Moar political ballyhooing

This will be a close race, and an interesting one. The drama leading up to november is picking up with one major event after another. Both parties are split--the dems by Hillary, the reps by McCain's moderation on certain issues. Both parties have charismatic and likable personalities at their helms (unlike 2004, which had two candidates I would pay money not to share a drink with). And there is a lot at stake.

I just read an article titled, 5 things McCain needs to succeed. It listed some pretty commonsense stuff.

Here's my take: The Democrats' biggest weakness is that they're liberals, and, well, people don't like liberals. I know that sounds like a dumb thing to say, but have you looked at footage from the democratic national convention? Look, I agree with the dems on most of their issues, but I never saw such a collection of bitter, snide, self-important old people whose jokes were universally unfunny. Really, the dems all seem "old" to me, older than McCain, because McCain can make me laugh, and they cannot. But worst of all, the Democrats still imagine that their only constituency, and the only people they need to address, are pure, secularist liberals. Conservatives and republicans have never made that mistake.

So here are 5 things Obama needs to succeed:

1. SHOW people are smart he actually is--and stop insulting our intelligence--by talking directly to the issues instead of just giving "inspirational" speeches empty of content. Forgive me, but youth and glowing white teeth do nothing for me. Talk about your platform. Don't tell me everything's going to change. Say what will change, and for pete's sake don't cloak it in stump-speech. Be the anti-politician for once; give me some straight-talk express. Because right now, the dems are trying to write straight in crooked lines. There's only one guy I know who can do that, and it isn't Obama.

2. Reach out to conservatives in the party. I hate to break it to Obama but the United States is a conservative country. OK, so you're not going to criminalize abortion. Fine, nobody expected you to. Are you going to do anything to decrease the number of abortions? 'Cuz dems do not have a good record of this. Or maybe you think abortion is just the greatest thing since HotPockets? And other issues, too. Stop acting as if all Democrats were pure democrats. And by extension, silencing, disenfranchising, and punishing your loyal dissidents. Biden was a step in the right direction. Now let's see some more.

3. Don't be so gay. I remember back in 2000, candidates were asked about the homosexual marriage debate, and Gore fumbled on the answer. He would not flat-out say that he favored gay marriage. You know what? You should learn something from him. Don't assume that just because the media is blaring YAY GAY MARRIAGE that American culture has changed substantially on this issue since 2000. Go ahead and allow it, fine, that's your platform. But the gay marriage issue is similar to the abortion issue: the more visible it is, the more you will alienate voters.

4. Don't be so STIFF. I mean seriously, the greatest irony of modern politics is that the party of gay marriage, abortion on demand, pacifists, feminists, and pot smokers is so bloody boring and rigid. Yeah I've seen Roy Zimmerman's videos. He's funny. But he's also really uncomfortable in a rigid, desperate kind of way. All of your lines are meticulously scripted and planned. STOP THAT. All right, so maybe you have a candidate who doesn't look like a Mr. Ed or speak like Charlie Brown's teacher. If Obama is a Bently an McCain is a beat up old Jeep, I'll take McCain every time. Don't be fooled into thinking that this is only about image. Your image betrays you. The party of "let me do what I want" needs to stop acting like the party of "do as we tell you or else".

5. Finally, when all of that is done, remind people of how bad Bush is. Don't tell us, show us. Give us substance; don't just assume that we all remember how much we hate Bush. Because you know what? If you rest on your laurels and let McCain have his way, he will successfully make American forget how bad Bush was. You cannot ride the wave of anti-Bush sentiment, you have to create that wave. Don't forget that prior to 2007 Bush presided over a pretty good economy--but that Clinton presided over a better one. We don't much remember how good things were with Clinton--that's your job, and I haven't seen enough of it.

Technological concupiscence returns!

So, ever since I built my sub-$500 "gaming rig"--which has been simply awesome, by the way--my Asus Eee 701 "netbook" has been collecting dust in my bedroom for months. Some reasons for this:

1. I'm not sure if it's a problem with the SSD, but the Eee seems to be having issues with file permissions in Ubuntu.
2. A display issue with my Westinghouse HDTV prevents it from correctly displaying 1080p resolutions from VGA cables. DVI works fine, but there is no DVI port on the Eee.
3. With high resolution external monitors, the Eee's display is pretty choppy. But I've been too spoiled by a 1080 display to settle for its dinky 800x480 native resolution, which can't even display a modern website without horizontal scrolling.
   
4. I used to do a lot of Web surfing and lightweight gaming in my bed, but I haven't done so in a long time. In fact, I haven't been doing much PC gaming at all; I've been getting my fix from my dusty old PS2.
5. I also used like going to the local coffeebar and hanging out there, which I also haven't done lately.

But that doesn't mean that my interest in portable computing has completely faded. I'll probably do a clean install on my Eee and see if I can't get it running nicely. But I'm beginning to hone in on a possible December purchase. Here's my top candidate so far: the Gigabyte M912V. I've spent literally years thinking of how much fun I could have with one of Fujitsu-Seimens's P1600 series mini tablets, but they have never cost less than $1500. This new model will be less than half that price. Some other neat things about it:

• The screen is big enough to be useful.
  
• It has an ExpressCard slot, which I hope would become home to this Asus "XG Station" gadget. That would solve my external monitor issues quite nicely.
• With a wireless access point in my classroom, I could take attendance without going back to my desk; I could also remote into GIMP on the desktop there and write onto an projected screen.
  

Obama and abortion

Two links of note:

This article from the Washington Post,

and this article from Politico.

I'll give him this. He doesn't tick me off as much as liberal Catholic politicians like Guliani and Kerry, even though he's more extreme than both of them. At least he's consistant. This is a man who regards protectable life to begin, not only at birth, but sometime after biological birth. Pragmatic to the end, Obama regards the State accountable only to individuals who have been born, and perhaps driven home from the hospital.

