text:
Nintendo DSi Sound is an application built into the Nintendo DSi that cannot be removed. It can be accessed on the Nintendo DSi Menu by pressing the icon with a parakeet.
On the main menu of Nintendo DSi Sound are four different options including "Record and edit sound", "Play with your music", "Exit", and "Settings". The parakeet in the middle will say, in a distorted voice, various things that the player recorded (if they have recorded sounds). If the player leaves Nintendo DSi Sound untouched, the parakeet will say "hello" to the player. If the player talks to the parakeet on the main menu, it will try to imitate it to the best of its ability. Occasionally the parakeet will chirp the Super Mario Bros. theme song.
Record and edit a sound
After pressing record and edit a sound, the user will see eighteen bubbles. If this is the first time accessing "Record and edit a sound", then each bubble will be empty save for three lines. Automatically the first bubble will be surrounded by rotating blue lines, meaning that that bubble is selected, though the player is free to chose any of the other available bubbles. On the bottom of the screen is the volume slider, a record button, a "back" button, a delete button, and a button that alters the way a sound is recorded.
The user is allowed to change the location of the bubbles by touching and dragging them to the desired place. Even if every bubble is empty, the player can still drag them. When the player wishes to record a sound, they must first select a bubble (one is selected at all times) and then press "record" at the bottom of the screen. Following this, they must either start speaking or press the button in the middle with the red circle to start the recording. The benefit of speaking instead of pressing the button is that it starts automatically, though it won't start unless your voice or the sound is of a certain level, which also means that when you start to speak, it may not pick up on some of the earlier sounds if they weren't loud enough. On the other hand, everything will be picked up if the player touches the button in the middle. After they start recording a sound, they'll be given 10 seconds, or they can press the stop button which will automatically stop the recording. Following this, there will be an "OK" button with six colors (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple) that, when touched, will cause the bubble to fill up with liquid of that color. The longer the recording, the more liquid will be inserted. If the user is unsatisfied with the recording, then they can press "cancel" and try again.
After a recording has been made, the player can touch the bubble to play around with it. Right after touching the bubble, the recording will play. Above the playback bar are two boxes and the parakeet. Touching the parakeet will result in a tip. The tips include:
- "Oh well, eh!" What could that be? Some kind of secret code? Record it and then play it backward to find out!"
- Parakeet - "This will make you sound just like me! Now, repeat after me: Human want a cracker?" (US) Budgie - "You'll do an impression of me, will you? Then I'll do one of you too! "Mum! I'm hungry!" (EU)
- Electric Fan - "This will make you sound like an alien. We come in peace..."
- "Still can't understand? Try this: "Who y'are wha?" Record it an play it backward!" (note: this says "How are you?" backwards)
- Low Harmony - "deep and moving. "Baa baa! Black sheep have you any wool?..."
- Trumpet - "A talking Instrument? "Thank you very much for today!"
- "Keep tapping the Trumpet button, and you can change it to the Whistle filter."
- "Do you get how to make backward phrases? What's your name? becomes Main oy stop!"
- "Play around with your voice to make it sound cool. Choose Overwrite to save the new version you've made."
- Tunnel - "Your voice will echo away. Hellooooo... Is there anybody theeeeere?"
- "Don't use any bad language near DSi Sound. I might end up speaking that way myself!"
- Transceiver - "Are you a spy too!? This is Parakeet. Infiltration of the cage is complete. Over."
- "When you are recording, speak with a loud voice. The recording will start automatically, you know."
- High Harmony - "Ornate and delicate. Twinkle, twinkle little star. How I wonder..."
- "You can choose Overwrite as many times as you want. Who knows, maybe you'll make your voice sound even cooler!"
- Robot - "We need a robot to help out around here. Good morning, master! Are you fully recharged?"
- Buzzer - "Bzzt, bzzzt, bzzzrrt! Do re mi fa sol la ti do!"
- "Parakeets have a keen memory for words, but even I have trouble with the ones I learned a long time ago."
- Synth Harmony - "All together now... "London Bridge is falling down, falling down..."
- "You can play all those sounds you recorded even while you are listening to music on an SD Card!"
- Helium - "Like they use to fill up balloons. What? I can't hear you from up here..."
- "You can use the stylus to switch sounds. Don't forget to have them queued up in your preferred order."
- Whistle - "Can you whistle? Phweet! Phweeeeet!!"
- "By using A B repeat and Overwrite, you can trime your sound to the exact points where it starts and stops."
- "Sound travels pretty fast. About as fast as an airplane."
- "Light is much, much faster than sound. That's why you see the lightning before you hear the thunder."
- "You can't hear anything up in space. Sound can't travel in a vacuum."
- "Hiiiiiiiigh...Slow...Loooow...Fast! Play around with your own voice!"
- "Your voice sounds higher than you thought, doesn't it? Ask around and see what everyone else things!"
- "Thanks for playing with your Nintendo DSi!"
The box on the left allows the player to change the playback speed and the pitch. The farther up, the higher the pitch will be, while the farther to the right the faster it'll be. The box on the right allows the player to add filters. There are four boxes available, though by tapping a box you'll be given access to other filters. In all, there are twelve different filters, which include:
- Upper left box: Parakeet, robot, helium
- Upper right box: Electric fan, tunnel, transceiver
- Lower left box: Low harmony, high harmony, synth harmony
- Lower right box: Trumpet, whistle, buzzer
There are five types of playback actions, including:
- 1: Repeat the current sound over and over.
- 2: Play all of the sounds on the menu in order.
- 3: Play the selected sound only once.
- 4: Plays a random sound from the menu.
- 5: Play the selected sound from a point selected by the user. It starts at point A and ends at point B.
Play with your music
In "Play with your music", you can insert an SD Card and listen to your music on your Nintendo DSi. The music must be AAC with a filename extension of .m4a, .mp4, or .3gp. It must be sampled at a bitrate between 16 kbps and 320 kbps and sample rate of 32kHz to 48kHz (CDs are 44kHz). You are allowed to add filters and change the pitch and speed of the songs as well. You'll be able to change songs, talk to the parakeet to receive information, and change the visualization of the upper screen. During a song you can press the L and R buttons to add sound effects. The filters in Play with your music are:
- Radio: Makes the song sound as if it were coming from an old radio.
- Instrumental: Removes vocals from a song (this doesn't always work).
- Echo: Adds an echo effect to the song.
- 8-Bit Game: Makes the song sound like an 8-bit video game song.
The player is able to insert voice recordings he or she made into the songs.
- Very rarely the parakeet will whistle the theme of Super Mario Bros. on the Nintendo Entertainment System.
- One of the things the parakeet says is "Are you a spy too!? "This is Peach. Infiltration of castle is complete. Over."
- One of the filters in "Play with your music" makes the song sound like an 8-bit video game. The icon is that of a Nintendo Entertainment System controller.
- Some of the visualizers are from NES video games such as Super Mario Bros. and Excitebike.
- In the Nintendo DSi instruction booklet, some of the songs from an SD Card that are found in the images include Super Mario Bros. theme, The Legend of Zelda theme, and Bowser Battle theme. Some of the folders include Nintendo and Super Mario.


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subset: commoncrawl


text:
In Year 2 of the National Homelessness Social Work Initiative, the National Center for Excellence in Homeless Services (NCEHS) selected the University of Texas at Austin (UTA) School of Social Work (SSW) to be one of six Regional Hub Leader Schools.
Key faculty are engaged in homelessness-informed practice. Professor Dede Sparks and Dr. Angela Nonaka are working with a local homeless service provider to develop a sustainable program that includes American Sign Language-certified caseworkers and engaging in research to raise awareness of the deaf homeless population. Dr. Stacey Manser and her research team lead an evaluation project for the Health Community Collaborative. Additionally, Dr. Cal Streeter serves on the Board of Directors for the Ending Community Homelessness (ECHO) Coalition, the Continuum of Care lead agency for Travis County, a relationship that has provided opportunities to develop community-based learning projects for students and to stay informed of HUD policy changes and expectations for service outcomes.
UTA's work this past year has been impacted by the murder of a student on campus during the spring semester. The person arrested for the murder was a foster care runaway identified in the local media as homeless. In response, a number of vocal parents and alumni looked to the university to do something about the homeless/transient population that hangs-out near the campus. UTA's President asked the Texas Department of Public Safety to conduct a campus safety audit and asked the School of Social Work to take the lead in working with churches in the area, local non-profits, the University, the University police, and the Austin Police Department to develop strategies to appropriately address the needs of the homeless near the campus.
For several years faculty and students from the School of Social Work have participate in the annual HUD Point-in-Time Count for Austin/Travis County. This year the school is leading an effort to expand participation by students and faculty in the larger university, with the goal of helping to educate the greater university about the issue of homelessness and broaden the base of volunteers participating in the count.
In addition to leading these collaborative effort to address homelessness in the campus area and community, UTA maintains both graduate and undergraduate internship with thirteen agencies in Austin that specifically serve the homeless. This year it has developed new homelessness-related field placements for MSW students. The following is a brief summary of each.
- SSI/SSDI Outreach, Access, and Recovery (SOAR) Pilot Project: This fall, the school launched three new field placements designed to prepare MSW students to complete SOAR applications in an effort to increase access to disability income benefits for adults experiencing homelessness. In collaboration with Austin/Travis County Integral Care and Travis County Health and Human Services, the field placement calls for students to complete the SOAR training and certification and then work with agency staff to prepare applications.
