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  • Changing the Bankruptcy Laws and Social Unrest

    Front and centre in political debates these days is student loan debt.  It’s led to much of the romance of socialism amongst the Millennials (never mind that a good portion of that debt was spent in state schools, socialist institutions par excellence.)  One of the nasty things about student loan debt is that it is no longer dischargeable in bankruptcy, a change made in the last decade.

    Although I wasn’t considering student loan debt, I felt at the time that changing the bankruptcy laws in a society so driven by easy credit would lead to social unrest, as this 2005 post/2008 repost attests:

    On the other hand, the passage of the legislation as it stands is a recipe for social unrest.

    Some of it was necessary: it was too easy for wealthy debtors to shield too many of their assets. And, as an inducement for people to lighten their debt load, this legislation has the potential to do good. But getting from here to there is not going to be fun.

    To start with, tightening the bankruptcy laws will only make it easier for lenders to continue their “numbers game” of lending to credit unworthy people, since their downside risk has been reduced. Lenders could have achieved a similar result by tightening the access to credit by more selective lending; they could have even submitted to some kind of re-regulation to accomplish this. But they have decided to throw the burden of “credit regulation” on borrowers rather than themselves…

    It is our opinion that the change in bankruptcy laws will come much quicker than changes in American attitudes towards consumption and debt. The result of this will be many more people who will find themselves on the wrong end of the credit system, and enough of those people around can and will be socially destabilising.

    If what we’ve got now isn’t social unrest, I don’t know what is.  But it was predictable.

  • Soils in Construction (Sixth Edition) Now Available — vulcanhammer.net

    It’s here a last: Soils in Construction, the Sixth Edition, now available from Waveland Press. Many of you (and especially those who are familiar with the companion site vulcanhammer.info) are aware that I’ve spent much of my career in geotechnical engineering and deep foundations dealing with contractors. As such I am both sympathetic with their […]

    via Soils in Construction (Sixth Edition) Now Available — vulcanhammer.net

  • The Thing About Myself that @rachelheldevans Brought to Mind

    I was saddened by the last voyage of Rachel Held Evans.  It is never good for such a thing to happen, especially at this time in life.  She was not so far from us and my wife and I know several of her fellow parishioners at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Cleveland.

    It’s best to put your opinions out on someone while they’re still here, and the one extended piece I did on her was this one in 2013 on a series of tornadoes in Oklahoma.  It reminded me of a simple fact about myself; that, although my years in the Evangelical-Pentecostal world have on the whole been positive, I’m glad I was neither raised nor came of age in it.  I’ll reproduce the body of my response to her (and her opponents):

    The truth is that both Evans and her Evangelical opponents are working from one shared assumption: that we have a performance-based God whose purpose is to either a) fulfil our every wish or b) punish us for every fault.  Both implicitly assume that people are the measure, and neither really represents reality.  They represent responses to Evangelical Christianity’s current “selling point”, i.e., that if you get on God’s side you’ll have a life of bliss.  One emphasises the downside of not being on his side (and I’ll admit that too many Evangelicals are big on that) and the other attempts to apply post-modern “I deserve the best” mentality to a universe where such an assumption has no basis.

    Such dialectics are, for me, a reminder of how blessed I was that my chief intellectual formation as a Christian was as a Roman Catholic and not a Protestant, let alone an Evangelical.  It has saved me a great deal of grief and probably apostacy.  So let me lay out what I think is the reality we have.

    For all of its wonder, this world and universe is fallen and not God’s ideal for us.  That ideal will be found in eternity with him.  Before that happens we’ll have problems.  Sometimes these problems are big, sometimes these problems are small.  Sometimes these problems are the result of being in the path of unintended disaster, some are really of our own making.  (The global warming fanatics, for their part, can point to Oklahoma as a high-carbon consuming place because of its low-density settlement, large vehicles and ubiquitous air-conditioning, so there, you can make a liberal case against Evans).  But in either case the key is to secure our eternity so that we can deal with the problems that come our way in this life.

    But ultimately that redemption, like everything else we get from God, is undeserved.  We don’t have the intrinsic worth to expect otherwise; God’s act of redemption was an act of undeserved love.  Coming from a congenial region, Evans may think this is harsh.  But as I’ve said before (and there are exceptions to this) growing up in a place like South Florida convinced me that, if there is a “default” in eternity, it isn’t heaven.

    To think otherwise is, IMHO, to take on an entitlement mentality about God, which for many of us extends to the people and institutions around us.  Personally I can’t stomach that; entitlement mentalities not only go against my grain as a Christian, but they also really rub me the wrong way from my secular upbringing (and, yes, Rachel Held Evans, some of us really do have a secular background).  I would say that my walk with God has softened my attitude towards the world around me, which would otherwise be misanthropic and condescending (and I struggle with both).

    It’s time to stop being so “deep in our own stuff” and broaden our horizons.

    Memory eternal, and prayers for her family.