A line from his political review is chilling: "Expanded access to prenatal education and heath care facilities will far more likely serve the very real state interest in preventing increasing numbers of children from being born in to lives of pain and despair."

To this pro-lifer, the words "preventing increasing numbers of children from being born" stands out in stark relief. And I am not relieved.

Catholic Morality and Gay Sex

The Catholic Church's position—one with ties both to revelation and moral reason—is that same-sex sexual activity is an intrinsic moral evil.

Of course, the Church recognizes that where there is compulsion, there is not sin. This moral doctrine is prior to all considerations of guilt or culpability. An active homosexual may be said to be totally innocent of "mortal sin" or even "venial sin" given certain circumstances.

Whether an individual is guilty of sins committed is something we cannot know--God alone is fully aware of the drama of grace and freedom inside a soul. Thus to judge is to sin. But whether an action (in the abstract) is a sin, and thus whether it ought to be avoided, tolerated or prevented--this can be known.

Towards that end, I quote a former professor of mine, Fr. Ed Oakes, S.J.:

Among secularists, gay activists, liberal politicians, and the like, it is taken for granted that homosexual urgings are “natural,” in the sense of being innate (the word nature comes from the Latin natus, “to be born” as, in fact, does the word innate); and since the urges are natural in that sense (or so goes the claim), what’s wrong with satisfying them? For the Catholic Church, however, nature always carries a teleological implication, and since the sex organs are also called reproductive organs, it represents an abuse of their function to make use of them in ways that violate their reproductive purposes.

To go a little deeper, here is a paraphrase of the argument presented by Persona Humana (1975), and in the case of the last bullet, the "Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons" (1985):

• The right treatment of human beings depends on knowing correctly what human beings are (and their dignity), how they work and the purpose of their life.
• Certain things about human beings never change; thus reason can show that certain right treatment of human beings also never changes.
• Sexual morality is one of those kinds of right treatment that doesn't change, because it is based in the natural order of sex.
• To treat sex right, make sure your choices do justice to sex's natural end.
• A direct quote is appropriate: "To choose someone of the same sex for one's sexual activity is to annul the rich symbolism and meaning, not to mention the goals, of the Creator's sexual design. Homosexual activity is not a complementary union, able to transmit life; and so it thwarts the call to a life of that form of self-giving which the Gospel says is the essence of Christian living. This does not mean that homosexual persons are not often generous and giving of themselves; but when they engage in homosexual activity they confirm within themselves a disordered sexual inclination which is essentially self-indulgent."
  

Catholicism is confident that the only scripture necessary to teach and learn about sexual morality is the verse written into the human body itself. Although appeal to Natural Law always implies a certain appeal to the sacredness of "creation" (in turn, implying a creator), appeals to human rights are no different. Both stem ultimately from the belief in an objective natural order that prescribes proper treatment of human beings. Throw out natural law and you throw out the idea of natural rights with it.

Yet in the case of sexual morality, there is more at stake than doing something simply because “Mother Nature said so.”

For Catholic morality, there is an inherent bond between sex and what sex produces: human beings, and family. After all, the latter two did not spring magically into being without the former. Their dignity is fundamentally shaped—and at times defaced—by the manner in which sex is treated. Sex has a telos, an appointed destiny, which when sabotaged robs the act of its original (originating) meaning. Within sex resides a power that is as awesome as it is terrifying: the power to make a person. The dignity of a thing is rooted in its origin; and so we abuse, pervert, or cheapen sex at our own peril.

Nor are families invulnerable; consider the adage, “blood is thicker than water”. The very power of family, its binding force, resides in the honor of shared, real blood. Yes, the bonds of friendship, adoptee, step-brother and step-sister can be de facto stronger than those of physical blood ties. But blood and sex remain the definitive origin of family’s powerful meaning, a meaning that it retains when applied to permanent bonds outside blood. If family is redefined so as to erase or diminish its biological origin, all that is left of “family” is any association of semi-permanent cohabitators--which is to say, nothing at all. That is the logical consequence now present in states that legalize gay marriage or mandate adoption to same-sex couples. Blood is no longer thicker than water; blood is not recognized at all; our relationships are all water.

Thus, for me, no system of morality, besides that of the Catholic Church, appears to do justice to the ineffable mysteries of life's beginning.

Perhaps I should pose a challenge to thoughtful opponents. If you seek to persuade, get to the heart of the issue. Is the Church wrong to believe that sex has a telos, an original aim that issues from its very nature? Does nothing have an original, natural aim? Is natural law illegitimate? Is the Church wrong to believe that sex has an inherent connection to life's most important realities--to life and to family--and that its mistreatment decays the value of those things? Is the Church wrong to link sexual licentiousness with a decay of civilization? Is the Church wrong to seek to do something about that?

"But Mr. Zimmerman," I hear students saying, "morality is subjective." This is the nuclear missile of value disputes. However, the one who utters it never actually believes it. Nothing is as offensive to these folks as when the Church tries to stand in the way of the wish-fulfillment of well-meaning homosexual couples. The implication is that there is something objectively immoral about the Church's behavior. So why do we get to be absolutists on one issue but we must be relativists on another? That looks like a double-standard.

Ultimately, the old "subjective" chestnut is accurately translated: "your morality is subjective". Claims made in favor of public sexual morality are locked away in the closet of dubious and disputable ideas. People disagree with them, therefore they are disagreeable. The very fact that some reject sexual morality becomes itself evidence against sexual morality.