- Continuum of Care (CoC) Support: In the spring, the school is planning a new internship with ECHO to support CoC work in Travis County. Students will work on projects such as preparation of the CoC grant application, data analysis and reporting, roll-out of a new pay-for-success initiative focused on permanent supportive housing, coordinated assessment, and lobbying efforts at the local and state level.
Like this post?
Check out this one on how the UTA School of Social Work partners with homeless service agencies to create community-based learning opportunities for students.
Want more info?
Visit our website to learn more about us and our National Homelessness Social Work Initiative. And join our mailing list to receive our newsletter.
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Marine Conservation Society Turtle Creature Cap
Product variations
Color: Khaki
size: PLEASE SELECT
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Caring about cotton100% of the cotton used for our cotton clothing products is sustainably sourced. Read more about sustainably sourced cotton here.
Product code: 953841
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For peace of mind, and to make things easier for you we are also extending our returns policy. For orders placed from 1st March 2020, we have extended our returns policy to six months.
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- bvseo_sdk, dw_cartridge, 16.1.1, p_sdk_3.2.0
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text: There's a new food trend sweeping social media – black ice cream. Little Damage Ice Cream in downtown L.A. is fighting back against the pink and purple unicorn craze with charcoal-almond flavored ice cream that is a beautiful shade of black. The black, soft serve ice cream, which gets its color naturally from activated charcoal, is served on top of a black cone. (Today)


text:
March 17, 2017 by Shaun
Filed under The Fitness Bug
Basically… She can't workout… At all (I'll tell you why shortly). And I showed her that she can become
She's already S-curvish. She just needs to shred some fat around her body.
Yes… It might take longer. But you can get there, if you're in a situation like hers @ explanation shortly.
So let's go @ protocol reminders
A 9-5 working day…
– Oats (Slow carbs)
– Natural pineapple juice drink (Fast carbs)
– Whey protein on oats (Fast protein)
– Whole eggs (Slower protein and mono/poly fats)
– Tilapia (Slow protein)
– Broccoli (Fibrous carbs)
– Pasta (Slow carbs)
Workout period (Before and after)
– Whey (Fast protein)
– Natural banana shake (Fast carbs)
– Purple rice (Slow carbs)
– Any lean meat with no saturated fat (Slow protein)
– Asparagus (Fibrous carbs)
– No fruit at night
– No fat at night (Fish oil tablets are ok though)
You need to do some variation of that, consistently, daily. But of course… It will change over
Enter: FitBuzzer Dianne (She's a special case. So no pics at present)
So… Recently, we've been talking about the 1-3 month gold plan period. I talked about how this works
And it truly is the most important time period, as a new member. Or if you want to boost your results.
So today… We're going to do a > 2 month special gold program. Where you show up, without fail
But your 3rd month can be a free month on bronze.
Because of the conversation that I had with Dianne yesterday.
You see… She's been reading every newsletter since I connected with her in September 2014.
I couldn't meet up with her back then, because that's when she was diagnosed with lupus.
This means that she can't do S-curve workouts. Not even of I tailor everything. Which means… She can
She couldn't even leave her house to see me. And after seeing her yesterday. I can see why. Even though
And when I met up with her yesterday. She revealed to me that, although the newsletter does it's job, it's
A program is required to help with that.
I've heard this before and I already know that's a problem. That convo just added to that fuel to that fact.
So this is about getting all 'Dianne type' FitBuzzers to officially start.
Almost everyone who does 'start', replies to talk to me first. So do that. OKzee.
> More buzz for daily updates.


text:
Growing up in the 90s had its perks. Pogs, Tamagotchis, Starter jackets, Guess Jeans outfits, Grant Hill's Filas, The Miseducation of Lauren Hill, homemade mixtapes, Blockbuster videos, Bagel Bites, BrainQuest, and those weird-ass transforming McDonald's toys. ALL THAT SHIT WAS DOPE.
You'll notice that this list doesn't contain any hip-hop albums. I'm well aware that this was perhaps one of the most influential decades for rap music, but honestly, I didn't fall in love with the genre until The Roots blessed us with Things Fall Apart. As a child, my mom had a strict 'no cursing' policy in our house (which only applied to my brother and me), and it extended to the music we were allowed to listen to. Although she loved Tupac (who didn't love Tupac?), my moms discarded my brother's copy of Jay-Z's (classic) debut album, Reasonable Doubt, by the time Hov talked about taking funds to his jeweler Tito (she yanked that shit right out of the cassette player with no fucks to give).
Plus, there are more gifted writers than I who can provide better insight on just how great hip-hop was during the 1990s, especially 1996.
Pause: Why was I allowed to watch Boyz N The Hood, Menace II Society, and Higher Learning, but not listen to Illmatic? I need answers, mama. I'm digressing.
You know what else was great about the decade before Y2K? Black television. Of course, there were iconic sitcoms such as The Cosby Show, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Martin, and Family Matters. But with shows like Roc, The Parent 'Hood, Hanging With Mr. Cooper, New York Undercover (y'all just had to kill Eddie, huh?), Living Single, In The House, and In Living Color, there was no shortage of minority representation on a nightly basis. Seriously, EVERY NIGHT. It was en vogue. It was chic. It was proactive and it got the people going.
It was also impactful and encouraging because it provided images of people who shared my melanin doing big things, like going to college, or becoming doctors (and lawyers and judges), or developing transformation chambers to get the girl of their dreams (what up doe, Urkel?!). They made us laugh, and they made us cry. (Why did Will's daddy do him like that?) They found ways to discuss societal issues, such as drug use, sex, violence, gender equality, and police brutality. Truth be told, had it not been for A Different World — and my mom filling out an application to FAMU — I probably would have never attended an HBCU. And given Detroit's horrific resemblance to apocalyptic ruins during my childhood, this impression mattered.
Which is why I appreciate the current renaissance of Black entertainment. While there have been some notable black shows in the new millennium (My Wife and Kids, The Bernie Mac Show, Girlfriends, Chappelle's Show, Everybody Hates Chris, The Wire, Treme, and Oz), Black folks have been mostly relegated to the minstrel rachetness of reality television.
(Was I the only one who peeped BET's first scripted series, Somebodies?)
But since Donald Glover's Atlanta (FX) and Ava Duvernay's Queen Sugar, premiered to record-breaking ratings and impressive reviews, the tide certainly seems to be turning for the better. Furthermore, these two hits are just the latest residents to crash the old-fashioned, White neighborhood that is the television industry.
Taraji P. Henson and Terrence Howard are commanding a loyal following as Cookie and Lucious Lyon on Fox's Empire, killing the ratings game and getting that Pepsi advertising money. Starz is serving a double-dose of Blackness with the Twitter-favorite Power and King James' produced Survivor's Remorse. And is there any acclaim Black-ish isn't garnering with Tracey Elis Ross' fine ass? It's also proof that if Anthony Anderson can recover from his token roles in Agent Cody Banks 2 and Kangaroo Jack, you can blow up in that nursing program, get your hair done, and buy a Toyota Camry. Don't give up on your dreams, people.
Perhaps the most incredible example of black people flexing their talent on television is the upcoming show Insecure.
While HBO has provided some beautiful cinematic art, since Chris Rock's flagship program concluded in 2000, the premium station has been extremely white with its content. Like white, white. Game of Thrones is great, and all, but the only prominent Negro on that mug was Xaro, and his punk ass fell victim to Daenerys' ruthlessness for foolishly trying to double-cross her on some fuckshit. Up until now, HBO's longest tenured shows featuring black folks were either about selling drugs, or prison. C'mon, b.
The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency featuring the lovely Jill Scott and Anika Noni Rose was canceled after its inaugural, 7-episode season despite garnering a Peabody Award. Brothers in Atlanta, a comedy series from seasoned writers Diallo Riddle and Bashir Salahuddin, was scrapped after the network greenlit the project and ordered a pilot. Plus, we all know how they tried to play our soul-sista-friend Effie Brown on that "White Boy Bro" bullshit Project Greenlight.
Yet, terrible shows such as Bored To Death (the title should have been adorned with a Surgeon General's warning in small print for excessive shittiness) and Lena "I really want some Black penis" Dunham's, Girls, survived for multiple seasons before getting axed. I swear the only people who watched that Wonder Bread bullshit was my homeboy and my ex.
Which makes Issa Rae's meteoric rise as unlikely as it is welcomed. Much like her best-selling novel The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl and her budding web series, Rae's Insecure seeks to feature women of color beyond the clichéd roles of strong, loud, menacing, ghetto, angry characiture. Positive imagery matters, but so does realness. Not every Black woman is Olivia Pope or whatever melodramatic, stereotypical nonsense Tyler Perry concocts. Based on the trailers, reviews and the nature of Larry Filmore's writing, the show looks promising, engaging, an funny as hell. UPDATE: I've watched the pilot, and it was what I thought it would be (RIP, Dennis Green). It's a funny, authentic protait of what it's like to be black and female in 2016 (and beyond?). Gon' 'head and get that Friends money, girl.
Side note: It's worth mentioning that HBO produced some quality Black films back in the day. Something The Lord Made with Mos Def and Gabrielle Union and The Tuskegee Airmen featuring Lawrence Fishburne and Cuba Gooding Jr. were well-written, well-acted gems. Also, Dancing In September is perhaps one of the most underrated movies of all-time. It's a story about the politics and struggle associated with Black television shows starring Isaiah Washington and Nicole Ari Parker. And don't get me started on Jeffrey Wright's portrayal of MLK in Boycott. (I love that film.)
Make no mistake, this influx of Afro-centric programming on the small screen isn't going to rid our country of racism and systemic bias. Romanticizing about how our televised stories will somehow incite care, understanding, and empathy is a beautiful notion, even it is profoundly misguided.
Regardless of the overwhelming amount of successful shows featuring colorful casts portraying minorities positively, the 1990s was still one of the most racially tumultuous decades since the Civil Rights era.
The cops who brutally beat Rodney King and heinously executed Amadou Diallo unjustly escaped consequences for their criminal actions despite Officer Winslow's touching portrayal of racial profiling.
Moreover, officers sworn to protect and serve our communities continue to benefit from a flawed judicial system that frequently provides immunity to those who use their oath as a creed to unlawfully abuse their power, thus permeating law enforcement's blatant disregard for Black lives.
But Negro representation on the tube does provide much-needed access to role models and ideals that may be not available within decaying communities. It allows us to depict a variety of narratives about the Black experience in America. Plus, it affords opportunities to minorities in an industry perversely structured to be Caucasian. Y'all Wypipo stay Whitewashing shit.
At the very least, it's enjoyable entertainment that has proven to both critically and commercially successful. May the new wave of colored television reign on. Black is beautiful.


text:
It happened. One afternoon, I found myself in the city of Roswell…permanently. And I thought to myself, What am I doing here? It was a little late to have such thoughts, though Roswell happened like a sudden blow to the head. Oh, don't take me wrong; there was talk of moving to this
alien foreign land long before the move occurred. However, when it happened, it happened fast.
Hold on a second. I know you're protesting my use of the word "foreign" for a city inside the borders of my home state. But honestly, Roswell is foreign to me. It's not in the River Valley, for a start. No, it's not even precisely desert — a kind of merging into the plains region — a kind of ebb and flow into the ghastly state of Texas. If this is still the Land of Enchantment, will someone ease me back into the dream?
Roswell is a long city, as though stretched out artificially for God-only-knows-what reason. I would make the usual joke, but I promised myself I wouldn't use that word in this entire journal rendering of the place…
…where there are little green beings painted on shop windows and who peer at me from every corner.
Remind me where I am again.
Within the first 48-hours I was here, the air shook with sirens blaring out the impending arrival of a funnel cloud that couldn't even be bothered with touching down, but rather pathetically chose to rip up an outbuilding to the west. What touches down in Roswell stays in Roswell. The funnel cloud clearly didn't want to stay.
For unknown reasons, I am one of these disasters that's touched down here. On my first afternoon, I discovered I'd be living in a dingy, small, mouse-infested apartment. After I swallowed my panic at having to clean the filthy place, I rented a steam-cleaner for the carpet. For the record, I haven't had to live with carpet for the last thirteen years. I suffer from carpet paranoia — I'm likely certifiable, but that's beside the point.
It fell apart from there. Literally. Everything. The vacuum, for example. I was overextended from working 20-hour days. I was at my last tether, already, you see. And this — this place where I had nothing wasn't welcoming me. Even the little brown mice were running into far corners of the apartment as I tried repeatedly to clean the carpet.
When I say I had nothing, I mean that. I had driven down to clean before the rest of the family brought the furniture. I would ostensibly be sleeping on the wet carpet with the skittering mice, which, in my fertile imagination, turned into rabid predatory rats.
Therefore, I chose to sleep in my economy sedan of very small interior proportions. I filled a travel coffee mug with wine and carried it down to the car with a bag of sweet potato chips. I had my pillow and blankets, at least, as I was meant to be sleeping on the apartment floor.
So this is Roswell, I mused, as I leaned back as far as the passenger seat would go. This gave me a perfect view of the blindingly bright 24-hour gas station lights across the street. I drank the wine and slipped into a daze of exhaustion. After a bit, I actually fell asleep.
I woke and slept in fits and starts for the next six hours, my mind finally having stumbled on the truth (truth leads to sleep leads to…). Sometimes truth descends when you leave the enchantment of comfort behind you. In this case, "comfort" equaled the lush Shire of the River Valley.
Once I left comfort, I learned that in my waking and sleeping, my mind had the ability to alter the reality around me. When I closed my eyes and drifted into sleep, my mind recoded and thus reordered the world. When I opened my eyes, the air coalesced around me and exhibited the changed patterns. The leaves, the wind, the light — I had altered the patterns on everything. Such was my ability.
Due to this new reality, I could honestly claim when I woke the next morning that I'd slept better than I had in weeks.
Welcome to Roswell, the land of…


text:
Starring Paul Bettany, Jennifer Connelly and Jeremy Northam. Directed by Jon Amiel. 108 minutes. Major theatres. PG
Genius ideas rarely come with the swiftness of Sir Isaac Newton's apple bonk or Archimedes' bathtub dunk.
More commonly they are the product of long and painstaking thought and endeavour, something to be measured by the season rather than the second.
Yet such logical evolution doesn't necessarily apply to the making of films, which by their edited and encapsulated nature generally demand a greater economy of drama.
Which leads us, perforce, to Jon Amiel's Creation, and its dilemma of getting the science right while getting the movie terribly wrong.
A title card prepares us for the telling of the story behind "the biggest single idea in the history of thought": the writing of Charles Darwin's paradigm-shifting 1859 tome on evolution, The Origin of Species.
We get surprisingly little of this. Darwin's early sea adventures on HMS Beagle are given a quick once-over in a humorous prologue that highlights the folly of so-called enlightened men attempting to graft their culture onto so-called "savages."
Then it's straight onto dry rural land in the late 1850s, as a sickly Darwin (Paul Bettany), who is only in his late 40s yet looks at least 20 years older, is struggling to finish the book that has already excited his learned chums Thomas Huxley (Toby Jones) and Joseph Hooker (Benedict Cumberbatch).
Word has gotten out that Darwin will persuasively argue that much of what mankind attributes to an all-powerful deity is instead the result of natural evolution. It's the start of the creationists vs. evolutionists battle.
"You've killed God, sir!" says Huxley, a determined atheist.
Darwin pales at the thought, even though he's dubious about God's existence. He's worried about upsetting his devoutly Christian wife Emma (Jennifer Connelly) and their friend and spiritual leader the Rev. Innes (Jeremy Northam).
Darwin is also mourning the death at age 10 of his dear daughter Annie (Martha West), who is the real focus of Creation. We see her both as a living child and as a ghost who haunts Darwin, constantly popping up to distract him. Much of the movie is presented as a series of flashbacks, as Darwin desperately struggles to save Annie's life using medical methods that range from ineffective to dangerous quackery.
The emphasis on Annie is perhaps not surprising, since screenwriter John Collee is working from the book Annie's Box, by Darwin descendent Randal Keynes, which has a similar preoccupation.
But it robs the film of serious weight. What begins as a drama about the birth of a great notion – with its attendant battles between the pro and con sides – instead becomes a dreary melodrama about family grief.
Bettany isn't bad as Darwin, but he's presented here as spineless and sickly, not exactly the stuff of authority. Connelly's Emma is little more than a pious scold, a depiction that doesn't jibe with historical accounts of the real Mrs. Darwin, who apparently had much life to her. There is so little emotion in their entanglements, even when they're arguing with each other, it's hard to believe that Bettany and Connelly are also a married couple off screen.
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Director Amiel (TV's The Singing Detective) tries to up the science quotient by including time-lapse and CGI segments that cleverly illustrate Darwin's point about how living things evolve over endless cycles of birth and death.
But most of Creation is spent on death rather than birth. It reminds us all too keenly of Darwin's morose assessment of himself, in a letter to Emma, as being in "a silent struggle with myself, extended over a thousand afternoons."
It feels as though we trudge through every one of those afternoons with him.


text:
IBCAST Starting from the year 2002, the IBCAST is being held consecutively for over a decade in the vicinity of Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan. Until the year 2005, four technological areas namely; Advanced Materials, Control Engineering, Computational Fluid Dynamics and Wireless Communication & Radar were covered. Later, four more research areas - Biosciences, Cyber Security and Assurance Technologies, Medical Sciences and Underwater Technologies were included.
In 2015, another research area Aerostructures was also included in the conference. So far more than 12000 scientists and engineers have participated from Pakistani and foreign universities as well as scientific organizations with around 2750 research papers having been presented. The proceedings of the conference are published and catalogued in renowned international journals on yearly basis. Until now 16 conferences have been successfully organized by the CESAT, Islamabad, which is a setup of Centers of Excellence in Science and Applied Technologies of the country with the research activities being in-line with the conference theme.


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Lectures in Theoretical Physics : Volume VI. Lectures delivered at the Summer Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Colorado, Boulder, 1963. Lectures by Chandrasekhar and Ruelle.
by Brittin, Wesley E. (ed)
Additional authors: Chappell, Willard R. (ed)Published by : University of Colorado Press (Boulder, Colarado)
Subject(s): Applied Mathematics | Physics: Theoretical PhysicsYear: 1964
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|School of Theoretical Physics Library
|530.03 BOU (Browse shelf)
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You may be an expert Nursing Professional Development (NPD) Practitioner. Or you may be brand new to the professional development role. Allow me to ask you both the same questions: "Do you have a mentor?" And, "Are you mentoring others?"
