Twelve Words

Before heading out to church this Easter morning to celebrate Resurrection Day, while having my morning coffee time with God I reflected on the essentials of the Christian faith, beginning with the ancient formula of the church: "Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again."  Then I thought of the creeds, and their focus on a few aspects of the faith that were most contentious back in the day when the creeds were written, and so needed to be locked down.  

In these formulations, Jesus was: "conceived by the holy spirit, born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried.  He descended into Sheol.  On the third day He rose again from the dead, in accordance with the Scriptures.  He ascended into Heaven, and sits at the right hand of the Father, from whence he shall come to judge the living and the dead."

N.T. Wright has recently written (in his book "When God Became King") that the creeds are insufficient to teach theology or even learn adequately about the Christian faith, in large part because they have this enormous gap between "born of the virgin Mary..." and "... suffered under Pontius Pilate".  And in that gap lives everything about the Kingdom of God - both Jesus' announcing that it was here, and His living it out as we watched.

So it seems to me that the story of Jesus cannot be simply reduced to Incarnation, Crucifixion and Resurrection, but that it needs a fuller list of words ending in "..tion".  A dozen should do, I think.  This dozen right here:

Jesus' life story is this, in twelve words:

Incarnation
Maturation
Proclamation
Demonstration
Acclamation
Opposition
Persecution
Crucifixion
Resurrection
Confirmation
Ascension
Restoration

Each is important in telling His story (telling His-tory).  Each has a place and a point and a purpose.  I'd be happy to elaborate on them sometime.  Just ask.  :)



Oh, and... putting my teacher hat on for a minute... as I teach REL 120 - World Religions, for Upper Iowa University, I am aware of the aspects of different religions that overlap with one another, including with Christianity.  Other religions have notions of the first four ideas in the list, several have stories involving the next three.  But the last five?  ..not so much.  The Resurrection of Jesus is unique among religions (even considering those who put forward a cycle of death and rebirth - they are not like it at all).  And so, St. Paul was right when he said (in 1 Cor. 15:17):  "... if Christ was not raised, then your faith is futile - you are still in your sins!".  Resurrection Day celebrates that lynchpin of the Christian faith, for without it there is nothing worthy of our faith.

Happy Easter!  He is risen!

March Nonsense

According to ESPN, some 8,500,000 brackets were submitted for their NCAA Men's Basketball Bracket Challenge.  Eight and a half MILLION!  As of this morning, there were ZERO perfect brackets left.  None.

Honestly, predicting outcomes of college basketball games in March is nothing like the regular season (which is hard enough, in conferences like the Big East or the Big Ten, where the big boys keep knocking each other off so you don't know who's good and who's just lucky).

But 8,500,000 to 1?  This is getting into the range of winning-the-lottery type odds.   Hey, you know what they should do with the lottery?  They should split the pot among the people who have the nearest-to-perfect numbers, no matter how bad, just like in NCAA pools.  Pay out to first, second and third place lottery number picks, and use some kind of tiebreaker scheme.

I'll bet they sell more tickets if people know they were absolutely, positively, going to pay out the whole pot each time to whichever schmuck who got closest.  As of the round of 32, I'm in 8th place (out of 53) in my office pool, and I think I'm still in it!  Just need some big team to go down that I didn't pick to go to the final four.  If this were the lottery, I'd have torn up my ticket by now.

Oh, speaking of... I need to go check last night's MegaLotto results... I got a feeling I've got some ticket shredding to do.

Hm.  Just had a final thought.  How about developing an office pool on storm tracks?  How much snow will the next winter storm dump?  Which state will get hit hardest in the upcoming hurricane season?  Maybe the Meteorologists Local #15 already does this, and they just keep the results private to protect their reputation as scientific prognosticators, when we already know their odds of being right about weather in March are about as good as mine are in predicting an all-Big-Ten and all-Big-East Final Four each year, with Wisconsin and Marquette advancing to the championship game.  :(

Habemus Papam!

So good to see the election of a Pope from someplace other than Europe, especially since the church has not been Euro-centric for, like, decades, right?  Let's hear it for the Argentines!  And the Jesuits!

Hey, maybe the Pope will come to the Big East tournament next year when it's the Catholic 7+ playing ball (mostly Jesuit schools, BTW, so the Holy Father should feel right at home there in the Garden).

He is a bit long in the tooth, though, don't you think?  I mean... 77 or some such "way up-there" age?  Let's hope that he doesn't become too pooped to Pope, like that last guy Benny did.

Pope Francis is his adopted Pope-name, apparently.  Good call on that, I think.  He could do worse for an inspiration than St. Francis of Assisi, you know?  "God grant me the serenity..." to know what I can and can't change, and all that stuff.

Oh, and Timothy Cardinal Dolan?  Hang in there, boss.  You got next.

The Political Middle

Have I talked about this before?  If I have, stop me.

(or rather... stop reading!)

We have in this country a political spectrum ranging from far right (extreme conservatives) to far left (extreme liberals), both of which are deemed extreme only in relation to the "political middle", who are neither liberal nor conservative, or perhaps vary from one to the other depending on the issue.

Based on the way primary elections are held in this country, and based on how the dialogue (or should I say demagoguery) around issues goes, you might think that the extremes are the largest factions of the electorate.  Not so.  They're just the loudest.  Moderates are not all that vocal, precisely because they are not rigid ideologues convinced of their positions.

So, think of the political spectrum as being like the famous "Bell Curve" (aka the Standard Normal Distribution):

The dark brown shaded area on either side represents the most extreme ideologies of the political right and political left.  These are sometimes referred to as the "activists".  The medium tan areas are not as active politically (although they may volunteer), and are perhaps not as ideologically "pure" as the activists, but still share many of the same core beliefs and general worldview.  They are the "straight-ticket" voters, the "single-issue" voters, the part of the "base" that candidates feel they need to secure in order to get their party's nomination, financial support and volunteer labor. 

The beige section in the middle are the moderates ("independents" who don't necessarily register with a party).  Those closest to the peak of the curve are the true "swing voters", able to vote situationally depending on the times, the issues of the moment, and the particular candidate.  The graph that follows puts it in a bit different light.  If we ask the question of a voter "how liberal are you", the answers we might get look something like this:

The basic problem that both major parties (Democrats and Republicans) have is that the "base" (the activists and straight-ticket, single-issue voters) turn out for the primary elections and therefore determine the parties' candidates for the general elections.  So the candidates we get to choose between are either significantly left or right of the middle, either more conservative or more liberal than most, and by quite a bit.

Then in the general election, the two major parties fight over the middle, the independents and moderates.  And normally, there are a good number of voters in the center-left and center-right that stick with the inertia of their "usual" party affiliation.  These folks may find it easier to move a little more to the right or left to align with the chosen candidate on their side of the middle, than it is to move all the way up and over the hump to the other side, even if the candidate is an extremely articulate and compelling draw.  

So it winds up that whatever dollars are spent in the general election, are focused on winning the 5-10% of the electorate that hovers near the middle - those who decide at the last minute, are least convicted about a particular ideology behind the issues, and are more interested in how the process affects our civil discourse and the business of governing.  They may vote more on gut instinct than anything else, and are not usually easily swayed by extremism, stridency and vitriol, which is a lot of what you hear in the primary season.

In all of this, I have to wonder why no one has come up with a Moderate Party.  Wouldn't you think that a party (and its candidate) who targets the 68% of the electorate clustering around the political center, would win elections year after year after year?  Wouldn't it become a political dynasty?  That party's primaries would try to select a candidate that is closest to the center politically, one who is adept at sensing the times and appealing to what is best for the community at large, both taxpayer and beneficiary... the civil-tongued voice of both reason and compassion, of independence and community.

I think that's why third parties to date have not succeeded.  They follow the same general pattern; they are driven by activist ideologues, supported by their small but loyal base, and as such do not appeal to the center.  Libertarians are one example, Socialists another.  These tend to also form a spectrum of their own, only not right and left (conservative and liberal), but near and far (statists and individualists). Think of it as wanting government to be near to us... or far from us.  We depend on government, or we fear it.  Any successful Moderate Party would need to be aware of both spectrums: a conservative/liberal ideology and an immanent/distant government.

Wouldn't Congress function so much better if 68% of its members were Moderates, and only 16% conservatives and 16% liberals?  The extremists could keep the Moderates honest, inform everyone of the issues and the implications of landing on one side or the other.  The moderates then would form compromises and get stuff handled with a minimum of rancor.

So... what shall we call this new party?  And who should be our standard bearers?  Maybe the Common Sense Party, whose acronym (like the Republicans have the "GOP") could be "ATM"... for All Things in Moderation.  Its mascot could be the owl, wise and still.  And for leaders, how about Colin Powell, Zell Miller and Joe Lieberman?  Alan Simpson & Erskine Bowles, maybe?  Or two younger Senators, Scott Brown, R-MA and Mark Pryor, D-AR?  The National Journal sorts the Senate by ideology here.