Am I the only one who smells the zeitgeist in this line of reasoning? All that I ask is that contenders in the coliseum of culture be willing to clash swords with the Church instead of darting into holes and trap doors. Do not respond to a duel by playing hide-and-go-seek. Catholic morality throws its hat into the ring. Are you going to connect a punch, or swing at shadows and declare victory?

Catholic Morality and Adoption by Same-Sex Couples

To begin: I have zero knowledge of how poorly, or how well, adopted children fare when their adopters are a homosexual couple. Therefore, I do not assume one way or the other.

I mention this because someone dear to me cited an authoritative source implying that children raised by same-sex parents fare better in school, on average, than their peers. All told, that would not surprise me. However, it speaks little to the debate.

If the Vatican opposes adopting children to homosexual couples, it can hardly be for a pragmatic cause, and for two reasons. First, Catholic "oughts" are rarely based on mere pragmatism—whatever accomplishes the happiest end. Such sands are always shifting, and Catholic ethicists generally favor steadier ground. Second, controversies based on statistics risk being mere tests of who can gather and spin more data. I do not dismiss the value of good studies. But the trustworthiness of data interpretation is inversely proportional to the heat of the issue. The homosexuality debate is perhaps hotter in this country than even abortion.

People who actually read the Catholic position on adoption of children to homosexual couples will find little consequentialism. Nowhere does the Church suggest that such an arrangement will necessarily or even probably lead to unhealthy, perverted, or otherwise damaged children. No doubt conservative Catholics, in and out of the press, will often make such claims. Consider the following argument from Jeff Mirus (PhD, Intellectual History from Princeton):

Make no mistake about it, the placement of children with gay parents is a serious instance of violence against children. Confusion about one’s sexual identity is extremely painful, inclinations to homosexual attraction are disordered, and constant exposure to sexual affection between homosexuals places a child in an intolerable position with respect to his own sexual, moral, psychological and social development. Not only does such placement leave the child without either an adoptive mother or an adoptive father, but it substitutes a distortion for the missing adoptive parent and for the nature of marriage and family in their entirety. Placement of children with gay couples is quite simply a brutality.

Dr. Mirus' argument implies consequences, no doubt. Same as a child in a single-parent home, children adopted to same-sex couples will lack a parent of the other gender. In the latter case, the child will also be routinely exposed to same-sex kissing and hugging. By Dr. Milus' reckoning, this will lead to "confusion about one's sexual identity," detriment the child's "sexual, moral, psychological and social development," and provide for the child a distorted picture of "marriage and family in their entirety".

I think that Mirus overstates the case with the first two of those claims. But he does represent Catholic teaching with the third. The Catholic Church's position—one with ties both to revelation and moral reason—is that same-sex sexual activity is an intrinsic moral evil. As to why, see the companion article, "Catholic Morality and Gay Sex."

Thus, the Church does not make any statements about the healthy development, or lack thereof, of the child adopted to same-sex couples. She doesn't need to. Her argument is a priori—it would retain validity even if those children were universally proven to become good-looking multibillionaire philanthropic geniuses. A child raised by active homosexuals will be raised to believe that the goodness of the sexual act is neutral with regard to how it is treated and who has it with whom (given consent, of course). That is the position, the doctrine, of the gay rights movement.

The Church sees this doctrine and its logical consequences as destructive, not only to a peculiarly Christian way of life, but to human dignity and civilization as such (again, for exactly why, see the companion article).

The reply will come: isn't the Church is imposing its religion upon public life? Indeed, the Church does campaign for the integration of a morality into public life. Yet there is nothing peculiarly religious about this morality. It hardly requires belief in the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth. It scarcely demands any kind of belief in a God. It only requires that one not be a total anarchist as regards the natural constitution of the human species.

Thus I argue here only that it is legitimate for the Catholic Church to lobby against the adoption of children by same-sex couples. It is part of an equally legitimate campaign to stem the tide of sexual libertinism and show the western world its own scars left by five decades of "free love". If she can argue that there is an inherent sabotaging, a diverting, a cheapening present in every act of gay sex, then she should be permitted to argue that we should not allow its ideology to spread through adopted children.

It has nothing to do with whether the child's development will be negatively impacted--that is a question for the sociologists. It has everything to do with a culture struggle, and neutrality is a logical impossibility.

Catholic worship and the death of the subjunctive.

"Subjunctive, \səb-ˈjən(k)-tiv\ : of, relating to, or constituting a verb form or set of verb forms that represents a denoted act or state not as fact but as contingent or possible or viewed emotionally (as with doubt or desire) " (Merriam-Webster).

The observation I make is both a curious point of grammar and the linchpin of the modern paradigm shift in western Catholicism.

Catholic prayer written after a certain date--a date that, perhaps, could be pinpointed to a day, just as one can find the first gray class photo in which someone cracked a smile--ceased almost entirely to make use of the subjective mood. "We may be" became "We are;" "That the Lord may" became "The Lord will"; and "The Lord be with you" on occasion became a resounding indicative, "The Lord Is With You".

If the subjective mood connotes contigency, possiblity, doubt, or desire, then perhaps it is not difficult to speculate as to the cause of its death. We are a resurrection people, after all. The Gospels contain no small amount of reassurances for the distressed and uneasy. Fear, anxiety, and despair arising from uncertainty--from a "subjunctive" way of looking at the world--rightfully dissipate before the hot white light of a triumphant Lord. Christ showed no ambivalence about the right of his flock to rest easy in certitude and trust. Do not worry! Do not fear! Do not fret about your material needs! The Father knows you need them. Do not preoccupy yourself with what you will say before your interlocutors! The Holy Spirit will instruct you. Make no mistake: God has already won the battle. The Kingdom is already here. The gates to Heaven have already been broken open, like a great beautiful golden pile of Berlin rubble.