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  • ACNA and CANA: The Baling Wire Unravels, and Some Thoughts About Ethnicity and Churches

    They put a good face on a messy situation:

    Archbishop Foley Beach, Primate of the Anglican Church in North America, and Archbishop Nicholas Okoh, Primate of the Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion), have signed an agreement regarding the status of the Convocation of Anglicans in North America (CANA) dioceses in both provinces…

    The agreement provides that CANA become solely a mission of the Church of Nigeria but allows each of the three dioceses (Cana East, Cana West, Trinity) to make its own decision regarding its provincial relationships.

    Each diocese will amend its constitution and canons as necessary, and may request to be a ministry partner of the alternative province. Both provinces are thankful that this resolution has been reached and look forward to continued collaboration in Gospel ministry, sharing full communion as provinces in the Anglican Communion.

    One is led to recall Greg Griffith’s observation about North American Anglicanism when he swam the Tiber:

    …the promise of the orthodox Anglican movement outside of The Episcopal Church never materialized either. Populated as that movement is by many good people, it has the institutional feeling of something held together by duct tape and baling wire.

    Although the ACNA has made some progress from that, the multiprovincial origins of ACNA make things like this inevitable.

    Getting past the baling wire, the core issue here is whether a church should encourage the development of ethnically specific congregations or even dioceses within its structure.  This is a problem that the ACNA, whose leadership mostly comes out of a monochrome (and socio-economically undiverse) Episcopal church, are really not prepared to deal with.  The CANA Trinity Diocese is mostly made up of Nigerian immigrants, who are very much products of the “old country” by language and custom.  They would like that idea expressed in their leadership, and the old country responded by appointing four bishops on its own, something that created a brown pants moment for the ACNA leadership.

    So is it right?  Let’s look at the usual suspects at this blog.

    It’s been forgotten, but at one point the Roman Catholic church in this country seriously considered organising itself along ethnic lines of the places its immigrant laity came from, i.e. Ireland, Italy, Germany, France, etc.  They opted not to, and although we have had ethnically predominant parishes the structure is uniform.  The main result of this was to buttress the hegemony of the Irish, with all the ups and downs that comes with it.

    With the Church of God, Pentecostal in doctrine and worship but episcopal and centralised in government, the formation of ethnic “dioceses” and structures from the outset has been the norm.  The downside to that is that you end up with ethnic “enclaves” in the church, which tend to isolate these churches.  The upside is that you can put your congregation at arms length from the domination of the Scots-Irish, whose own priorities are driven by the peculiarities of their own situation.  That started with the African-American churches; the largest group which have their own structure today are the Hispanics, not as homogenous a group as people think.

    Some of this, especially now, is the result of variations in cultural assimilation.  When people come here at the start, they have their own language, customs, etc.  As time passes and the children grow up here, they will shift to a different idea.   The result of this are the multicultural churches (usually medium to large churches) which are more common in American Christianity than their “woke” opponents would care to admit.  In this respect churches such as the CANA Trinity Diocese are transitional in nature (isn’t everything on this side of eternity?)

    Getting back to the ACNA and CANA, the rigid ideal of purely territorial dioceses is one that dominates the thinking of many in the Land of the Apostolic Succession.  It was broken by the way the ACNA was cobbled together, and the realities of ethnically diverse Christianity, which requires both putting people together from all places and all races into one church and accommodating the specific needs of different groups, make this ideal impossible on a practical level.  This concord isn’t the best way to address the current reality, but given the way things stand in the ACNA, it’s just best to tighten and repair the baling wire and hope for the best.

  • Dr. Wang Yun Wu: Leading Chinese Scholar Abandoned Atheism after Witnessing a Miracle

    via Dr. Wang Yun Wu: Leading Chinese Scholar Abandoned Atheism after Witnessing a Miracle

  • YouTube Closes in on the Cover Artists

    ICYMI, I’ve migrated the music that’s been on this site to YouTube.  That took some time and effort but I think it’s worth it.  The central reason for that is that it gives the artists (and their record companies) the opportunity to earn some revenue off of the music, even though most of them are either unable or unwilling to put the music back into distribution.  As many of you know, this site specialises in the “Jesus Music” era of the 1960’s and 1970’s.

    In the process of doing this, some of the albums were claimed by their copyright holders, usually the record companies or their agents, successors or assigns (how’s that for a little legalese!)  And that’s fine; I didn’t go on YouTube to make money, and the channel (thanks to the recent change in YouTube rules) isn’t eligible for monetization because it doesn’t draw enough traffic.  I’m glad to see that we’ve got a workable mechanism (not perfect but workable) to link the copyright holders with their music.

    Most of the claims made during the process were for albums released by secular labels (which did happen in the Jesus Music era) where the album came from.  There are a few for Christian labels, but they’re the exception, not the rule.  But virtually all of the claims came for original artists.

    This week I’ve seen a rash of claims for “covers,” i.e., songs not performed by the original artists.  This is something new.  It indicates to me that the algorithm for determining which songs are which has stepped up.  With the new regulations coming from Europe, that’s going to be a survival mechanism.  This tells me that YouTube has stepped up its game on this.