I distinctly remember my first mentor, Laura (Gasparais) Vonfrolio. She remains a strong presence in the world of adult critical care nurses, offering critical care nursing certification review courses as well as authoring electronic learning modules and reference books on the subject. I had an "aha!" moment when I heard Ms. Gasparis describe how to interpret 12-lead EKGs. She was a dynamic and engaging speaker and she gave me exactly the information I needed in exactly the way I could understand. During a break, I asked if I could take Ms. Gasparis to lunch. She took me under her wing and over the next few months helped me establish my own health education company. She was gracious and generous with her time and advice. I have had many other mentors over the years. Some pushed me to go to graduate school. Others encouraged me to present posters. Some, like Weatherly Brice, our current ANPD Convention Content Planning Chair whom I have the pleasure to work with, have allowed me the freedom to expand my professional limits.
These mentors integrate ANPD's Roles and Responsibilities into their professional lives:
"Mentor. The NPD practitioner advances the profession by contributing to the professional development of others and supporting life-long learning as individuals develop across practice, professional and educational settings"1.
All of them share what I call The Flower Pot Theory. Plants, when placed in a small pot, never grow beyond the border of that pot. Their roots become entwined and bound. Their leaves turn pale and they do not flower. Place a plant in a larger pot, however, and, while it may be shocked initially, the plant quickly adapts, grows, and flourishes.
Strong mentors help us grow by placing us into a pot we might think is too big. They may be the one moving our pot where others can see us. Mentors are always the colleague providing the nurture we need to grow.
I try to use the Flower Pot Theory with the colleagues I mentor. I challenge them: "Of course you can do that. I'll help get you started." I acknowledge that change can be scary: "I understand. I've been in that place, too." I keep them informed of opportunities that might interest them: "You have GOT to submit that as an abstract to ANPD's Convention."
You may not know it, but you already mentor people around you during your daily practice. You role-model the qualities that make NPD practitioners well respected and valued colleagues. You encourage and advocate for the profession. Reach out to someone who expresses an interest in what YOU do. Offer them advice. Be a sounding board. Share yourself. You may never realize the impact you have on someone's work and life.
And if you don't have a mentor, now is the time to find one. Call, write, or walk up to someone whose work you appreciate. "Will you be my mentor on this project?" It's a simple request for a great start.
It's spring. What a wonderful time to start growing.
1Harper, M., & Maloney, P. (2016). Nursing professional development: Scope and standards of practice (3rd ed.). Chicago, IL: Association for Nursing Professional Development.


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By contrast, here's the official high-speed rail plan as proposed by the White House in April:
Among the differences: the ttp plan includes a route for the Colorado Front Range which the gummint plan lacks; it also integrates the major components of HSR in the eastern half of the country, from the Northeast Corridor to Texas; and integrates the Arizona 'Sun Corridor' into the California network. Whence the differences? Well, these are among ttp's criteria:
the transport politic's proposal was informed by an analysis of potential travel between metro regions of populations greater than 100,000 and between 50 and 500 miles apart... The vast majority of train travel would occur on trains running at 150 mph or above on routes of 500 miles or less. Roads and airports along these corridors would be significantly decongested as more people choose to take the train instead of a car for short to medium distances (50-200 miles) and the train instead of the airplane for long distance (300-500 miles) travel...They also get into the nitty-gritty of how such a plan ought to be administered:
There is no transcontinental high-speed railroad proposed here because high-speed rail simply doesn't attract particularly high ridership above the 500 mile travel distance; the best way to get from the East Coast to the West Coast will – and should, barring some unforeseen technological advance – remain via airplane...
In order to calculate the cost effectiveness of each route on the high-speed system, the transport politic used a relatively simple methodology based on travel between city pairs 50 to 500 miles apart. The calculations assume the following: that a big city to big city route attracts more passengers than a small city to small city route; that a big city to small city route attracts more passengers than a small city to small city route; that as distances increase, ridership decreases, though not proportionately. I recognize that these assumptions may be incorrect in many cases, but they provide a reasonable start for further research on this subject.
the transport politic's suggestion is that the most appropriate way to get the ball rolling is to separate train operations – Amtrak – from track possession and maintenance by setting up a national infrastructure owner – let's call it NatTrack. This agency would take hold of the Amtrak-owned Northeast Corridor and begin acquiring and assembling land for future high-speed rail corridors. Through eminent domain, it would also take possession of a large number of the nation's freight lines, most of which are currently under-maintained and poorly managed, and begin converting them to standard-speed rail operations. NatTrack would manage route creation, not only in buying land and constructing track, but in prioritizing corridors to build new lines, deciding which to implement, and when.Here's their proposal for order of implementation:
By the way, as a Texas-based blog, The Map Scroll heartily endorses the plan to include Houston in the Texas HSR plan along with San Antonio, Austin, and Dallas-Fort Worth, which the official plan stupidly fails to do. Intermodality shows a plan specifically for Texas:
There are lots more details for the transport politic's plan, including scoring for every route based on a function of distance and expected demand. It's really a comprehensive analysis and well worth checking out.


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Continental Tide Defense Systems, Inc., is among a group of 10 ship-repair firms that have been awarded a share in a U.S. Navy maintenance contract worth $119.1 million over one year.
If all options are exercised, the contract could be worth up to $644 million and continue for five years.
Click the following link to view an article from the Virginian-Pilot newspaper about the project: 9 local ship-repair firms out of 10 to share in big Navy contract
Continental Tide
Reading, PA
Corporate Office
531 Canal Street, Suite 401
Reading, PA 19602
Phone: 484-577-4070
Fax: 484-577-4077
Continental Tide
Norfolk, VA
1457 Miller Store Road,
Suite 104
Virginia Beach, VA 23455
Phone: 757-410-7611
Fax: 757-410-7211
Continental Tide
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205 West 35th Street, Suite K
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Phone: 619 781-8658
Fax: 619 781-8672


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Monthly Archives: March 2013
Christian Political Witness: Thinking of Ourselves as a Minority
Evangelical Protestants have done very little thinking about what it means faithfully to engage in a democratic process when you are a religious minority. Indeed, Evangelicals are not used to thinking about themselves as a minority at all. To be sure, many have become comfortable claiming victim status when the opportunity presented itself. There is no shortage of voices proclaiming the decline of America and the imminent specter of religious persecution.
But all of that is quite different from the more level-headed, thoughtful reflection on what it means to be a faithful minority – a loyal opposition, so to speak – that has been second-nature for Jews and various Anabaptist groups for centuries. When it comes to public controversies over matters like abortion, marriage, and even immigration or care for the needy, we are still arguing over whether or not we should base our public appeals on Scripture, or whether we should come up with some other sort of argument.
You would think that the New Testament would be a fruitful basis for reflection on what it means to be a faithful Christian in a pluralistic and often immoral world. But again, for centuries Protestants have been so used to thinking about their public responsibilities in terms of Christendom (for which the scriptures of theocratic Israel have always seemed to be a much simpler analogy than the suffering, serving, and witnessing New Testament Church), that they have developed only the thinnest of traditions of reflection on the new covenant scriptures.
At the First Things blog John Turner writes,
After 2008, I thought obituaries of the Religious Right were very, very premature. Come on, Republican Party. If you want to win an election, you may as well try to ride that horse one more time. I know Romney performed better than McCain among evangelicals, but I still think it's much easier for the Republican Party to win a presidential election with a candidate with fervent evangelical support (this requires the rather delicate trick of not scaring the daylights out of everyone else in the country).
But in the long run, I tend to agree with Albert Mohler that evangelicals had better get ready for a sojourn in the political wilderness. I remember (but could not find to link) a splendid editorial by the Christian Century's David Heim (some uncertainty about the author) from quite a few years ago (presumably before the 2008 election) wryly encouraging evangelicals to enjoy their moment in the political and cultural limelight because it would prove fleeting. In a short time, they'd be with their erstwhile liberal Protestant bedfellows in the scrapheap of political history. Very prescient.
It's time to stop focusing on the theoretical question of whether or not America should be a Christian nation, and time to face up to the fact that it is most obviously not one right now. We need to stop arguing over whether or not religious and moral pluralism is a good thing, and to start thinking hard about how we might be faithful in a nation where religious and moral pluralism is a fact. We need to imagine our political responsibilities not by identifying with those in control, but through solidarity with the vulnerable. And then, of course, we have to continue to stand for justice and mercy, in faithful witness to Christ.
Bitter complaints about decline and gloomy prognostications about future persecution do not satisfy this obligation. The changes in American culture and politics do not mean the world is in decline or that Christ's kingdom has suffered some sort of defeat, as if premillennial eschatology is being confirmed. Only if we've made the mistake of identifying America or the West with the kingdom of God in the first place will we assume that our political fortunes in America have anything like this much significance (see the above figures). Our witness to Christ – even in politics – has to be marked by joyful confidence (theological optimism) grounded in the gospel, not by political despair (cultural pessimism) grounded in worldly assumptions about power. That might involve recognizing that despite our tremendous disappointments about certain matters of basic justice, our country remains the embodiment of some of the greatest achievements in political liberty, equality, and prosperity the world has ever known. I would rather live in this place and time than in any other.
A thoughtful Christian approach to democratic engagement in a pluralistic context has to include careful reflection on the relation between Christian morality and human flourishing, and on how we might bring the wisdom of the Christian tradition to bear in a way that is helpful for people who are suspicious of Christianity. It has to work out the implications of under-appreciated virtues like love, service, and self-sacrifice, using them to counter our own older assumptions about power, piety, and paternalism. And of course, like the New Testament church, the guiding light for our own transformed political witness must be not so much the Law of theocratic Israel but the example of the one who came to fulfill it. Romans 13 finds its place towards the end of Romans, in the midst of Paul's discussion of our sanctification by the Spirit, not in the middle of Deuteronomy, towards the end of the old written code.
The Limits of Law: Cathleen Kaveny on Law's Virtues
In past posts on this blog I've presented Calvin's argument that the government cannot simply punish all forms of immorality. The civil law cannot directly correspond to the moral law. The government's toleration of a particular action does not imply its approval of that action. The classic example for this argument, which Calvin discusses in multiple places, is Jesus' interpretation of the Jewish Torah's law of divorce. The Torah permits divorce but as Jesus points out, "In the beginning it was not so." Although divorce is unjust, the Law permitted it due to the hardness of men's hearts, and regulated it to ensure that men treated their wives with at least a modicum of justice.
In her recent book Law's Virtues, Cathleen Kaveny, a professor at Notre Dame Law School, tries to work out the implications of this principle as it is articulated by Thomas Aquinas. She argues that it is not sufficient to say that a good law must promote virtue in the persons whom it is seeking to regulate. We must also recognize that law itself must conform to certain virtues, or principles. She presents this point through a statement of Isidore of Seville, as quoted by Thomas Aquinas:
Law shall be virtuous, just, possible to nature, according to the custom of the country, suitable to place and time, necessary, useful; clearly expressed, lest by its obscurity it lead to misunderstanding; framed for no private benefit, but for the common good.
Kaveny emphasizes in particular the principles, which she thinks cultural warriors on both ends of the political spectrum often ignore, "possible to nature" and "according to the custom of the country." Of course, she doesn't think custom is the sole standard for civil law. As Thomas Aquinas argued quite clearly, civil law must be at least consistent with natural law or it becomes simply a perversion of law, even no law at all. Nevertheless, Kaveny thinks we need to take the customs and potentialities of a society much more seriously than we do.
She explains the limits of law in terms of four principles. First, enacting and enforcing laws costs money. Governments must always take into account whether the financial cost of a particular law outweighs its benefits to society.
Second, a law is unjust if its enforcement requires unjust action on the part of the government. As Aquinas says, government cannot prohibit and punish all evil, because to do so would require it to trample upon much that is good. In Kaveny's words, "In some instances, the concrete steps a state would need to take to enforce a particular law are themselves morally repugnant."
Third, we must remember that civil law has to be designed for ordinary persons (sinners), not for saints. It needs to be realistic or the impossibility of obeying it will lead to the collapse of the credibility of law itself.
Finally, Kaveny points out, we need to remember that criminal law is only "a small sliver of the legal framework necessary to promote the common good." There are many more ways in which a state can express approval or disapproval of a particular action, in which it can encourage or discourage a certain practice, than through criminal law. And again, to stress the fundamental principle, permission does not imply sanction.
It's a helpful argument, and overall, I really like Kaveny's approach. But of course, the question arises, what about fundamental human rights, like the right to life? Can a government ever permit the unjust taking of innocent life based on the principles of law Kaveny articulates? Kaveny does an excellent job demonstrating that there are indeed circumstances in which a government has to tolerate certain immoral practices, including unjust killing, simply because it is impossible for the government to enforce a prohibition of those practices. Her main example here comes from the Wild West, in which no civil authority had a sufficient monopoly over the use of force to prevent settlers from having the right to protect themselves and their property, despite the violent abuses to which that right led.
I think Kaveny is correct on the basis of the above cited principles that sometimes it is wise and even virtuous for government to leave certain actions, including sometimes killing, unpunished, and that this does not implicate the government in sanctioning such murder. At the same time, I worry that Kaveny places too much emphasis on the authority of custom.
Kaveny writes,
In the end, however, custom has the last word. 'Custom has the force of a law, abolishes law, and is the interpreter of the law.' Aquinas recognizes that even if the purpose of a law is sound, it cannot prevail if it 'is not possible according to the custom of the country…. For it is not easy to set aside the custom of a whole people.'
It appears that Kaveny is talking about more here than simply the physical impossibility of a government enforcing the right to life, or even than the fact that in some cases a government would have to be unjustly invasive into people's lives to enforce its prohibition of murder. She is talking about what is deemed acceptable according to the relative customs of a people. Does this include racially oppressive custom, the custom of economic exploitation, or permissive custom relative to sexuality and privacy? Perhaps I'm misunderstanding Kaveny here (I haven't yet read the whole book). I hope so. But I'm not satisfied with her argument that criminal law should not always seek to secure fundamental rights.
Perhaps I've simply been too immersed in the lecture I gave yesterday on the German Protestant Church's response to the Holocaust. But I'm inclined to think that when we are talking about rights as fundamental as the right to life, only the principles of possibility and justice should constrain a government in its responsibility to protect the weak. A government that tolerates the custom of a society when it permits the murder of those human beings it refuses to recognize as persons (whether on the basis of race, health, age, slave status, or birth) has forgotten that its fundamental obligation is not to the people but to God, from whom the right to life is derived.
That Lutheran Two Kingdoms Doctrine and its Church-State Establishment
As I've said before on this blog, one of the oddities of contemporary discussions about the two kingdoms doctrine is the assumption that it entails the radical separation of church and state, with the latter rendered autonomous before God's law. Even more odd is the sometimes stated claim that this radical two kingdoms doctrine is characteristic of Lutheranism and a supposed Lutheran political passivity (in contrast to an allegedly culturally transformative Calvinism).
In part this confusion goes back to early 20th Century works by prominent theologians like Ernst Troeltsch and H. Richard Niebuhr, whose caricatures of Lutheran and Calvinist social teachings have been authoritatively rehashed in a myriad of scholarly and popular works. In part it stems from confusion about why so many Lutherans supported Hitler's regime in Nazi Germany. Calvinists like to ignore their own record of theologically justified complicity with racism and oppression in places like South Africa and the United States. They also seem oblivious to early Lutheran teachings about justified resistance to tyrants, teachings that helped spark the first great religious war after the Reformation and that by no means rendered Lutheranism politically passive during those early centuries.
In his Law and Protestantism John Witte describes at length how Lutheran jurists and theologians built on the two kingdoms theology of Martin Luther to lay the foundations for the Christian state. According to these Lutheran scholars, magistrates were to ensure material provision for the church, overseeing its care for the poor, education, teaching, discipline and ministry. Princes were to govern as Christian princes, and where they went against God's law they were not to expect the cooperation or obedience of Christians. They were to govern society according to the Ten Commandments and the guidance of Scripture, under the careful influence of the clergy.
"For the Ten Commandments," as Witte puts it, "were best interpreted by the Church and its theologians, not by the state and the Obrigkeit. The magistrate was thus obligated to draw on theologians and clergy in order to understand the moral and religious dimensions of the law." As he summarizes his conclusions, "the jurists emphasized the need to establish an overtly Evangelical order of law, society, and politics in the earthly kingdom."
Of course, many contemporary two kingdoms advocates, like their neo-Calvinist or neo-Anabaptist cousins, reject old assumptions about the obligation of civil governments to enforce true religion by punishing idolatry, false teaching, and blasphemy. As a result, they reformulate old doctrines, seeking to draw upon the wisdom of the past while avoiding its mistakes. Darryl Hart and David VanDrunen are no more interested in slavishly aping the reformers than were Abraham Kuyper or Herman Bavinck (or is Stanley Hauerwas in imitating Menno Simons).
Some have taken to describing contemporary Reformed two kingdoms advocates according to the epithet "Radical Two Kingdoms (R2K)." Perhaps a better (and more respectful) descriptive term for such efforts would be "neo-two kingdoms." Of course, the prefix 'neo' should by no means be seen as denigrating. All of us are trying to work out the implications of the Christian faith for our public life and witness, drawing on the theological insights of men who held very different assumptions and lived in very different times. We should be careful not to reduce the giants on whose shoulders we stand to mere proxies for our own cultural, political, and theological debates. We need to learn from them, not simply to use them; to build on their work in faithfulness to the demands of our own times, not nostalgically to yearn for some "golden age" of the past.
When cultural conflict skews your theology …
At his blog Bill Evans writes a follow up post to his earlier article on Presbyterian squabbling. Evans worries that Reformed pastors are losing the ability to distinguish between primary, secondary, and even tertiary issues. He also worries that some are coming to view the confessions as substitutes for (or as the source of) doctrinal consensus, rather than as expressions of genuine consensus grounded in Scripture, a phenomena he calls "confessional fundamentalism."
On the way he makes a poignant argument about the way in which obsession with the culture wars contributes to a skewed view of theological priorities:
[T]he ever-present context of cultural conflict has become the lens through which many theological issues are viewed. Whether it be odd speculation about an "eternal subordination of the Son," or the rise of the so-called "Biblical Patriarchy" recently and properly critiqued by Rachel Miller, or opposition to the ordination of women even to an office of service like the Presbyterian diaconate, a lot of conservative theology is being driven the desire not to give an inch to the feminists. Likewise, the recent trend in conservative Reformed circles toward literal six-day young-earth creationism is certainly not driven by any new exegetical insights into the meaning of Genesis 1 or any new scientific evidence, but rather by the desire to exclude Darwinism and its cultural implications a priori.
Unfortunately, what has emerged is theology that is often just as "political" as anything on the left, and from this political polarization flows an approach to theological controversy in which there is increasingly little room for complexity and interpretation. Nuance, judgments of charity, the recognition that reality is often more complex than we might wish, and necessary shades of gray have been replaced by the binary logic of black and white, truth and error, faithfulness and compromise. Little wonder, then, that the Balkanized conservative Reformed theological landscape looks more and more like an exercise in Manichaean politics. Little wonder that positions long regarded as acceptable are now suspect and even unwelcome in some presbyteries, or that a view almost extinct in 1960 (except among Seventh-Day Adventists) has become a touchstone of orthodoxy.
As I wrote in an earlier response to Evans, we need to learn that the conservative position is not necessarily the biblical, or Christian position. 'Liberal' is not a bad word, and as its usage by an older theologian like John Calvin demonstrates, orthodox Christians used to think of liberality as a virtue. Jesus and his apostles, like the reformers, were as liberal as they were conservative because they understood that their obligation was to the word of God, not to the status quo. Our allegiance is to Christ and his kingdom, not to the way things once were.
Read Evans's whole post here.
Pope Francis: A Step in the Right Direction?
Pundits, journalists, and even most generally well-informed Catholics are scrambling to find information that might tip them off to the significance of Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, for the future of the Roman Catholic Church. Some of the basic facts are immediately obvious. Born in 1936, Francis is a theologian whose understanding of the Christian faith and its moral implications is quite similar to that of Benedict XVI. As one of my liberal Catholic friends noted, many Catholics will find this pope to be too conservative.
But while Bergoglio has a clear appreciation for orthodox Christian teachings on marriage and the sanctity of life, his choice of the name Francis, invoking the great patron of the poor Francis of Assisi, highlights his embrace of the church's fundamental obligation to serve Christ by ministering to the needy. He is the first Jesuit pope, and of course, he is an American, in the broad "New World" sense of the term. Though he hails from Argentina, it is important to note that Bergoglio studied in Germany and his parents were immigrants from Italy. His ties to Europe are deep. Ross Douthat helpfully explains the significance of the choice of a pope from Argentina.
Latin America is in many ways the place where the different experiences of global Catholicism converge. The region shares a New World experience with North America, a long record of church-state entanglements with Western Europe, a history of colonial exploitation and stark extremes of wealth and poverty with sub-Saharan Africa. The Latin church faces the same challenges from secularism and sexual liberation as the church in the developed world, and the same explosive growth of Pentecostalist and prosperity-oriented Christian alternatives as the church elsewhere in the global South. A pontiff from the region is thus a natural choice, in ways that an African or Asian pope might not have been, to move the church's focus away from Europe and North America (and especially Europe) in some ways without cutting the Vatican off from the trends, issues and crises facing the church in a secularizing West.
R.R. Reno, editor of First Things, comments on the choice of a Jesuit, finding a significance in the fact that might be counter-intuitive to those aware of the history of the order during the turbulent centuries following the Reformation:
I worked with Jesuits for twenty years. They break the rules. So far Pope Francis is true to form. He took an unprecedented name, which is the name of the most severe critic of the papacy before Martin Luther. He bowed to receive the crowd's blessing.
At Via Meadia Walter Russell Mead reminds us of a story told by G.K. Chesterton:
G.K. Chesterton tells the story of the time that St. Francis of Assisi visited Rome and the pope of the day proudly showed him all the wondrous treasures of the Vatican. Referring to a story in the Biblical Book of Acts in which St. Peter spoke with a beggar in Jerusalem and told him he had no money, the pope pointed to the treasures around him and said, "Peter can no longer say 'Silver and gold have I none.'"
St. Francis' response: "Neither can he say, 'Rise up and walk.'"
[Francis is] a symbol of the opposition between Christian values and the tinselly values of the secular world. Materialism and the quest for prestige and power are the chief ends of life for many of our contemporaries. The contemporary world admires the virtues of St. Francis, but it cannot live up to them. That gap is where Christians must speak if they are to gain a hearing in these difficult times.
Mead, who is not Catholic, also notes that like Benedict XVI, who was a young man in Nazi Germany, Francis has had to work through what it means to be a Christian bishop in a non-democratic context.
Cuba's bishops must somehow work with the Castros; the bishops of Syria, Iraq, Nigeria, Rwanda and many other countries have had to make choices that people from stable and democratic places know little about. In Pope Francis's case, he lived under the horrible Argentine military government of the 1970s when disappearances and torture were business as usual. Those of us who haven't had to navigate those treacherous waters should be careful how we judge those whose experience has taken them through trials we cannot comprehend.
On First Thoughts Matthew Schmitz notes that the new pope's concern for the poor does not make him a liberation theologian:
This is a humble man, a prince of the church born into a working-class family who's noted for riding public transportation and cooking his own meals…. But the new pope is also a veteran of old battles. When many of his brother Jesuits sought to move away from parishes and embrace liberation theology, he insisted on traditional forms of work, and his order's beloved Ignatian spirituality.
Perhaps most significantly, at National Review George Weigel celebrates the fact that the new pope is committed to the "New Evangelization," a salutary movement within the church on which I have written before. Weigel writes,
The election of Pope Francis completes the Church's turn from the Counter-Reformation Catholicism that brought the Gospel to America — and eventually produced Catholicism's first American pope — to the Evangelical Catholicism that must replant the Gospel in those parts of the world that have grown spiritually bored, while planting it afresh in new fields of mission around the globe.
Weigel quotes from a document that as a cardinal Bergoglio had a significant part in drafting:
The Church is called to a deep and profound rethinking of its mission. . . . It cannot retreat in response to those who see only confusion, dangers, and threats. . . . What is required is confirming, renewing, and revitalizing the newness of the Gospel . . . out of a personal and community encounter with Jesus Christ that raises up disciples and missionaries. . . .
A Catholic faith reduced to mere baggage, to a collection of rules and prohibitions, to fragmented devotional practices, to selective and partial adherence to the truths of faith, to occasional participation in some sacraments, to the repetition of doctrinal principles, to bland or nervous moralizing, that does not convert the life of the baptized would not withstand the trials of time. . . . We must all start again from Christ, recognizing [with Pope Benedict XVI] that "being Christian is . . . the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction."
These events should remind Protestants just how important the papacy is for the witness of Christianity in the world. If Rome is to recover a consistent witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ, movements like the "New Evangelization" will play an important part in that recovery. But these events also remind Protestants just how different Catholic piety is from their own. Having addressed the crowd in Rome and having called the faithful to prayer after being chosen as the new pope, Francis closed with these words,
"Brothers and sisters, I will be leaving. Thank you for your welcome. Pray for me and we will see one another soon. Tomorrow I want to go and pray to the Madonna that she may protect Rome. Good night and rest well."
Does the Two Kingdoms Doctrine Require the Church to Be Silent on Politics?
There is a distorted version of the two kingdoms doctrine out there that claims that if an issue is political, the church should not address it. The separation between the kingdom of God and earthly politics is absolute. God has given authority over the latter to the state, and the church should not question it.
Now I should say up front that I'm not aware of any major theologian who has actually advocated this version of the two kingdoms doctrine, except perhaps Emmanuel Hirsch. Luther clearly believed that a prince has the obligation to act justly and to protect the preaching of the gospel against fiendish opponents like the pope. He did not hesitate to preach the law or the gospel to earthly magistrates, nor did he hesitate to draw specific conclusions about the implications of the law and the gospel for the way in which those magistrates were to rule. And later Lutheran theologians and jurists if anything only tightened the relationship between state and church. The state was to rule according to God's law, establishing and protecting the true church, guided by the instruction of pastors.
Many modern two kingdoms advocates, of course, challenge the old assumptions about the necessary ties between church and state, and about the responsibility of the state to enforce the first table of the law (i.e., prohibitions against idolatry, false teaching, blasphemy, etc.). But they do not challenge the idea that the church should preach the whole counsel of God – even when that counsel pertains to politics – so much as they challenge old assumptions about what Scripture actually says about politics. The central factor underlying this shift in emphasis is a clearer understanding of the differences between modern political states and Old Testament Israel. If the present form of Israel and the Davidic kingdom is the kingdom of Christ, manifest in the body of Christ (i.e., the church), then we should not be too hasty in drawing direct lines between the Old Testament civil law and modern politics.
That said, it is important to distinguish between two lines of argument, one legitimate, the other problematic. According to the first, the statement that the church should avoid speaking to matters that are political means that the church has to distinguish between God's moral law and its application in civil law. For instance, the church should proclaim that the state must protect innocent life, but the church has no right to advocate its own ideas about how to organize a police force, or about how to try and punish murderers. The church must call the state to govern consistent with God's moral law (and in fulfillment of its obligation to protect the weak), but it may not dictate to the state the myriad of ways in which it might act consistent with that law. This distinction is absolutely necessary if the church is to avoid politicization and preserve its moral authority.
According to the second line of argument, the statement that the church should avoid speaking to matters that are political means that the church cannot speak on matters that are politically controversial. According to this mindset, the church might ordinarily have the right to proclaim that the state should protect the life of the unborn, or that it should prevent a person from violently destroying another person's property, but in the context of national debates over abortion (i.e., the United States in 2013) or state authorized pogroms against Jews designed for the good of Volk and Fatherland (i.e., Nazi Germany in 1938), the church should remain silent. One would not want to alienate people from the gospel, or to give the wrong impression about one's motives.
Now I'm sure that there are some readers who will think that I have just violated Godwin's Law, the law which warns against bringing up the Nazis in an ethical, political, or theological debate. Some people chided me in recent weeks for my bringing up the Nazis and the Holocaust on this blog at all. And to be sure, we should be very, very careful about how we use such history, or the lessons we attempt to draw from it.
But this history is relevant here for a very important reason. The German church often attempted to justify its silence before Hitler precisely on the basis of its two kingdoms doctrine. Anyone arguing that the church should maintain the two kingdoms doctrine needs to explain why this happened and why it was wrong. As a scholar writing my dissertation on the two kingdoms doctrine and associate teaching a course on the Holocaust, I have particular reasons to address the issue. In the next few weeks, therefore, you should expect more articles from me wrestling with the use of the two kingdoms under Hitler. If you don't like them, you are warned. You don't have to read them.
For now I want simply to emphasize that the two kingdoms doctrine teaches not that the church should avoid matters of public or political controversy, but that the church should limit its proclamation to what the word of God actually teaches. The two kingdoms doctrine warns not against the church speaking about politics, but against the church moving beyond the word in the name of politics. And I want to emphasize that those who say the church should refrain from addressing any issue that has been deemed by others to be political are not freeing the church from politicization. On the contrary, they are subjecting it to the very politicization they claim to fear. For if the church's proclamation of God's word can be muzzled by a regime or a democratic constituency, the church can be manipulated by that constituency. The kingdom of Christ has been made subject to the political kingdom.
Calvin warns repeatedly against this mindset in his commentaries on the prophets. Here I simply want to quote from his commentary on Micah:
Since then the prophets were the organs of the Holy Spirit, whoever attempted to silence them usurped to himself an authority over God himself, and in a manner tried to make captive his Spirit. For what power can belong to the Spirit, except he be at liberty to reprove the vices of men, and condemn whatever is opposed to God's justice? When this is taken away, there is no more any jurisdiction left to the Holy Spirit. (Commentary on Micah 2:7)
We now see that the word of God is not bound, but that it puts forth its power against the highest as well as the lowest; for it is the Spirit's office to arraign the whole world, and not a part only. 'When the Spirit shall come,' says Christ, 'it will convince the world.' He speaks not there of the common people only, but of the whole world, of which princes and magistrates form a prominent part. Let us then know, that though we ought to show respect to judges (as the Lord has honored them with dignified titles, calling them his vicegerents and also gods), yet the mouths of prophets ought not to be closed; but they ought, without making any difference, to correct whatever is deserving of reproof, and not to spare even the chief men themselves. (Commentary on Micah 3:10)
If the two kingdoms are genuinely to be distinguished, the ministers of Christ must be free to proclaim his word.
The Catholic Church in Turmoil
The Roman Catholic Church needs a new pope and rarely has the choice of a the next pontiff come at a more delicate time in the church's history. Reports suggest the Roman Curia is in turmoil, Pope Benedict XVI having failed to exercise the most practical form of oversight. Across Europe and America clergy sexual-abuse scandals have thoroughly darkened the church's reputation among insiders and outsiders alike, with many suspicious that we have only seen the tip of the iceberg. In both continents cultural Catholics are abandoning the church in large numbers, a decline offset in America only because of large scale Hispanic immigration. Shortages of clergy are becoming more acute as priests age and fewer young men rise to fill their ranks. And as the Catholic hierarchy has been growing ever more assertive and conservative in recent decades, the gap with a much more liberal laity is becoming wider.
According to recent polls roughly 70% of Catholics support women's ordination and the marriage of priests, while even greater numbers reject the church's teachings against contraception. Most Catholics support the church's firm rejection of abortion, but the laity are divided evenly when it comes to the recent conflict between the church and the Obama administration on contraception and health care. Paradoxically, slight majorities believe both that the administration should allow employers to opt out of its requirement that they provide free birth control to female employees, and that the issue is more about women's rights than about religious liberty.
In the meantime conservative lay American Catholics like George Weigel are arguing that the church needs to continue to evolve in a more evangelical direction, maintaining traditional church teachings while reemphasizing the centrality of Christ for salvation. The laity in particular has to understand its role in the "New Evangelization."
The primary lay mission in the church is to be the presence of Christ in the world: family, neighborhood, business, culture, public life. The challenge here is to get every Catholic thinking of himself or herself as a missionary: someone who enters "mission territory" every day. Getting a paycheck from the church isn't what Vatican II meant by "lay mission," or what John Paul II meant by everyone in the church putting out "into the deep" [Luke 5:4] of the New Evangelization. The Council and Blessed John Paul meant us all to be witnesses, inviting others into friendship with Jesus Christ.
The future of the Catholic Church, which makes up well over half of Christians worldwide, is of obvious importance both to Catholics and to other Christians. Evangelical Protestants will laud any sort of increased emphasis in proclamation on faith in Jesus Christ and his work of salvation. And while many Evangelicals do not share the church's teaching on women's ordination, the marriage of priests, or contraception, they should take seriously the church's social teaching on matters like natural law, sexuality, concern for the poor, and abortion, most of which is based on the tradition they hold in common with Protestants.
We should be watching the developing story with interest. We should be praying for the Catholic Church too.
VanDrunen's Response to Kingdoms Apart
At Ordained Servant David VanDrunen has written a helpful response to Ryan McIlhenny's multi-authored Kingdoms Apart. You should definitely go and read the whole thing, but I want to draw your attention to a few points here.
First, like me (here and here), VanDrunen is disappointed with Venema's chapter on Calvin and the two kingdoms, going so far as to call it "very polemical and tendentious." This is in contrast to Gene Haas's chapter on Calvin, which is much more measured and which largely agrees with VanDrunen's work on Calvin. VanDrunen responds in particular to Venema's charge (made by others as well) that he has turned the two kingdoms into two "hermetically separated domains or realms" and that he has identified the kingdom of God with the church "simpliciter." He notes his own statement "that for Calvin 'no area of life can be completely slotted as civil and not at all as spiritual'" and rightly denies that he identifies the church with Christ's kingdom in this way, but he also reaffirms a crucial point affirmed by Haas and readily evident from much of the Genevan reformer's work: Calvin does closely tie the two kingdoms to the institutional work of church and state.
Second, after mentioning that Kingdoms Apart focuses almost exclusively on Calvin and a few modern Dutch theologians, VanDrunen notes that McIlhenny and his co-authors (strategically? unintentionally?) sidestep the issue of the place of the two kingdoms doctrine in Reformed history.
Kingdoms Apart does not resolve a question that would seem to be absolutely crucial to its purposes: is the two kingdoms doctrine part of our Reformed heritage? Since Kingdoms Apart aims to engage the "two kingdoms perspective" critically, one might think that the book would answer no. One of the endorsers (Charles Dunahoo) indeed states that Kingdoms Apart "compares and contrasts the one-kingdom view and the Two Kingdoms view." But who actually holds a "one-kingdom view?" Venema and Haas clearly affirm that Calvin taught a two kingdoms doctrine, Wood explicitly presents Kuyper as a two kingdoms theologian (confirmed by Parler in a later chapter), and even Kloosterman admits that Bavinck "recognized the twofold kingship of Christ" and "the so-called two kingdoms" (72). For all of the negative comments against me in these chapters (Wood's excluded), it seems as though all of these contributors to Kingdoms Apart agree with my basic thesis that the earlier Reformed tradition—including Kuyper and Bavinck—affirmed the two kingdoms.
It seems so, but unfortunately the authors fail to make this point. VanDrunen may be justified if he feels that the authors avoided affirming the extent to which they actually agree with his work. If the purpose of Kingdoms Apart is to promote cordial conversation and theological consensus, why the reticence?
VanDrunen goes on,
But what then of neo-Calvinism? My historical claim is that contemporary neo-Calvinism (post Kuyper and Bavinck) is different from the earlier Reformed tradition in ignoring and even denying the two kingdoms doctrine in favor of a one-kingdom perspective. If the contributors to Kingdoms Apart believe this is wrong (yet agree that Calvin, Kuyper and Bavinck affirmed two kingdoms categories), then presumably they believe that neo-Calvinism itself adheres to a two kingdoms doctrine. This would be quite a remarkable claim. But even McIlhenny's Introduction (which seeks to define neo-Calvinism) doesn't make this claim or clarify the issue.
As I suggested in my review of Kingdoms Apart (at Mere Orthodoxy, here and here), this is a major weakness of the book, one that obscures the extent to which most of the authors are actually in agreement with VanDrunen's arguments about the two kingdoms doctrine. In my view, this is a classic example of the extent to which polemics and controversy can obscure truth.
Third, VanDrunen observes that McIlhenny, who once sought a third way between the two kingdoms and neo-Calvinism, now characterizes his own perspective as more firmly entrenched in neo-Calvinism. Yet it's unclear just how McIlhenny's position has changed. Indeed, VanDrunen writes,
I find his discussion here helpful, especially in its emphasis upon culture not simply as a thing that humans create but as at root language, which involves community practices and interpretations. And though he makes some critical comments directed toward advocates of the two kingdoms in the second part of the chapter, it is still not clear whether his broad proposal is really so at odds with the two kingdoms idea, at least how I understand it.
After describing one of McIlhenny's arguments VanDrunen then writes,
At this point he states: "Interestingly, VanDrunen seems to agree with this" (270). Indeed, but why does he find this surprising? Does McIlhenny believe, deep down, that no two kingdoms proponent really thinks that no aspect of life is religiously/morally neutral or that the antithesis rears its head in all human activity, no matter how often some of us affirm such things? At the end of the day, McIlhenny's interest in a redeemed cultural ethos seems to approach the subject at a different angle from me, but I hold out hope that our approaches may not be ultimately incompatible.
As I argued in my review, the disagreements here are really not as substantive as they sometimes seem. We need to keep working hard to tone down the rhetoric.
Finally, VanDrunen legitimately complains that Kingdoms Apart makes little effort to engage his own constructive exegetical work relative to the two kingdoms. In particular, the authors almost entirely ignore the significance of VanDrunen's arguments regarding the Noahic Covenant, a fact which contributes to the book's incorrect suggestion that he rejects the cultural mandate. VanDrunen explains,
A key aspect of my biblical-theological case for the two kingdoms is my interpretation of the continuing applicability of the cultural mandate in light of Paul's Two Adams paradigm and the Noahic covenant…. It is not as if Christians have no cultural mandate (as Kingdoms Apart suggests I claim), but that the cultural mandate comes to the human race only as refracted through the covenant with Noah after the flood. It comes thereby to the human race as a whole (not to Christians uniquely) and is geared for life in a fallen world and holds out no eschatological hope of reward.
This is a helpful point. Recognizing that God has given the cultural mandate to believers in common with unbelievers would go a long way in helping Christians to avoid the sense of entitlement and even arrogance that nonbelievers often detect in our political and cultural engagement.
I do think VanDrunen could say more about the significance of the fact that "all things" are now tied up with Christ, and therefore about the relation of the Noahic Covenant to the witness of Christians to Christ's lordship in all of life. What much of this conversation revolves around is the relationship between four theological realities:
1) the definitive reconciliation of the world that has taken place in Christ's death and resurrection (the neo-Calvinist emphasis)
2) the full transformation of the world that will take place at Christ's return, but not before (the orthodox Christian belief, undermined by the social gospel and certain forms of theological liberalism)
3) the in-breaking of the kingdom in the ministry of the church and in the sanctification of believers (the key affirmation for the discovery of common ground?)
4) the "already-but-not-yet" tension of a Christian life of sanctification and witness in an untransformed world (the two kingdoms emphasis)
More work needs to be done clarifying the relation between these points. I hope VanDrunen's response to Kingdoms Apart can help to move the discussion forward.
The Two Kingdoms Doctrine Gone Awry: The Case of Paul Althaus
One of the most prominent German theologians who used the two kingdoms doctrine to justify the church's support for Hitler was Paul Althaus. Althaus was a leading critic of the Barmen Declaration because he believed that it rejected the orthodox Christian teaching on general revelation. He publicly supported the Nazi regime at least through 1937, at which point he became silent. Though he never turned publicly against Hitler, in private comments during the war he condemned Germany's genocide of the Jews. Later he admitted that Germany had fallen under the judgment of God.
As most scholars recognize, Althaus significantly revised Luther's two kingdoms doctrine in order to justify the church's support for Hitler. The orthodox two kingdoms doctrine had declared that the state is called to use its authority to preserve basic justice and to uphold the created order, including the institutions of family and church. When the volkisch movement (ethnic and cultural German nationalism) began to gain influence during the early 20th Century, a 1905 regional synod of Protestant pastors declared, on the basis of the two kingdoms doctrine, that the church may not place its authority behind such ideas.
The pastor … has to place himself above nationalities. He is not a politician but a pastor of souls. His task is neither Germanization or Polandization, but the faithful proclamation of the gospel, in which he must as far as possible do justice to each nationality. (Scholder, The Churches and the Third Reich, 100)
This statement approximated the appropriate interpretation of a political movement from the perspective of the classic two kingdoms doctrine: healthy distance from a political trend, accompanied by a clear affirmation of the truth of the Word of God in relation to that political trend.
Based on his experience of the volkisch movement during World War I, which had a radical impact on him, Althaus began to challenge the statement of the 1905 synod in lectures during 1916. He argued that the church could no longer be indifferent to the volkisch question because such neutrality was damaging the relationship between German pastors and their communities. In 1919 Althaus called the church publicly to reject the Treaty of Versailles. In the following years he revised the two kingdoms doctrine so as to make it conducive of church support for the great political movement of the day.
Althaus revised the two kingdoms doctrine in two crucial ways. First he argued that the Volk (ethnic and national culture) is a law of God, part of the created order, revealed in history. Indeed, Althaus insisted that the Volk was the primary law of God for modern Germany, the loyalty that trumped all other earthly loyalties. As he put it in a lecture of 1937,
The belief that God has created me includes also my Volk. Whatever I am and have, God has given me out of the wellspring of my Volk: the inheritance of blood, the corporeality, the soul, the spirit. God has determined my life from its outermost to its innermost elements through my Volk, through its blood, through its spiritual style, which above all endows and stamps me in the language, and through its history… The special style of a Volk is his creation, and as such it is for us holy…. We are unconditionally bound to faithfulness, to responsibility, so that the life of the Volk as it has come down to us not be contaminated or weakened through our fault. (Ericksen, Theologians Under Hitler, 103)
Second, Althaus carefully revised Luther's two kingdoms doctrine in order to justify a greater political role on the part of the church, in support of the Volk. As he argued in 1935,
As a Christian church we bestow no political report card. But in knowledge of the mandate of the state, we may express our thanks to God and our joyful preparedness when we see a state which after a time of depletion and paralysis has broken through to a new knowledge of sovereign authority, of service to the life of the Volk, of responsibility for the freedom, legitimacy, and justice of volkisch existence…. We Christians know ourselves bound by God's will to the promotion of National Socialism. (Ericksen, 86)
Althaus feared that the classic Lutheran two kingdoms doctrine rendered the church too passive in the context of the political malaise of the Weimar years. That the Weimar government was so contrary to God's will, and that the volkisch political movements were in accord with that will, was obvious to him. He therefore argued that while Paul and Luther may not have been aware of the volkisch principle, it was now the task of theologians to revise the relation of church and state in its light. A crucial part of the church's responsibility was to provide the Volk with leadership, organization, education, and spiritual consciousness, in close cooperation with the state. In taking this position, Robert P. Ericksen argues, Althaus turned the classic Lutheran view of the state on its head.
Althaus insisted that a biblical antisemitism was compatible with this new Christian mission. True, in Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither male nor female. Christians must therefore treat the Jewish Volk in accord with love. But the church has always recognized distinctions in terms of male and female, and therefore there is nothing inconsistent with the gospel about recognizing distinctions of race as well, while at the same time affirming equality in Christ.
Like many German Christians, Althaus came to see that Nazi antisemitism went far beyond the sort of "biblical antisemitism" he thought was appropriate. But by that point it was too late. The politicization of the church in its seduction by the volkisch movement, which entailed the rejection of the orthodox Lutheran two kingdoms doctrine, rendered the church incapable of maintaining its prophetic perspective towards the state until it was too late.
It's important to emphasize that it was by revising the two kingdoms doctrine so as to enable the church to take a position on the most important political movement of the day that Althaus and others made the church vulnerable to this politicization. Despite the fears of its critics, it is precisely because the two kingdoms doctrine distinguishes the nature and mission of the church from that of the state that the church can maintain a prophetic stance towards the state. This is why Barth's Barmen Declaration remains a fundamentally two kingdoms document.
To be sure, two kingdoms advocates should not be smug, as some contemporary Christians appear genuinely to believe that the doctrine requires pastors to be silent on any matter that has been deemed by others to be political. It is urgent that we emphasize that the church must preach the Word of God in all faithfulness regardless of what its critics may say. But that was not Althaus's mistake. Althaus's mistake was to believe that the church had to get more involved in politics. And it was by getting more involved that the church surrendered its allegiance to Christ.


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Popcorn Ball
I seem to have gotten myself caught up in a helluva lot of mundane, boring, unfulfilling tasks again that eat up every bit of my time. I am not sure where or how I went wrong. Every waking moment seems again to be caught up in feeding the vampires my blood and hence has me feeling like I am shriveling away into oblivion once again. I had thought I had worked hard against this outcome, and my fall was off to a good start. But now, because my life's blood is being wrung out of me, I feel irritable, aggravated, short tempered, put upon, hurt, abused, and mangled. I *should not* have to have 17 different students interrupt me across the span of the day to discuss their grade (meaning, they are failing). This is in addition to the three hours I actually lectured, the hour I spent with Super Puppy, the hour I spent with the Chair, and the various phone interruptions.
I tried to sit and do my own work, just in preparation for the the upcoming exams in my classes and I could not get even a sentence written between interruptions. I never even had a moment to step into my laboratory... so of course my research output was big old, damn goose egg today (meaning ZERO).
It is terribly irksome. I want to teach excellently, I want to conduct meaningful research, and I want to be a pillar of the community. Yet, I *do not* want to waste my time with student vampires, nor vampire-like faculty members and chairpersons. I am but ONE HUMAN. I will DIE If you drink any more of my blood. I need some for myself in order to survive. Please, you horrid vampires, do not bother me on Friday.