The Gospels are chicken soup for the anxious soul. Christianity is the great answer to the one who cries out in pain and fear, who long ago abandoned hope for joy, who is starved for a smile. And far be it from me to challenge that message, or to rob those souls of their great consolation.

Yet I cannot help but inquire: whence the change? If we were a dreary bunch of uncertain doubters before, what caused us to

Sacraments Unit 1 revision

Today I have to pick up the pieces from some bad ideas last week.

First off, I'm revising two essential questions, formerly:

• Why is a Church necessary? What are the alternatives? Why didn't Jesus simply stay on Earth?
• What is the best way to represet ("re-present") the person, love, and saving power of Jesus of Nazareth in an accessible way to people today?

to:

• How is the Church an instrument of God's love?
• How does the Church make the Paschal Mystery accessible to the world?

Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity.

The performance tasks and evidence will remain the same. However, I will need to pay more attention to the WHERETO criteria.

• Where are we going? Why? What is expected? - The unit really is about love, but the point of the unit is to unveil the amorous basis of the Church, and by extension, the seven sacraments. If we didn't understand this point, we might be tempted to think of the sacraments as "just another religious ritual", with all of the attendant prejudices against superstition and public devotion. This unit will help students see the personalistic and human roots of the seven sacraments so they will be less tempted to think of them--and other ritual expressions--in superstitious and externalistic ways. This requires some very basic catechesis on the Paschal Mystery.
• How will we hook and hold student interest? Hook: The great theological riddle: In the first century, the Roman government of a small Palestinian region executes a Jew to appease local authorities in occupied territory. As a result, one billion Catholics and billion other Christians today believe that their immortal souls have been saved from eternal torment by an infinitely loving and merciful God. How do we get from point A to point B?

More to-do lists

1. Sort mountains of stuff into piles.
2. Record grades.
3. Set up Edline.
4. Set up Sub binder.
5. Set up SADD binder.
6. Tweak Junior lesson plan to reflect slow couple of days.
7. Plan next week of Freshman Theology based on UbD (low priority).
8. Get paper for printer.
9. E-mail SADD members to get them coordinating effort for Club Rush.

Morning lesson planning.

I have an hour. What can I do in an hour?

Priorities:

• Write quiz for summer reading discussion today
• Record grades for Freshmen homework
• Compress remaining goals into abbreviated lessons for today(46 minutes) and tomorrow (37 minutes)

For the Juniors I have a little more time (46 minute prep before period C; lunch and lab monitoring for the remaining three periods).

• Give general credit to C-period juniors who turned anything in (theirs was the period that bombed yesterday).
• Generate Paschal Mystery research worksheet for use with all Junior periods.
• Introduce central concepts of the Incarnation in a rote way.
• Introduce the Catechism and how to use it with more depth.
• Have the class complete same exercise as other periods, with the Paschal Mystery instead of the Incarnation.

For the Junior classes that had a successful day yesterday:

• Open the class by having a recorder generate a sheet of notes based on student answers to yesterday's research questions.
• Repeat exercise with the Paschal Mystery research worksheet.

Morning thoughts

Wow, this thing is almost becoming a twitter with the frequency of updates.

First, personal thoughts. Two issues have been occupying my mind.

• Cognitive dissonance.

If it was one thing I prided myself on during my seminary years, it was my unyielding attachment to sheer consistency of belief, thought, and action. Now, that does not imply that my thoughts were always based on sound judgement, nor that my actions were never subject to human weakness. But nevertheless, I relished the notion that my Catholic faith was like a hot iron, pressing out the wrinkles of intellectual obscurity. I still hold on to the conviction that real faith is the archimedian point for the life of the mind. But one effect of my living as a layman is that much of my anxiety about personal failings has decoupled and slowly fallen away. The failings are there; the sense of urgency and guilt about them is not. The iron is not has hot as it used to be. Is this a sign that I am allowing cognitive dissonance into my own framework? This was always the most irritating thing I observed in liberal Catholic authorities and pundits. Or is the ability to accept failure a sign of growing maturity?

• Contraposition of belief vs. neurology as motivators.

The MSN website ran a couple of cheesy articles on how differences between the male and female brain can affect behaviors and explain certain habits. I'm not at all opposed to the idea that we are substantially moved by biology. But the articles highlighted for me the wonder that the human organism is governed by such a thing as "belief" at all. That a mammal should have access to rational thought, and through the science of logic gain entry into being (at all! let alone well), is to me the most fascinating and wonderful thing. Perhaps it is a red herring, in the "homo sapiens are special" debate, to look for essential differences between humans and animals on the natural plane. Still, it bears reflecting: an ape can learn sign language. Can an ape worry about whether he is allowing cognitive dissonance into his motivations?

Mayday! Mayday!

Lesson plan failure! The plane is going down!

All right, so I introduced a few resources for theological research and described what they were used for, and then I set the class to the task of answering a few questions about the Incarnation using those resources.

That was dumb.

Let's recover.

1. Review three branches of theology.
2. Present PowerPoint on resources for theological research
3. Incorporate in-class assignment into PowerPoint. Give specific locations in CCC and Bible in order to answer questions. Include a question about love.

UPDATE: Evasive manuevers successful! Class now productive and educational. Must apologize to period C tomorrow.

Little snag in lesson planning

First of all, the good news: I finished the preliminary UbD process for the first two weeks of the Sacraments class.

That means that, for all intents and purposes, my lesson planning is done, but... I've hit a snag. I've set aside Wednesday and Thursday to introduce the Incarnation and the Paschal Mystery. But I don't want to revert to lecture. I thought I could work around this by introducing the students to theological research, and essentially having them come up with central concepts through research. Yet this introduces an element of risk.