    Fortunately in all cases they just claim revenue and let the album stay up.  I suppose that, for music this old and frequently obscure, they’re glad to have any exposure for it, especially when someone else goes to the trouble of putting it out there.  As of now this situation is IMHO a happy one for everyone, and I hope it stays that way.

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  • Angel Tucciarone: If We Saw Him

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  • Getting Past Bread: A Holy Week Reflection — The Bossuet Project

    I have an Iranian office mate. My contact with the Iranians has been educational in my understanding of the Scriptures. One thing he’s really big on is bread. One time we went to a bakery where he brought a loaf of sourdough bread, which he consumed in its entirety–in one sitting. I bring bread from […]

    via Getting Past Bread: A Holy Week Reflection — The Bossuet Project

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  • The “Acceptable Religion” Concept Makes a Comeback

    Historical amnesia is a common American malady.  One of those aspects of American life that is oft forgotten is that of the “acceptable religion,” the idea that certain religions are more socially acceptable (and thus more amenable to their adherents moving up) than others.  In the past, this was mostly an intramural contest within Christianity (with the Lodge lurking in the background); certain forms of the faith were more “acceptable” than others, thus the Episcopal Church was the “church of Presidents.”  (I think we just buried our last one.)  That made Christianity, especially in the South, a socio-economically stratified business: people changed churches both to help move up and to announce that arrival when it happened.  Those who had the bad taste to buck the trend had…bad taste, with the consequences that followed.  The first groups to push back in a significant way against this were Jews and Roman Catholics, but it wasn’t an easy struggle for either group.

    Today, of course, the new “acceptable” religion is sexually-driven secularism, and it’s setting the trend for taste in a new way at Yale:

    But in late March, Yale Law School adopted a novel tactic: one-upping the protesters. It announced three major policy changes that went further than many of the protesters’ demands, all under the guise of an expanded nondiscrimination policy.

    The new policies require all employers to swear that, when hiring students or graduates who benefit from certain Yale funding, they will not consider an applicant’s “religion,” “religious creed,” “gender identity” or “gender expression,” among other factors. The effect of this, for instance, is if a Yale Law student or graduate wishes to work for an organization that does consider religion in hiring — say a Catholic organization or Jewish advocacy group — Yale will cut them off from three important programs.

    Because the United States had the bad taste to make another decision–anoint a group of private schools as its ne plus ultra educational institutions–this will probably stick in some form, since students at private schools of any kind don’t enjoy the same broad First Amendment protections from university intrusion that their state school counterparts do.  But it’s a serious shot across the bow, especially for climbing Evangelicals who want their children to move up without the inconvenience–and eternal consequence–of formally adopting an “acceptable” religion.

    But such has never really been an option, has it?

    Do not love the world or what the world can offer. When any one loves the world, there is no love for the Father in him; for all that the world can offer–the gratification of the earthly nature, the gratification of the eye, the pretentious life–belongs, not to the Father, but to the world. And the world, and all that it gratifies, is passing away, but he who does God’s will remains for ever. (1 John 2:15-17 TCNT)

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  • Settling for Lehigh Isn’t the Worst Thing That Could Happen

    In Caitlin Flanagan’s interesting piece on the college admissions scandal, she makes this statement that jumped out at me:

    I just about got an ulcer sitting in that office listening to rich people complaining bitterly about an “unfair” or a “rigged” system. Sometimes they would say things so outlandish that I would just stare at them, trying to beam into their mind the question, Can you hear yourself? That so many of them were (literal) limousine liberals lent the meetings an element of radical chic. They were down for the revolution, but there was no way their kid was going to settle for Lehigh.

    “Settling” for Lehigh is what my grandfather did; he graduated in 1912.  The legacy he left in aviation and yachting alone is so spacious that it’s taken two generations of my family to really get out from under it.

    chw-lehigh-2
    My grandfather (right) at Lehigh.  He probably earned a “Gentlemen’s C” while there, but what happened afterwards is another story.

    But my grandfather lived in a different country: today all of our Presidents (including the current one) and Supreme Court justices are products of the Ivy League, to say nothing of much of the upper bureaucracy and of Congress.  For my part I passed up the Ivy League, to the catcalls of my prep school.  Given the course that our privileged few have led us this past half century, to say nothing of the attitudes on display that Flanagan experienced as an admissions counselor, not being complicit in that is a relief.

    I think that Flanagan’s bottom line on why the privileged few went for broke in the admissions scandal is accurate:

    But what accounted for the intensity of emotion these parents expressed, their sense of a profound loss, of rage at being robbed of what they believed was rightfully theirs? They were experiencing the same response to a changing America that ultimately brought Donald Trump to office: white displacement and a revised social contract. The collapse of manufacturing jobs has been to poor whites what the elite college-admissions crunch has been to wealthy ones: a smaller and smaller slice of pie for people who were used to having the fattest piece of all.

    I think that’s part of the problem I witnessed at the Church of God, which expedited my departure.  I think that the world is changing; we should celebrate what we have, move forward with those who are with us, and forget about what color they happen to be.  But that’s easier for a Christian engineer whose spent much of his life on the “outside” to say than someone who’s heavily invested on the “inside” that’s fading away.

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