Saturday Evening Blog Post

I shouldn't be up this late. Really. I promised myself a quick peep into Google Reader, and Jen's Conversion Diary is on top alphabetically (it's all about those quote marks around "Et tu?" which I still haven't changed to her current blog name, lazy moi). So I took the quickest possible glance ... and discovered something that means I'm up far too late, fingernails clacking incessantly upon my keyboard ... AGAIN.

I always promise myself that it will take "only a minute" to write a post. And then I get drawn in more and more deeply, changing this detail and adding that. My joy in the craft of writing swallows me up, and somehow an hour slips past me as I'm totally engrossed in composing. The only other activity that engulfs me, heart and soul, to the point of losing track of time, like I do when writing is reading a really good book.

So here I start writing a "quick" post to tell about the very cool thing that Jen and her friend Elizabeth are doing: The Saturday Evening Blog Post. On the first Saturday of each month, we can post our favorite blog post of the past month on Elizabeth's blog using Mr. Linky and then post in our own blogs why we chose that particular post.

I chose a post from earlier in August which includes my latest poem that I shared with our town's little writing group. You may read it here: Poem: In the Confessional. I chose it because it tells a great deal about my life as a writer and about a topic that I feel drawn to writing about over and over during the past two years: confession. I hope you like it.

I almost chose a couple of other posts, so in case you're interested, you may read them here: Tennis, Anyone in which I describe my kids picking up my formerly favorite sport, and A Recap: God at Work which is about answered prayer as we prepared to start our twelfth year of home education.

So please feel free to join The Saturday Evening Blog Post and tell us about your favorite post of the past month! (Not bad, only half an hour!)

New Poetry Class

For the past seven I have been teaching the same two courses at Heritage Christian School's twice-monthly co-op Class Days: Intermediate Writing, a college prep expository writing course, and Advanced Writing, an honors-level expository writing class. This past spring when sign-ups for classes started, no students from our Class Day (there are at least five HCS Class Days in San Diego County, and one across the border in Mexico) had signed up for Advanced Writing, so our Class Day co-ordinators closed the Advanced class, not realizing that the majority of students in that class usually come from other Class Day sites as it's the only Advanced Class available. Meanwhile, the teacher of the 4th-6th grade Poetry and Research Class had to back out of her teaching assignment, so now a full class of students now needed a teacher, and I willingly took on the class. So I now have a new class to prep this year for the first time since I wrote the Intermediate Class seven years ago.

In a way, I'm rather excited. Prepping the new class will indeed require work, time, and creativity, but I like working with this age group and I like getting kids excited about poetry, one of my own passions. So that's my prayer: that the kids will leave this class with an appreciation of, or even a love for, poetry that they did not possess when they first walked into this classroom. After all, I do get rather enthusiastic about poetry. (Okay, a little more than "rather" enthusiastic.) I only hope the kids will half the fun I'm planning to have in prepping and teaching this course.

My plan is to divide our 18 classes into two halves, one per semester. The first semester we'll read the work of a certain poet each Class Day (probably 3-4 poems), read a short biographical sketch of his/her life complete with a picture of the poet, and, for homework, respond to the poet's work in writing. (I'm thinking of a list of questions that they can answer as they structure their paragraph(s).) In class we'll work on reading the poems aloud, on analyzing the structure, sound devices, and figurative language of the poems. The students will also be preparing an oral report similar to our class meetings on an additional poet: a picture of the poet, a short biographical sketch, and 3-4 poems by that poet as their "final exam" which I'm calling a "Sharing Day."

The second semester will involve the writing of poems. We'll examine different types of poems, write some together in class, then ask the students to compose a few poems of their own in that genre. At the end of the class each student will choose his/her three or four favorite poems composed by him/herself and read them aloud to the class for our second "Sharing Day."

Each student will also be assembling his/her own portfolio, or "Folio" during the class in a three-ring binder which will contain: the picture, biography, and poems of each poet we study (plus the written responses of the student to one of the poems), plus the student's own research project on an outside poet for Sharing Day in the first half of the folio, and then the different definitions, explanations, and examples of each kind of poem the student will write, plus the student's original poems of each type. By the end of class, each student will have a nice poetry book to return to in later years, explaining much about poems by famous poets and poems of the student's own composition.

So here is the tentative syllabus I've set up:

FIRST SEMESTER (subject to change):

September 10: Introduction to Class: copybooks, poetry folios, research project, sharing days, oral readings and written responses.

September 24: Introduction to Poetry: structure, sound, figures of speech

October 8: Poetry of Robert Louis Stevenson

October 22: Poetry of e.e. cummings

October 29: Poetry of Robert Frost

November 12: Poetry of Carl Sandburg and William Carlos Williams

December 10: Poetry of William Wordsworth

January 14: Poetry of Emily Dickinson

January 28: Sharing Day: Poet Reports Read Aloud in Class

SECOND SEMESTER (subject to change):

February 25: Personification and Metaphor, plus Couplet, Tercet, and Quatrain

March 11: Haiku and Tanka

March 25: Acrostic Poetry

April 22: Cinquain and Diamante

April 29: Visual Poetry (Shape and Concrete)

May 13: Free Verse

May 27: Limerick and Sonnet

June 10: Sharing Day: Favorite Poems Written by Students and Poetry Party!

Writing all of this down is helping me as I sit down to plan and compose the remainder of handouts for the class which begins this upcoming Thursday, September 10. I have a lot of preparation to do, but I am strangely looking forward to it. I certainly have more than enough work on my plate this semester (including the possibility of another One Thing: Poetry class for Brave Writer in November), but change is nice once in a while. However, I will dreadfully miss my Advanced Writing students as they are the students who want to write, versus some of the Intermediate students whose mothers are making them write. Don't get me wrong: most of my Intermediate students are extremely motivated, but there are always a few students who really have no desire to be in the class and are taking it because their parents want them to improve their writing. There's nothing wrong with that at all, but those students often need extra TLC than the highly-motivated students require.

So Class Day will be quite the adventure this year as both the Poetry/Research class and the Intermediate Writing class contain 12-15 students, more students than I am accustomed to. Although it will be a great deal of work, I think this year will be one of great enjoyment as well for me, and I hope for the students, too.

A Sonlight Blessing

We continue to be blessed by the home schooling community. Yesterday I received an e-mail from Sonlight Curriculum, our long-time favorite core curriculum. We've used Sonlight since Elizabeth entered first grade, and it's been the basis of our home education program ever since. And for years I have planned to have Elizabeth study the Church History portion of Sonlight 200 along with the Sonlight 530 British Lit program for her senior year. So when I purchased Sonlight 200 for her freshman literature program, I saved the Church History for this year, so I already have it on hand. But without funds for purchasing new books this fall, I was rather stuck.

I collected all the Brit Lit books I found listed in the catalog for Sonlight 530 and checked the library for the ones I didn't have on my overflowing bookshelves. There was only one that the San Diego County Library System and I didn't have between us which a dear reader of this blog kindly ordered from Sonlight for me. So Elizabeth will be reading these books this year:

The Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
Beowulf (translated by Seamus Heaney, of course)
The Canterbury Quintet (General Prologue and Four Tales) by Chaucer
Dubliners by James Joyce
Emma by Jane Austen
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
The Great Divorce by CS Lewis
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
Hamlet by Shakespeare (we'll read Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead with it)
The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
Lord of the Flies by William Golding (blech! blech! gag! gag!)
Paradise Lost by John Milton
A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie (we love the film Finding Neverland)
Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw
Right Ho, Jeeves by PG Wodehouse
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Secret Sharer and Other Stories by Joseph Conrad (I vastly prefer Heart of Darkness)
A Severe Mercy by VanAuken
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens
Three Men in a Boat by Jerome
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

But I didn't have the Instructor's Guide for Sonlight 530, so I was stuck. Did I let her start reading the books (I found the schedule for the first three weeks on the website) without all those wonderfully helpful and illuminating notes, or should we wait until we have the IG, doubling her Church History in the meantime and then switching off to Brit Lit until we are caught up? We decided on the latter. But it's been very hard to wait.

Until yesterday afternoon.

I received an e-mail from Sonlight stating that a forum user who wishes to remain anonymous sent us two gift certificates that will precisely cover the cost of the Brit Lit 530 Instructor's Guide! I placed the order this afternoon -- I would have placed it earlier except that Sonlight's ordering system has been down since last night, so I e-mailed in my order and received a confirmatory phone call within three hours. Yay!

Another dear friend (we attended graduate school together) called me today to let me know that she was purchasing the new MLA Handbook (7th edition) for me to use with my upcoming MLA course at Brave Writer. I will be able to pick it up tomorrow at the local Barnes and Noble which is simply perfect as I have set aside Saturday to work on the class.

I am soooooo blessed with friends and family who are so willing to help us through this valley of under-employment. (See this post for more blessings!) I've usually been on the "giving end" and am now learning how to gratefully receive. It's such a relief (and a little humbling) to have our needs filled by others, and I am so incredibly thankful for the Family of God and to our Lord who is teaching me so much during this difficult time. As I sign my e-mails, Soli Deo Gloria!

Learning Languages

Approximately six months ago I joined a daily e-list called ClickSchooling which recommends web sites for home schooling on a daily basis: Monday Math, Tuesday Science, etc. I've found a couple of really nice sites through ClickSchooling, but the gem I found there in July has been mind-blowingly wonderful.

Livemocha is a foreign language site with FREE lessons in just about every language imaginable. I had been bemoaning our lack of finances as I had wanted to purchase the Rosetta Stone German program for Timothy's freshman year of high school, and all I had on hand besides my own ancient textbooks (all at the college level) was a Barron's Foreign Service German audio CD and text set which really focused on travel and not on truly learning a language. Jonathan, in 7th grade, had mentioned wanting to learn Japanese, and I possess nothing at all on that language. And with Rosetta Stone at a couple of hundred dollars per level (and needing at least 2-3 levels for each language), studying foreign languages just didn't seem possible for our boys this year. And that was sad because one of the major reasons we wanted to home school our children was foreign language acquisition at younger ages than the public schools allowed.

But we are pleased as punch with Livemocha. The lessons are quite similar to the old versions of Rosetta Stone, using pictures to naturally teach not only vocabulary but also sentence structure and grammar. I'm taking Timothy through German which is still quite familiar as I taught it briefly at the university level both as University of San Diego (as a TA) and at Point Loma Nazarene University (first year, second semester). I am very pleased with the lessons, although I have found a simple mistake or two here and there, but nothing major. Keith and Jonathan are doing the Japanese together as well as they both want to learn it, and they're really enjoying it. Our one complaint is that sometimes the native speakers go a little too fast, and it can be difficult at times to understand what they're saying. I can catch the German well enough to get Timothy through it, but Keith and Jonathan are struggling a bit here and there. But, hey, it's FREE!

Livemocha does have a paid "Plus Program" which is $100 per level, but the free one is quite adequate. Each free lesson has four parts: 1) a 40-word/sentence learning part, 2) a 40-word/sentence review part that involves reading, hearing, and dragging words into sentences, 3) a writing part that involves composing sentences and receiving feedback from native speakers, and 4) a spoken part where we record ourselves reading a paragraph, and again we receive feedback from native speakers.

The beautiful component that makes Livemocha different from even Rosetta Stone is the worldwide community of language learners available at one's fingertips. We as native English speakers can give feedback to students of English on their written and spoken exercises, and we can also make "friends" with speakers of either our native language or of the language we're learning in order to teach and learn, give and take, within the Livemocha community.

I'll be helping Timothy with his fifth lesson of the first level (101) as soon as I post this, and there are Intermediate and Advanced Levels as well. Plus, the program keeps track of all reviews and keeps a running percentile of all lessons combined; he is running at 94%. Quizzes and extra review material are also available in the free version although we haven't needed either yet. Overall, I am quite impressed with Livemocha and highly recommend it to my home schooling and non-home schooling friends alike. And thank you, Diane at ClickSchooling, for recommending it to us in the first place!

Quotation of the Week

I was so incredibly out-of-my-mind busy last week with a Brave Writer deadline and starting our home school on Tuesday (and not having half my books -- what I wouldn't give for a Sonlight Brit Lit Instructor's Guide and an ABeka Economics and American Government set! Poor Elizabeth is functioning with only one class right now for her senior year until I can get her books. The boys' math workbooks can wait as they can finish their workbooks from last year, even though they're rather drowning as Jonathan gasps through algebra and Benjamin flails his way through fractions and double-digit multiplication with NO gentle review that allows them to slide slowly into the mathematics whirlpool to acclimate. Nope, they've been flung into the deep end with nary a floatie. Poor babies).

Anywhoooo, I was so incredibly busy that posting my usual Quotation of the Week never happened. And this week as I thumb through my quotation copybook, I am drawn to quotations on art. So here they are -- enjoy!

"I don't paint things. I only paint the difference between things."
-- Henri Matisse

"Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather seen."
-- Leonardo da Vinci

"Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does, the better."
-- Andre Gide

I love quotations. I love reading them, and I love copying them into my little copybook. When I find a sentence or two that sparkle on the page -- or on the computer screen -- I suck in my breath and reach for my rosewood dip pen with the steel nib and my bottle of ink. Removing the cork of the glass bottle of sepia ink, I carefully dip the nib into the swirling ink to the precise depth of maximum writing without blots, bring the nib to the thick white paper, and start letting ink flow into words and letters. The satisfaction when the quotation is copied in old-fashioned sepia ink sends wriggles of joy up my spine. Joy. Yes, joy.

Words are my tools, and I love them -- when they are assembled into the perfect order, it's simply magic.

An Interview with Dean

My creative writing professor from Point Loma Nazarene University (and who kindly shared his office with me when I taught there as an adjunct) was interviewed on Friday by a local news station regarding his new book, God Hiding in Plain Sight. Dean is the founder and director of PLNU's journalism department and the man behind the Writers' Symposium by the Sea each February.

My internet service is being pokey tonight, and it wouldn't let me upload the video, but at least I have a link for you. You may watch the interview here: Dean's Interview

I am looking forward to reading it -- I adore the topic of examining the seven sacraments in light of discovering the sacred in everyday life. Perhaps I can sweetly beg for an autographed copy?

The Middle Place

Warning: The review below contains a few mild plot spoilers, but no more than one would gain from reading the dust jacket.

When our Logos Reading and Discussion Group at Lake Murray Community Church recommended books for our third year, my friend Kim highly recommended The Middle Place by Kelly Corrigan (2008). It was one of the few books on our combined lists with which I was not familiar, but I took Kim's recommendation quite seriously and, after checking that our library system had adequate copies, put it on the schedule for July. The discussion was moved to August when Kim's nursing schedule conflicted because we really want her to be present as she has recommended the book so highly. And it's actually the first book in about a year that I haven't spent all of the Saturday before our meeting frantically finishing; I completed it last night and am feeling rather smug, thankyouverymuch.

I started the book just last weekend and was immediately sucked into Corrigan's easy-breezy, humorous prose that sparkles despite the serious subject matter: cancer. Kelly Corrigan, a mother in her mid-thirties to two girls three and below, finds a lump and walks us through diagnosis and treatment with a tone of humor, reality, and poignancy. Intermixed with her present experiences of wife, mother, and cancer patient are scenes from her childhood as George Corrigan's daughter -- growing up with a bubbly Irish Catholic lacrosse coach who cheered his children constantly, always looking for and seeing the best in his children as well as in everyone he meets.

Kelly Corrigan examines "the middle place" where she is both child and parent, telling stories of her childhood fraught with joy and hilarity juxtaposed against her diagnosis and treatment for bre*ast cancer which she attempts to handle with her father's positive outlook and his unfailing support. She leans on her father almost as much as her husband, sometimes wishing her husband to be as supportive as her father, but they come behind her in different and helpful ways, and she learns to value and love her husband even more as she endures treatment. Corrigan's writing sparkles with details that make her writing ebb and flow in just the right places, transparent in a human way that almost everyone will be able to relate to.

Her writing reminds me of Anne Lamott's -- that self-deprecating humor, the transparency, not concerned with making herself "look good" but wanting to not only remove the mask we all hide behind but stomp on it with ecstatic joy in our humanity. I found myself laughing and crying as I read, especially as Kelly struggles with her dad's diagnosis of prostate cancer shortly after her own diagnosis. Living on opposite coasts, they pull together in their common treatments, George Corrigan relying on his robust, devout Catholic faith and Kelly relying on friends and family as well as on her father's faith, a faith she seems close to embracing by the end of the book -- although I may be reading between the lines a bit too much.

The genre of the memoir is one of my favorites which can be seen in my list of favorite modern writers: Anne Lamott, Kathleen Norris, Frederica Mathewes-Green, Fr. James Martin, Peter Gilquist, Donald Miller, Scott Hahn, Thomas Howard, especially when these writers are focused on the development of their Christian lives. Kelly Corrigan falls short in this one area of not writing about her faith (although she does discuss her father's faith), but I still absolutely enjoyed The Middle Place and look forward to what Kelly Corrigan might be working on right now. I can't wait to discuss her book tomorrow (Sunday) afternoon with my Logos friends, especially as we have some new people coming over the summer.

And next month: Les Miserables! I'd better start reading NOW....

A Baptist Discusses Communion

(Father Acker and Benjamin as Acolyte prepare the Eucharistic elements in Victoria Chapel)

This afternoon while consuming some delicious leftover Chicken Parmigiana (one of our family's specialities), I scrolled through Facebook and discovered a new post from Michael Spencer, a.k.a The Internet Monk on a Baptist Concept of Communion. Intrigued (especially as our Evangelical Free Church is quite similar to the Baptist denomination in many ways), I started perusing the article, gearing up in my mind to disagree with the Baptist professor Michael has interviewed. Imagine my pleased surprise in finding myself "Amen"-ing Dr. Timothy George in my head as I read his reply to Michael's question. I reproduce the question and answer below in their entirety:

[Michael writes:] ...Dr. Timothy George continues to serve as the founding dean of Beeson Divinity School at Samford University in Birmingham and a senior editor of Christianity Today. He is a participant in the project known as Evangelicals and Catholics Together and also serves on the International Baptist-Catholic Dialogue team.

I recently wrote Dr. George and asked for his comments on this question: “How can Baptists respond to Catholic and Orthodox Christians who challenge our view of the Lord’s Supper as having no deeper historical/Biblical roots than Zwingli?”

Dr. George was kind enough to send along this reply. I’m deeply appreciative of his generosity.

Among many Baptist Christians there is a growing awareness that the Supper of the Lord should have a more prominent (and frequent) place in the life of worship, as it certainly did in the early church. There is also the realization that a more robust doctrine of (what Calvin called) the real spiritual presence of Christ in the Supper is called for by the participationist language of the New Testament itself and is in keeping with the best traditions of Baptist life. No less a figure than Charles Haddon Spurgeon portrayed the Lord’s Supper as nothing less than an encounter with the living Christ himself: “At all times when you come to the communion table, count it to have been no ordinance of grace to you unless you have gone right through the veil into Christ’s own arms, or at least have touched his garment, feeling that the first object, the life and soul of the means of grace, is to touch Jesus Christ himself.” [Note from Susanne: This quote from Spurgeon deserves copying into my Quotations Journal!]

For most of our history, Baptists have been more concerned with the externals of the Table—grape juice or real wine, who may preside, who may partake—rather than with the question of what actually goes on at this sacred meal. It is well known that Luther and Zwingli differed strongly, and actually broke fellowship with one another, over the meaning of the words of institution, “This is my body.” Historically, Baptists have belonged more to the Reformed (whether Zwinglian or Calvinist) side of that debate, but it is important to realize that all of the mainline reformers reacted against the displacement of the Lord’s Supper as the central focus of Christian worship in medieval Catholicism. They criticized the fact that the Eucharist had become clericalized (the service in Latin and only bread for the laity), commercialized (votive masses used as a fundraising scheme in much of the church), and scholasticized (the dogma of transubstantiation and the view of the mass as a sacrifice).

The reformers harked back to the teaching of the New Testament, the practice of the early church, and especially to the theology of St. Augustine. Augustine argued that in the sacrament the sign must be identified as a sign by a word spoken about it, thus making the sacrament itself a “visible word.” In commenting on John 6:50, Augustine wrote: “ ‘He who eats of this bread will not die.’ But that means the one who eats what belongs to the power of the sacrament, not simply to the visible sacrament; the one who eats inwardly, not merely outwardly; the one who eats the sacrament in the heart not just the one who crushes it with his teeth” (In Ev. Joh. Tract. 26.12). While Luther could speak of the manducatio impiorum, “the eating of the ungodly,” the Reformed tradition picked up Augustine’s distinction and emphasized the cruciality of faith for the proper reception of the beneficium of grace in the Supper. This same theology they found echoed in other pre-reformation figures including Ratramnus, Wycliffe, and Hus. What they rejected, in keeping with Luther, was an understanding of the sacrifice of the mass as an expression of works-righteousness, a theology which seemed to them to undermine the all-sufficiency of Jesus’s once-and-for-all death on the cross—where, as Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer put it, he offered “a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world.”

Since the sixteenth century, and especially in the liturgical renewal stemming from Vatican II, many of the changes called for by the reformers have been accepted in the practice of the Catholic Church. Yet important, church-dividing differences still remain and I think the Church of Rome is right to resist the kind of easy-going ecumenism that would ignore such differences in order to achieve a false unity. In our discussions with our Catholic brothers and sisters, we Baptists and evangelicals must learn to distinguish the unity we are called to affirm and the divisions we must still sustain. But this we should do in the spirit of Jesus’s high priestly prayer for his disciples in John 17—“that they may be one, Father, as you and I are one so that world may believe.”

Sources:
Timothy George, Theology of the Reformers
Steve Harmon, Towards Baptist Catholicity
Geoffrey Wainwright, Eucharist and Eschatology

I agree with basically everything that Dr. George writes above which is quite remarkable given my Anglicized view of the Eucharist. I only hope that more Baptist, other evangelical denominations, and non-denominational pastors/churches take heed and follow through on Dr. George's views of both Communion and ecumenism; I truly appreciate how he writes of Catholics as our "brothers and sisters" as he strives for respect and unity within our catholic (universal) Christian Church.

Serving God by Serving People

(Image from pbs.org)

In 2006 our church of sixteen years, Lake Murray Community Church in La Mesa, California, (San Diego County, in case you're not a local) sent a team of 21 adults and young people to Seneg*al, West Africa. I already have a homeschooling e-friend living in that country who has been part of several online communities and Yahoo Groups (currently a prayer group) serving as a missionary with her family in that country, so I possessed some familiarity with Seneg*al. Our team helped missionaries in the country and also went out to the villages to serve.

Why Seneg*al? One of the leaders of the 2006 Seneg*al group from our church grew up in the country as the child of missionaries and now is seeking to return there as a missionary himself with his wife and two sons. As they finish raising the requisite support and then attend foreign language training, our church desires a closer relationship with the Seneg*alese, especially those in villages outside the big cities.

Our church has the idea of supporting a single village over (at least) the next five years, helping them with needs for clean water, for education, for medical care, for nutritious food, etc., sending smaller teams to Africa every 12-18 months, with the first trip planned for March 2010. We will build relationships with these people and help supply some of their physical needs as well as their spiritual need for Christ.

I'm really excited about this opportunity. Our church already supports another missionary family in North Africa who came from Lake Murray and are good friends of our family. In addition, over ten years ago, our church adopted the Turkm*en people group, and our former pastor is still quite active in serving the Turkm*en people in the several countries in which they live. Several of our church's young people have served in East Asia, with one just returning to continue to serve in a predominantly Musl*im area.

Our church also supports missionaries serving here in the the States -- a family in Idaho/Wyoming who minister to migrant farm workers, another family who trains missionaries in Wisconsin, plus two local families in which the husbands serve as Kaiser hospital chaplains (unpaid positions). Each month a group from Lake Murray fires up the grill to serve dinner to the homeless in downtown San Diego, with everyone from the pastors to small children helping make the venture a success on the first Friday of every month.

I love seeing God use His people to help others in need. We all need a hug from "Jesus with skin on," as we sometimes call our Christian friends. We are knit together, heart and soul, by the One who created us and who is glorified as we serve in His Name. I am looking forward greatly to seeing how His Will shall unfold in the days and weeks, the months and years to come.

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost; as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen. (The Gloria Patri)

Liberals and Conservatives

(Image from commienews.com)

As I type this, I just heard on Fox News and CNN that Senator Edward Kennedy died this evening at age 77 from brain cancer after serving in the US Senate since 1962, one of the longest-serving Senators ever and the youngest of the nine Kennedy offspring. As a conservative-leaning person, I have disagreed far more with the late Senator than I have agreed with him, although I have found myself on "his side" in a few issues.

The "rivalry" (for lack of a better word) between liberals and conservatives is something that has deeply troubled me. Tonight I read an article that quite nicely summarized many of my experiences on the university campuses (campii??) at which I have taught. You may read it here: Perspectives: Republicans Are Evil.

I grew up with my father's staunchly Democratic parents on one side and my mother's conservative family on the other, despite the fact that my staid, proper Democratic grandparents looked down upon my mom's rather wild "hippy" Republicans -- rather an upside down situation. Later (probably after his father's death) my dad changed his party affiliation to Republican, and myself, my brother, and my sister remain committed to conservative values of small government, the value of small businesses, states' rights over government control, lower taxes, etc. Even though I didn't find John McCain a true fiscal and social conservative, I and our four children volunteered in the local Republican Party office because we believe strongly in small government and states' control rather than a large federal government.

At age 18 I voted proudly for Ronald Reagan. I gritted my teeth through Clinton's eight years yet found myself frustrated with George W. Bush for not taking a more conservative stand on national safety at our California/Mexico border, of which I live a mere 17 miles north. I greatly admire Alan Keyes whose articulation of the conservative platform and lack of politico-speak led me to vote for him in the primaries of 2000 and 2008; thus, I voted for an African-American candidate eight years before Barack Obama and again during Obama's campaign as well.

But the utter hatred I have experienced because of my rather conservative views has shocked me. The first semester that I taught at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego was the fall of 1992 when Bill Clinton was elected President, and California also ushered in two Democratic female Senators: Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, both of whom remain in office nearly twenty years later. The majority of students in my classes were upset on the morning after the election, but the majority of the Literature Department Faculty were ecstatic. One female professor asked me happily, "Aren't you thrilled that we've elected two women Senators?" I replied, "Not those women." She looked shocked, her smile disappearing. Somehow, because I was an educator, it was assumed that I was liberal. I have nothing against the idea of female Senators; I simply agree with very little if anything that Feinstein and Boxer support.

I was still teaching at Point Loma during the 1996 presidential campaign and was berated by a beloved literature professor for supporting Dole over Clinton. I was accused of wanting to take school lunches away from needy children, and when I asked in disbelief if this professor truly believed that Republicans were "out to starve children," he banged his fist on the secretary's desk and cried, "Yes! They are all rich white men who are greedy warmongers and who enjoy nothing better than starving poor children!" I tried to explain that with lower taxes, our family's small business could actually support our children so we could pay for our own children's lunches, but he insisted that Republicans indeed were evil.

But one can indeed be a "compassionate conservative" who wants to be a good steward of our environment (but sees that balance is quite possible and desirable between being "green" and being a member of PETA). One can support Welfare reform and still be compassionate toward the poor -- such as serving dinner at a local homeless shelter, a monthly event that our church does monthly. One can indeed support education choices ("school vouchers" and home schooling) and be an educator. One can support private, faith-based programs for caring for the poor rather than the government. One can be against abortion and not support government-run health care but still be a caring person ... one who values life and health but doesn't want the same government that is almost twelve trillion dollars in debt and charges $500 per toilet seat to attempt to run our health care system. Canadians with a similar system who can afford to do so often creep over the border and pay for their health treatments in the US, but the poor up north are stuck with the Canadian system with insanely and dangerously long waits for treatment. A friend who admires Obama likened health care reform to school choice -- but with school choice, only the rich can afford private schools and everyone else is stuck with public education unless one is willing to give up a career and home school their children ... and still pay full property taxes. Not much of a choice, really.

The article's point and mine: Republicans really are not "evil people who wish to starve poor children." Our family income is well below average; small business owners get short shrift when it comes to our federal government, so for our benefit, we see that less government is better government. The federal government should protect our borders, provide national defense, and keep to the simple stuff that the Constitution permits them to do. Even the federal income tax is technically illegal, a fact that FDR admitted at the time he proposed it. Let the federal government take care of what it is supposed to, and allow the states to deal with the rest. And that's certainly not an "evil" idea ... although I am sure some will indeed call it (and me) so. And it will be far from the first time, unfortunately.