And on top of that I wanted somehow to connect all of this with love. *sigh*. How to do this?

• Write quiz for Friday so I know what my students absolutely need to know.
• Break the quiz down into two worksheets with questions and fill-in-the-blank to be filled out with student research.
• Include on the worksheets a personal response section in which the student is prompted to connect the "love lyrics" presentations to the patterns discovered in research.

Sacraments lesson planning, Part 5: Assessments

The second of the UbD book on assessments is thankfully brief--just two chapters--so we will see what assessments emerge from the previous work here.



What previous work? First, we sketched and prioritized the various subject matter of the first unit.

Outer: Worth Being Familiar With

• Divergent beliefs of Catholics and Protestants about Christian
  fundamentals


• Alternate theories of Soteriology


• Avery Dulles' Models of the Church


• Importance of Paul's letters for Christian theology.

Middle: Important to Know and Do

• Terms: agape, eros, incarnation, grace, paschal, pentecost, mystical


• Look up passages from Scripture; read for understanding


• Look up passages from the Catechism; read for understanding

Center: Big Ideas and Core Concepts

Big ideas: authentic love, incarnation, Paschal Mystery, atonement, participation, Pentecost, Church

Big ideas framed as understandings:

• To call God "Love" both respects God's mysteriousness and summarizes his self-revelation to human beings.


• The Paschal Mystery is the linchpin of God's love and of Christian
  salvation.


• The Church is the visible continuation of the presence of Christ and the Paschal Mystery throught the power of the Holy Spirit.

Core tasks:

• Critically examine uses of the word "love" in popular discourse and in theology.


• Explain how the Paschal Mystery fulfills Jesus' promise of eternal life.


• Interpret data about the Catholic Church according to the distinction between its human and divine dimensions.

Then, we took the "answers" from the textbooks and turned them into a small group of "essential questions":

• 
  

  
  

  (Topical, Open) How exactly does the Paschal Mystery "work"? What does the
  political execution of a 1st century Palestinian Jew by the Roman Empire have to do with me?

  
  

  (Overarching, Open) What do God's actions reveal about love? What does love
  look like for Catholics?

  
  

  (Topical, Guiding) Why is a Church necessary? What are the alternatives? Why
  didn't Jesus simply stay on Earth?

  
  

  (Overarching, Guiding) What is the best way to represent ("re-present") the
  person, love, and saving power of Jesus of Nazareth in an accessible way to
  people today?

(I am axing the whole issue of "mysteries and paradoxes" because of time constraints and audience limits).

Next, operating from the "Essential Questions" and the criteria for "Understandings," we established the basic understandings that the students should come away with in the end (these have been greatly reworked).

• 
  

  
  

  (Overarching) For Christians, Jesus embodies God's love for particular human
  beings and his desire to lift humanity to himself.

  
  

  (Topical) Two of the most prominent soteriologies of Jesus Christ are the
  soteriology of "atonement" and the soteriology of "participation".

  
  

  (Overarching) The Church is a visible, organic community of graced sinners
  that embodies Jesus' presence, love, and salvation on Earth.

  
  

  (Topical) The Church has a human and divine dimension.

  
  

  (Topical) The Biblical names for the Church--Body of Christ, Bride of
  Christ, People of God--reveal its role in salvation.

Now I am in Stage 2 (finally!) - Assessments.

Step 1 & 2: Consider evidence of the understandings in Stage 1; Use the six facets to identify needed evidence of understanding.

The basic question: What kind of evidence do we need?

UbD offers a list of types of evidence:

• Performance Tasks


• Academic Prompts


• Quiz and Test Items


• Informal Checks for Understanding

UbD strongly emphasizes performance tasks as the creme-de-la-creme for assessing understanding--other assessments are important for basic concepts and skills. It also offers a helpful graphic organizer that aligns understandings and questions with measurable skills.

IF the desired result is for learners to...

UNDERSTAND that:

• For Christians, Jesus embodies God's love for particular human beings and his desire to lift humanity to himself.


• Two of the most prominent soteriologies of Jesus Christ are the soteriology of "atonement" and the soteriology of "participation".


• The Church is a visible, organic community of graced sinners that embodies Jesus' presence, love, and salvation on Earth.


• The Church has a human and divine dimension.


• The Biblical names for the Church--Body of Christ, Bride of Christ, People of God--reveal its role in salvation.

And thoughtfully consider the QUESTIONS:

• How exactly does the Paschal Mystery "work"? What does the political execution of a 1st century Palestinian Jew by the Roman Empire have to do with me?


• What do God's actions reveal about love? What does love look like for Catholics?


• Why is a Church necessary? What are the alternatives? Why didn't Jesus simply stay on Earth?


• What is the best way to represent ("re-present") the person, love, and saving power of Jesus of Nazareth in an accessible way to people today?

Then, you need evidence of the student's ability to...

EXPLAIN

• Aspects of God's love


• The Paschal Mystery


• The nature of the Church

INTERPRET

• Passages from Scripture


• News articles about the Catholic Church

APPLY, BY

• Designing/presenting a creative way for people to experience the Paschal Mystery today


• Evaluating these relative to the experience of going to Mass

SEE FROM THE POINTS OF VIEW OF

• The first Christians


• Various kinds of "lovers" (i.e., parents, old couples, small children, pets, new marriages, troubled marriages).

EMPATHIZE WITH

• Good people who suffer

REFLECT ON

• Personal participation in the Paschal Mystery


• Attitude toward, and behavior as regards love

So the assessments need to require something like...

• Develop a lesson capable of giving 3rd graders an idea of how God's love works in the Paschal Mystery.


• Create a venn diagram listing statements from Scripture and other texts in either the "divine", "human" or "both" sections.


• Design and evaluate creative ways to experience the Paschal Mystery for the purpose of sharing with Christians who are unable (health) or unwilling (belief) to go to Mass.


• Compare student stories of human love, Scripture passages, and writings of saints to answer the question, "What is love?"


• Interview someone who is disavantaged or vulnerable to learn their story; write a modern "Paschal Mystery" story in which this person's suffering becomes God's instrument to save the world.


• Reflect: To what extent do you share in the Passion and Resurrection of Christ? Evaluate your skill as a lover of human beings.

Step 3: Use the GRASPS elements to design authentic performance tasks.

In doing so, I will also organize the above items to reflect a realistic progression of understanding through the first two weeks.

"What is Love? (Baby Don't Hurt Me)"; Your task is to write song lyrics that answer Haddaway's question. ROLE: You are a group of singer/songwriters that like to answer other songwriter's questions in your lyrics. But your "thing" is that your answers are based on real stories. Your audience is the record label, so keep your lyrics cool and hip while still referencing story details to back up your intelligent mojo. The challenge involves describing love as some combination of actions and choices from your story sources, in order to provide an inspiring and accurate piece of music. You will produce lyrics to a song integrating parts of both your stories and Biblical passages that have been handed to you. You work will be judged by the consistency of its message, your incorporation of actions and choices from multiple (including Biblical) texts, and an oral presentation of the meaning of your song and the reasons for your decisions in the creative process.

"What's Love Got to Do With It?"; Your task is to teach 3rd graders about the Paschal Mystery. You are the newly hired Sunday School teacher at St. Joseph's Church in Tucson, AZ. You are taking over a 3rd grade class in the middle of the year because the previous teacher quit suddenly. The students were supposed to be learning about the Paschal Mystery and the love of God, but you quickly find out they don't know anything. The challenge involves helping 3rd graders connect three ideas: God's love, the death and resurrection of Jesus, and salvation. You will create a lesson, activity, or visual aid (or a combination of these) no longer than 7 minutes in order to help the 3rd graders understand a correct relationship between these things. Your lesson will be graded on the age-appropriateness of the lesson, the adequacy of the connections made, and remaining within the time limit.

"What if God Was One of Us?"; You have been commissioned to contribute to a project called "The Modern Bible," a book that takes Bible stories and rewrites them using real modern images and contexts. Your task is to learn the story of someone who is truly disadvantaged or vulnerable, and then write a modern "Paschal Mystery" in which that person is the Christ, whose suffering becomes God's instrument for salvation. Your audience is the editor of the book who is evaluating your contribution . The challenge involves telling the story of a real person in a way that their suffering becomes redemptive, not only for themselves, but for others. You will write a short fictional story based on a real person you have interviewed, in which his/her problems come to bring "new life" (however you interpret this) to him/herself and to others as well. Your work will be judged by its portrayal of a real person that you have interviewed, your style and word choice, and your faithfulness to the spirit of the actual Paschal Mystery.

"Paschal Mystery for the Unchurched";

"People are Talking"

"Where You At?"

Always remember, class:

The Word of the Lord is PWNAGE.

Sacraments Course design, part 4

This is based on UbD's chapter 6, "Crafting Understandigns".

I have "Big Ideas" and "Essential Questions". Now I need to establish the basic understandings I want the students to come away with. Here are the qualities of "understandings":

• important inference, drawn from the experience of experts, stated as a specific and useful generalization
• transferable, big ideas having enduring value beyond a specific topic
• abstract, counterintuitive, easily misunderstood ideas
• best acquired by "uncovering" and "doing" the subject (using ideas in realistic settings and with real-world problems)
• summarizes important strategic principles in skill areas

UbD also adds:

• has endured over time and across cultures because it has proven so important and useful.
• endures in the mind of the student because it will help the student make sense of the content and it will enable transference of the key ideas.

Understandings are also topical and overarching. Again, they should be small in number; I will use the 2-5 standard again.

Step 1: Mindful of my B.I.s and E.Q.s, what are some "understandings" that I want students to walk away with?

I should be mindful of student misunderstandings. Some of these might be:

• A mystery is something we can know nothing about and do not question.
• Paradoxes are contradictions.
• Love is never angry; it does not punish; it does not set boundaries to freedom.
• God desires our love out of personal need.
• Jesus saves us by receiving the punishment that we deserved for our sins.
• The Church is primarily a group of people who agree that Jesus is God.

Using a design tool included in the text, I come up with the following. Students should understand that:

• Mysteries are "beyond us" only in the sense that we can never be "finished" learning about them; they are not unsolvable problems, but realities to be loved and served; they cannot be mastered or controlled. Human beings are mysteries.
• Paradoxes prevent us from treating a mystery like a problem by denying our minds easy ideas to work with, but they also invite us into a deeper understanding through meditation.
• The doctrine that "God is Love" is illuminated by recognizing (a) patterns in the way he acts as revealed in nature, Scripture, Jesus Christ, and tradition and (b) the way "love" unfolds in my life.
• The Paschal Mystery has been popularly understood to save us in numerous different ways throughout Christian history, no one of which is the absolute explanation.
• Christ instituted the Church to be the visible continuation of his presence, love, and power; and to be the inauguration of the Kingdom of Heaven, which is both already, and not yet here, as can be observed in the Church's characteristics and history.

OK, this is too much. I need to narrow these down to four.

1. Mysteries and paradoxes help us to respect life realities that are misunderstood when they are treated like problems requiring solutions.
2. Love is illuminated by recognizing (a) the concrete ways love manifests in my life, and (b) patterns in the way God acts as revealed in nature, Scripture, Jesus Christ, and Tradition.
3. The Paschal Mystery has been subject to various competing and complimentary understandings throughout Christian history.
4. The Church is the continuation on Earth of Jesus' presence, love, and salvation embodied by a visible, organic community of graced sinners; as such it has both a human and a divine dimension.

Sacraments Course design, part 3

In the last post (just now updated), I identified the Big Ideas around which the first unit will be based.

Outer: Worth Being Familiar With

• Divergent beliefs of Catholics and Protestants about Christian fundamentals
• Theories of soteriology and their contributors
• Avery Dulles' Models of the Church

Middle: Important to Know and Do

• Terms: mystery, paradox, agape, eros, incarnation, grace, paschal, pentecost, mystical
• Look up passages from Scripture; read for understanding

Center: Big Ideas and Core Concepts

Big ideas: mystery, paradox, authentic love, "incarnation" and religious representation, Paschal Mystery, Pentecost, Church

Big ideas framed as understandings:

• To call God "Love" both respects God's mysteriousness and summarizes his self-revelation to human beings.
• The Paschal Mystery is the linchpin of God's love and of Christian salvation.
• The Church is the visible continuation of the presence of Christ and the Paschal Mystery throught the power of the Holy Spirit.

Core tasks:

• Critically examine uses of the word "love" in popular discourse and in theology.
• Explain how the Paschal Mystery fulfills Jesus' promise of eternal life.
• Interpret data about the Catholic Church according to the distinction between its human and divine dimensions.

The next step in Stage 1 is: "Select and develop Essential Questions to guide inquiry into the big ideas"

Questions can be topical or overarching; open or guiding. There should be a balance of open vs. guiding questions; and topical questions should be explicitly matched to overarching questions. A unit should have approximately 2-5 essential questions. They should: cause inquiry into the B.I.'s; provoke deep thought, discussion, and inquiry; lead students to consider alternatives, weigh evidence, support ideas, and justify answers; stimulate ongoing rethinking and self-questioning; lead to meaningful connections; and naturally recur and transfer.

Step 1: Start with the textbook. If the text provides "answers," then what are the questions? What are the "answers" of my textbooks?

From Celebrating Sacraments Teaching Manual by Stoutzenberger:

• Christians believe in the Incarnation--that God became human to communicate love for us.
• Jesus is the primary sacrament of God tot he world, revealing God's kingdom in his life and ministry.
• Jesus dying to free us from the bods of sin and death, and his rising to bring us into a new life with God in the Spirit, is known as the paschal mystery.
• We witness [the Paschal Mystery] often in everyday life as a cycle of life, death, and new life.
• Jesus models humanity as its best, faithfully responding to God's offer of grace.
• On Pentecost the Holy Spirit empowered the disciples as the Christian [C]hurch to be the sacrament of Jesus Christ to the world.
• The [C]hurch can be understood as the people of God, a community of believers in Jesus; the Body of Christ, whose members combine their individual gifts to bring Christ to the world; and the temple of the Holy Spirit.
• The [C]hurch, empowered by the Spirit as both a sign and an instrument of the Kingdom of God, carries on Jesus' work.
• The [C]hurch is called to be oen united whole with Jesus as the center.

From Our Sacramental Life Teacher's Manual by Driedger:

• In order to understand how the sacraments are the work of Christ and continue Christ's work on earth, we must understand more about his Church.
• The Church is a multidimensional reality. Two aspects of this reality are the Church as Body of Christ and the Chruch as the Sacrament of Christ.
• As members of the Chruch we are united to one another.
• Christ is the head of the Church; all members of the Church strive to be like Christ.
• Christ and the Church are not the same. The head and members of one body have a distinct relationship. The image used to the describe this relationship is that of a bride and bridegroom.
• The Church exists to point others to Christ.
• The Church is both Christ's instrument and the visible sign of God's plan for all humanity.
• The Church has botha visible and invisible or spiritual dimension.
• All members of the Church are called to carry on Christ's work.
• Christ establish the Chruch as a visible organization with a hierarchical structure through which he communicates truth and grace.
• By her relationship with Christ, the Church is called a sacrament.
• Christ himself is the prime, or primordial sacrament.

Also, let's not forget my "fake standards":

• the meaning of the phrase, “God is Love”.
• patterns in the actions of God in creation, revelation, and salvation.
• “incarnation” as referring both to Christ as the presence of God and to the experience of God in tangible things.
• how the Paschal Mystery fulfills Christ’s promise of eternal life.
• how the event of Pentecost characterizes both the power of the Holy Spirit and the Mission of the Church.
• Biblical images of the Church as the Body of Christ, the Bride of Christ, the People of God, and the Temple of the Spirit.
• qualities of the human and divine aspects of the Church.

All right. Step 2 is to brainstorm questions. Specifically, I want about 3 topical questions.

• Why would God have chosen to save humanity through the Incarnation and the Paschal Mystery? Could he have done so in other ways? How would the first Christians have answered this question? (Guiding)
• How exactly does the Paschal Mystery "work"? What does the political execution of a 1st century Palestinian Jew by the Roman Empire have to do with me? (Open)
• Why is a Church necessary? What are the alternatives? Why didn't Jesus simply stay on Earth? (Guiding)

OK, these are more like "question clusters," but each bullet is ultimately a single question.

Next, I need to broaden these questions into overarching questions.

• What does love look like for Catholics? (Open)
• Is there a pattern to the way God does things? Why does he work the way he does? (Open)
• What is the best way to represent ("re-present") the person, love, and saving power of Jesus of Nazareth in an accessible way to people today? (Guiding)

Now I need to narrow. 2-5 questions. Less is more. Let's aim for four.

• (Topical, Open) How exactly does the Paschal Mystery "work"? What does the political execution of a 1st century Palestinian Jew by the Roman Empire have to do with me?
• (Overarching, Open) What do God's actions reveal about love? What does love look like for Catholics?
  
• (Topical, Guiding) Why is a Church necessary? What are the alternatives? Why didn't Jesus simply stay on Earth?
• (Overarching, Guiding) What is the best way to represent ("re-present") the person, love, and saving power of Jesus of Nazareth in an accessible way to people today? (Guiding)
  
• (Overarching, Open) How can we talk about mysteries if they are beyond human understanding?
  

(I edited these based on Part 4 above)

Rethinking John McCain

When a man is as loose with his words as this YouTube video seems to show, my immediate response is to stagger backward in disgust. Whatever else I write in this post, a degree of that disgust will always remain. But yesterday I came upon a revealing article by Adam Nagourney that shows some of the forces at work--and out of control--in McCain's campaign and in his own personality. Something about the article opened me up to a smidgeon of sympathy for McCain. As I read about his style of leadership and how his military experience influences his decision making process, I realized that it had more than a little in common with my short teaching experience.

“Soldiers are taught to expect the unexpected and accept it, and revise, improvise, and fight their way through any adversity," McCain says. Nagourney points out that "Mr. McCain’s style contains contradictions, veering between a shoot-from-the-hip tendency and assertions of damn-the-consequences authenticity on the one hand and a grudging acceptance on the other of the need to give in to the discipline of programmed politics."

It would be too convenient to blame all of McCain's contradictory gaffes on disorganized campaign strategy; but it would be too naive to overstate them as evidence of McCain's dishonesty or callousness in matters of truth.

What is more likely the case is that McCain's worst quality is a certain recklessness of the mouth. I have been known in the past to make statements with confidence that in my own mind were merely plausible. This is bad. But it would be a far worse sin were it not for the fact that McCain's thoughts are just as fluid and changing as his words--including when his words are flat-out wrong. The virtue in all of this--and yes, this whole post is an exercise in seeing a virtue inside of a flaw--is that McCain is exceedingly (perhaps excessively, by his campaign's reckoning) open to changing his course based on new inputs, and to do so quickly. To quote Nagourney again: "Mr. McCain hungers for information." Again, a chord of sympathy within me is struck.

Now none of this excuses McCain from flatly denying things that he himself said, even in the face of damning evidence. I have seen high school students do the same thing, and it is a repulsive dimension of human nature to try to contort reality to what suits me in this moment. But I am a little more open-minded about the McCain campaign as a whole. Opponents are cynical about the phrase, "Straight talk express." But as a theologian, I am open to the possibility that McCain, not wholly unlike God, writes straight with crooked lines.

Sacraments Course design continues...

A late post, but I am cutting some hours of sleep this weekend to ensure some basic goals for the semester. A colleague loaned me her copy of the actual UbD textbook, which I have been reading voraciously, making notes, and essentially cramming so that I can produce a curriculum I can be proud of.

Although the book says several times that it is not meant to be practiced in rigid "steps", I don't have time to be creative about my process. Essentially I must do the following to complete stage 1 of the 3-stage process for the first unit:

1. Establish what that unit will be.
2. Lay out and prioritize the "Big Ideas"
3. Identify 2-5 "Essential Questions"
4. Identify corresponding "Understandings"

What is the first unit?

Don't you just love that it's early Sunday morning and I don't have the answer to this question yet? To answer it, I need to look at my fake "sacraments standards" and ask some hard questions about content organization. I have already decided not to separate the units by individual sacraments; I believe that such a structure is a near disaster.

Consider what I already had:

1. God, Christ, and Church
2. The Catholic Sacramental Vision
3. Liturgy and Sacred Time
4. Origins, Purpose, and Effects of the Sacraments
5. Sacraments in Scripture and Tradition
6. Historical Development of the Sacraments
7. Ritual and Practice
8. Sanctification of Human Life

I could probably work with this, but there are glaring problems. #3, "Liturgy and Sacred Time," is a catch-all for topics I consider worthy, but it had little internal cohesion as a unit. It includes topics such as the Liturgy of the Hours and other liturgies beyond the seven sacraments; the liturgical calendar and the missal; the overal structure of the liturgy, sacred time, silence, blah blah. Let's see if I can't impose some better order...

All right. I've removed the unit called "Liturgy and Sacred Time", and moved elements of it into the unit "The Catholic Sacramental Vision" and "Ritual and Practice", as well as deleted a couple of elements. But I am not finished. First, there is a the big matter of order. Should I begin with #1 or #2? "God, Christ, and Church" as an introduction has the advantage of stressing the personal and religious character of the sacraments. "The Catholic Sacramental Vision" has the advantage of being the more direct and concrete of the two.

I'm starting with #1, "God, Christ, and Church". It will serve better as a review and a primer for everything that follows.

What are the "Big Ideas"?

UbD categories "big ideas" as follows:

• Concepts
• Themes
• Ongoing debates and points of view
• Paradoxes
• Theories
• Underlying assumptions
• Recurring questions
• Understandings or principles

Here are my "fake standards" for "God, Christ, and Church":

• the meaning of the phrase, “God is Love”.
• patterns in the actions of God in creation, revelation, and salvation.
• “incarnation” as referring both to Christ as the presence of God and to the experience of God in tangible things.
• how the Paschal Mystery fulfills Christ’s promise of eternal life.
• how the event of Pentecost characterizes both the power of the Holy Spirit and the Mission of the Church.
• Biblical images of the Church as the Body of Christ, the Bride of Christ, the People of God, and the Temple of the Spirit.
• qualities of the human and divine aspects of the Church.

Let's break this down according to UbD's categories:

• concepts: incarnation; experience of God; Paschal Mystery; