," for example) that juxtapose serious and comic scenes.

In politics, too, both humorous and serious discussions have their roles. For Americans, being able to laugh at oneself is an important guide to one's character. In other countries, whether one can laugh at oneself is considered irrelevant as a measure of political acceptability.

Why do Americans blend these two? I have a few theories, one of them being its centrality to our democratic, multi-ethnic society. I'm sure someone here can explain why, for example, German politicians would never participate in something like the dinner that Obama and Romney did last night.

I thought this was a great question, and answered that I thought it came from our British political heritage. The Brits do this too — having perfected a particular sort of dark humor, and turning their Parliamentary speeches often into stinging barb-fests.

Americans owe Brits quite a lot when it comes to the organization of our political system as well as many deeper undercurrents of social and political philosophy. But I hadn't before thought of them as the originators of our collective love for displays of political wit — either self-deprecating (demonstrating how deeply we value a man's ability to laugh at himself) or viciously cutting (demonstrating, er, how much we value a man's ability to make people laugh at someone else?) I think we count it as a particular, and particularly important, display of a certain kind of intelligence.

Oct 19, 2012

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1 comment on Political roasting and self-roasting.
Review: The Mind at Work by Mike Rose.

I'm going to stay on the subject of vocational-oriented education vs. liberal-arts education long enough to post a review of a 2004 book I finished reading last night: The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker by Mike Rose.

This book is a quick read, not too scholarly, and full of anecdotes about the lives of working people: waitresses, hairdressers, railroad men. There are also those who teach future workers: a woman who teaches welding at a trade school, a man who teaches high-school carpentry.

I was prompted to read this book when I turned on NPR in the middle of an interview with the author on Weekend Edition. It must have been a rerun, I guess, since the book was released eight years ago. But I was drawn in by Mike Rose's description of interviewing his own mother at the kitchen table, inviting her to reminisce about her years as a waitress.

The work of Mike Rose's mother, uncle, and other relatives figure large in this book. It's part family history and part social/educational essay. Here are some of the themes:

(1) Calling attention to the mental work that so-called "low-skilled" jobs demand of their practitioners. For instance, the waitress works for tips, so she can increase her income by honing her craft. A good memory helps. So do subtle manipulation skills, quick judgment about the priority of tasks, spatial sense, flexibility, and negotiation techniques. The personal work histories that Rose uses to tell these stories are fascinating to read, a sort of glimpse behind the swinging door, for someone who's never waited tables or built one.

(2) Inviting the reader to look at these workers in a new way that demands more respect than we might be inclined to think. Rose argues that many wait staff act as individual entrepreneurs, and that a hairstylist is a sort of creative consultant.

(3) The sometimes arbitrary distinction between "skilled" and "semi-skilled" and "skilled" workers; the historical role of labor unions in creating this distinction, and how gender and class have been used to funnel young people into prescribed roles. (Sometimes the funneling can be a mixed blessing for a group: he writes that "Girls were channeled into clerical courses," but points out that these were successful in leading to employment.)

(4) The artificial separation between "hands-on" or "practical" education, and "academic" education. There is an interesting part of the book where Rose looks at the work of surgeons; they have, of course, a very technical and practical job involving the skilled use of the hands, but enjoy a much higher status than most other "hand" workers. It makes for a thought-provoking comparison with the carpenters and welders that make up the larger part of the book.

(5) The mixed bag that is vocational and technical education today. Vo-tech education might provide a place where a young person, disliking classroom work, can learn to strive for excellence and discover his own self-worth; or it might be a place where young people are shunted too early and where expectations are kept low, and where the intellectual development of the young people on the "job-training track" is unfairly neglected. Rose writes a bit about his own experiences with the differences between "academic" and "vocational" education (he began high school as a working-class kid on the vocational track, and later moved to the college prep track), but most of this story is told by examples from the teachers and kids that Rose observed in their learning environment.

Here's an excerpt from the back, criticizing the VocEd system's separation from the academic realm by pointing out a situation where, literally, a student needed to be guided to "see something from the other side:"

…[T]here were no bridging mechanisms…to enable creative interaction, to foster cross-disciplinary discussion that could expand and enlighten, for example, the use of tools or the development of literacy. I think here of something I saw…that crystallized this… I was watching [Mr. Butler, a teacher,] as he was guiding two of his students inserting windows into a house frame.

They have just placed an assembled window into its space in the frame. They are looking it over, eyeballing the edges, checking it with a spirit level. They're following procedure, and everything seems OK. They're ready to fasten the window in place. Mr. Butler…asks them to come here a moment, to walk with him around to the other side of the window, inside the house. "Take a look from here," he says. The boys inspect the edge of the frame—and see the problem. The plywood that forms the frame on this side of the window assembly has been cut unevenly, and at several places there is not enough wood to receive the nails that the boys were about to drive from the other side. They are visibly struck by this, say they wouldn't have thought of this. But, geez, now that they see it….

In many ways, this is a small thing…But it also could be thought of as a metaphor for the vocational-academic divide. Though a routine move, and though utterly functional…this strategic shifting of physical location represented for me the shifting in perspective that is such a key element of intellectual development. It contributes to the solving of problems in many domains, to a more complex understanding of human behavior, to adopting a point of view in literature and the arts. A lot could emerge from this moment. The day-to-day at the…job site was full of such episodes, and their cross-disciplinary potential was, for the most part, lost to the English teacher or the psychology teacher, sealed off by the physical and conceptual barriers in the curriculum. [emphasis mine]

The result is separate professional spheres, each narrowly defined. And it is the academic curriculum, not the vocational, that has gotten identified as the place where intelligence is manifest.

I think this episode is a good one to pull out, particularly as Darwin and I continue our banter on the meaning, utility, and limits of the "liberal arts education." The episode with the window — thinking of a "shift in perspective" that is literal and using it to jump off and think of metaphorical shifts of perspective — is pretty emblematic of how I like to say that my technical education serves me as a "liberal" education. I have a toolbox of metaphors and allusions too: mine contains concepts like Schroedinger's cat, "black boxes," diffusion, parallel and series, material and energy balances, instabilities, damping, deformation, boundary layers. Problem-solving of all kinds. I call on the mental associations linked to concepts like these every day.

I think much of this book would be a good assignment for a high school student. There is certainly material there that might encourage thoughtful consideration of one's future, but more importantly, I think the anecdotes serve to inculcate respect and admiration for the people whose work (often behind the scenes) contributes to our health, safety, leisure, and comfort.

The chapters on vocational education are probably worth reading for any educator — including the homeschooler. I have gotten so used to thinking of vocational education as a good solution to much of the education bubble's excesses, that I had forgotten to consider how it really plays out in real schools, where the "academic" and the "vocational" sphere are completely isolated from one another. But in the homeschool, we can round out the liberal arts education with a good dose of skills training, or we can make sure that our trades-minded children still receive a firm grounding in classical liberal arts. We don't have to make the trade-offs that the institutional schools have had to make — nor the mistakes they've chosen.

Oct 17, 2012

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1 comment on Review: The Mind at Work by Mike Rose.
Postsecondary education link – is the free online education coming?

I have been swamped lately, and with bouts of a nasty bug moving slowly through my family. Hoping to provide book review soon for two relevant pieces of nonfiction I've currently got my nose in.

For now, here's a link from TIME: Why College May Be Totally Free Within 10 Years.

….if [author and entrepreneur Vivek] Wadhwa is right the student debt problem will take care of itself—at least as it relates to the next generation and those that follow. Online courses will proliferate to such a degree that acquiring knowledge will become totally free. There will still be a cost associated with getting a formal degree. But most universities, he says, “will be in the accreditation business.” They will monitor and sanction coursework; teachers will become mentors and guides, not deliver lectures and administer tests. This model has the potential to dramatically cut the cost of an education and virtually eliminate the need to borrow for one, he says.

… [Hedge fund billionaire Peter Thiel's] focus is on skipping college altogether unless you can get into a top-tier school and are certain to enter a highly paid field. He believes we are experiencing a “psycho-social” bubble in higher education. Everyone believes they have to have a college degree and so they will borrow and pay any amount to get one from any school.

Most families view a college degree as insurance; something they can buy to guarantee that they do not fall through society’s cracks, Thiel says. But what they are really buying is “a dunce hat in disguise” because employers have less respect than ever for a degree that comes from a second-tier university. Such a degree, in Thiel’s view, brands a graduate as mediocre.

What do you think? Could the model of cheap online education for anyone, pay a university only if you need a diploma, ever supplant the traditional model? If it can't supplant it, will — at least — another viable choice become available for the motivated, out-of-the-box-thinking, would-be intellectual?

Oct 14, 2012

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4 comments on Postsecondary education link – is the free online education coming?
Reading to children.

A must-read post from MrsDarwin.

I let the pressure to get things “done” and to get to bed on time, plus my own desire to just have a break from everybody in the afternoon, squeeze out our reading-aloud time far more often than I should.

Oct 12, 2012

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5 comments on Reading to children.
Postsecondary education questions: What if money is no object?

Here’s a question:

Suppose you were filthy, stinkin’ rich. You have so much money that you don’t even have to think about saving for retirement. So much that you can, effectively, pay cash for all of your children to take as long as they want to go to school anywhere they want, and to major in what they want.

The question is… Should you?

Should you write each of them a blank check?

Should you put conditions on the money?

Should you pay for some educations, but not others?

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Granted, this is a highly rare hypothetical. But maybe we can use it to get at some general principles.

What’s the stereotype of the rich kid whose parents paid for everything they wanted? Not so positive, is it?

But at the same time, isn’t there a stereotype against “stingy” wealthy parents who don’t help their kids out with college? We all understand that not everyone can afford to pay a lot towards college, but when parents can pay for it, is there an assumption that they should?

Well, let’s think about it. Is there ever a time when a parent (who can pay)…should NOT pay?

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Off the top of my head, a parent shouldn’t pay for university if he expected the young person would harm himself with the money or the opportunity. Suppose we’re talking about a young adult who has a problem with alcohol or drugs, or a history of dangerously impulsive behavior. Unless the parent has the means to keep tight control of the purse strings (so that money intended for college expenses can’t be diverted), putting that much money in the hands of someone so irresponsible could be a grave error.

But suppose it isn’t so clear-cut…

Since money isn’t an object, should the wealthy parent steer adult children to more prestigious universities? To religious ones? Should the parent steer the adult offspring to a college where most of the peer group will also be wealthy, or of the same religion? To a place where the peer group will be more diverse? Should the young person be allowed to choose whatever he or she wants? Is it necessary to have a concrete plan before beginning, since the family is wealthy enough to cover any contingencies?

Should the wealthy young person be made to come up with some of the money on his own, on the grounds that he needs to learn self-sufficiency and a work ethic? Should he learn how to make his own way in the world, at least somewhat? Or is that a pointless exercise for a kid who can afford anything, and ought he instead learn how to be a model rich person, busy with civic engagement and philanthropy, and passing down values to the next generation?

What do you think? What would you do?

Oct 10, 2012

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5 comments on Postsecondary education questions: What if money is no object?
Ground rules.

"All right, everybody." I took a sip of my beer, set it down firmly and pounded my fist once on the table. "I call this meeting to order."

My friend C. put down his herbal tea and said "We're having a meeting? This is a meeting?"

I looked over at M., his wife. M. and C. are the parents of two boys and two girls; their daughters, age 14 and 10, co-school with H. and me twice a week. Their 14-year-old is the one who just had a five-week stint in a local charter school but recently returned to homeschooling. "You didn't tell him this was a meeting?"

"Uh, no."

"Okay then. I'll fill you in."

Dinner was over and the brownies hadn't been served yet; we had sent all the children away upstairs to play Wii or cards. Throughout the evening they would keep poking their heads down to ask if it was time for brownies, and we would send them up with a terse, "No. Go away."

This was somewhat unusual for us, but today we were talking about the kids. Two of them, anyway.

+ + +

"Okay, C., do you remember a long time ago when our oldest kids were very little, and we were sitting around having tea in the evening, the four of us? And we were sitting around talking about theology? Do you remember the Mutual Anti-Evangelization Clause?"

He raised an eyebrow. "I remember."

+ + +

C. and M. are members of the LDS Church, i.e., they're Mormons. And C. and M. are kind of Mormon nerds in the way that Mark and I are Catholic nerds. We used to have a lot of fun talking about the differences and similarities between our two faiths, late into the evening, when the kids were younger. As we've gotten busier and busier, and our children's antics more complicated, we haven't had much opportunity to sit down and have long-ranging conversations, although from time to time we've fielded brief questions from one another, sometimes through email.

+ + +

"Do you remember how we used to say, 'One of these days our kids are going to grow up and start arguing with each other and then we'll have to have a talk about all this?'"

He grinned. "Is that time now?"

+ + +

Last Monday was the 14-year-old girl's first day of seminary, which in the LDS church refers to an organized, four-year religious education program for high schoolers. It's typically run on weekday mornings before the kids go to their "regular" schools; she'll be getting up at 5:30 AM for the foreseeable future. I picked her and her sister up from her parents' house not long after her dad C. brought her back, and we headed to H.'s house for a day of history and Latin and Spanish and English, all the subjects that H. and I co-school.

She was really excited, and chattered about it all the way. I nodded and listened: it is a beautiful thing to see a young woman totally on fire for her faith. And I'm charmed because she's a budding theology nerd too. As well as the regular kind of nerd. Did I mention I'll get to teach her geometry next year?

During lunch, while H. and I were eating and chatting in the kitchen, we overheard a lively discussion in the dining room where all nine kids were having their salmon loaf and apples. I touched my ear and gestured to H. to listen.

"But it just doesn't make sense that God created everything out of nothing," the 14-year-old was saying. "That's why we think of God as the Creator in the sense of an organizer."

My 12-year-old was saying, "No, God has to make everything out of nothing, because otherwise where did everything come from?"

"Here, let me try to find what it says in the Scriptures…" I could hear the sound of rummaging in an overfull backpack.

H.'s almost-13-year-old was saying, "Guys. Guys. Maybe you're both right. Maybe we should talk about something else."

We listened to them debating while we cleaned up, more than a little entertained — at least we listened to the 14-year-old and my 12-year-old debating, and H's son going "Hey, I have an idea, let's play cards" — and eventually I had to go put a stop to it because lunch was over and they had to work on their world history homework.

And then I had to put a stop to it again.

And again.

I could tell they were trying to figure out a way to come to some point of agreement, but I knew darn well they weren't going to find one. The LDS doctrine of creation is not reconcilable with the Catholic one. Besides, they had work to do, and they were making the other boy feel very stressed out.

[H. told me subsequently that when their family sat down a couple of days later to watch the first televised debate between President Obama and Mr. Romney, their son asked exasperatedly, "Why do they have to sound so much like my friends?"]

Anyway, I figured I was going to have to talk to my son about the reality of having good friends of a faith different from his own, and I might as well start by talking to… my good friends of a faith different from ours.

+ + +

I told the story at the table, strenuously urging C. and M. not to apologize for their daughter. It was a two-way thing, really, even though her excitement about her new seminary class was the trigger. "What I'd really like to do," I explained, "is use this as a teaching opportunity. We have a chance to model to our kids how — well, how we can enjoy taking an interest in each other. How we can sit around and talk together in a spirit of honest curiosity, you know?"

"It's very useful to have a clear understanding of what we all believe."

"I know I've enjoyed being able to call upon explanations that come from 'my good Catholic friends' when I teach Sunday school," said C. "I use you guys all the time."

"And it's interesting," I said. "And talking about it and identifying the differences helps us understand our own beliefs. I mean, I'd like to see them enjoy the same kind of attitude that we can have, sitting around and talking over a cup of tea." I adopted a mock conversational tone. "'This is what we believe.' 'Oh, isn't that interesting, this is what we believe.' 'Oh, how very interesting. Is it like this?' 'No, it's not at all like this, it's like this.'"

"But trying to convince each other is kind of off the table."

"Well, yes, it's not necessary. It's obvious that you are happy where you are and that we are happy where we are, and that we each understand our own faith really well. But we can still explain because it's interesting, and neither one of us wants the other to have an inaccurate picture of each other. And it helps us know each other better, too."

Mark interrupted with a sly smile, "Of course, it's not like we wouldn't be happy if you decided to become Catholics. But our friendship isn't predicated on that. We know perfectly well that if you have any questions about what we believe, you'll ask us. And if we have any questions about you, we'll ask you."

"Yes," I said, "it's like 'Preach the Gospel, and we mutually agree that words aren't necessary.'"

+ + +

We knew we needed to lay down some ground rules for the teens and soon-to-be-teens. "Plus," I explained, "I want the grownups to get our story straight before we turn around and have this conversation with our kids." After much discussion we decided on four points.

1. Both of our families believe that it's the right and responsibility of parents to form their own children in faith. That means that we can confidently say to our own teen, "It's fine for you and your friend to explain your faith to each other and answer questions. But you need to know that your friend's parent doesn't want you to work hard to try to convince your friend that you're right and they're wrong. We respect our friends' wishes when it comes to raising their children, and we aren't going to undermine their parental authority." Bottom line: explaining and answering questions is fine ("Catholics believe this because…") but attempts to prove to a teenage friend that his/her mother and father are teaching error are not permitted.

2. In answering each other's questions, they are not allowed to speculate and make up answers. My son is particularly prone to this: imagining how he thinks things ought to be, and then explaining them authoritatively as if that is really how things are. I could easily see him saying, "Well, Catholics believe such-and-such…" when he's really only talking about his own opinion.

So: The teens are only allowed to answer questions that they are confident they can answer accurately. We do not want them teaching each other inaccuracies. And we do not want them being reinforced in inaccuracies about their own faiths. And we certainly don't want them to think they've found points of agreement that don't actually exist. We agreed to make the kids practice saying, "I don't know the answer to that. I will ask my parents." It's good practice anyway, to admit when you don't know the answers, and to go to a reliable source to find them.

3. They need to take note of the emotions of people around them. It was unfair of my son and C. & M.'s daughter to keep debating — even though they really were being polite to each other — when it was clearly making H's son so uncomfortable. (He didn't have the option to leave — they were all supposed to be working on a project together.) We will let them know that if their discussion is upsetting other people in the room, they should charitably discontinue it and pick it up at another time.

4. We don't give them permission to discuss eternal consequences. Both families agree that kids of their age and level of catechesis aren't yet mature enough to fully grasp concepts of heaven and hell and purgatory and the like. Speaking from the Catholic point of view, the concept of "no salvation outside the Church" has a certain subtlety that I'm not at all confident a twelve-year-old can grasp and accurately convey. And discussions of damnation or salvation tend to have an emotional effect on many people — not usually a positive one.

Obviously, if you believe in the immortality of the soul, it follows that there's nothing more important than their friend's salvation. But they also need to trust that it's God, not them, who is in charge of that. And they need lots more catechesis (and maturity) before they can discuss what their churches teach about "the last things" with confidence and accuracy. So: Ix-nay on the ell-hay, at least for now.

+ + +

That was Sunday night. The next morning, on my way to pick up the girls, I had my 12-year-old in the front seat, and I had a chance to talk about it all with him. I think it all sank in and made sense.

Also, he spent several minutes describing with interest the differences between the doctrine of Creation as he understood it, and as the 14-year-old had explained that she understood it. It sounds to me like he was paying attention.

They're reaching the age when they start taking possession of the things they've been taught, trying to re-formulate them in their own words if they can, trying to make sense of it from within themselves. They're going to talk to each other, and they're going to try to make sense of a world in which people they love have very different thoughts. We have an opportunity, as friends who are parents of friends, to help show them how to set the tone. It would be irresponsible not to do so with some deliberateness.

Oct 9, 2012

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4 comments on Ground rules.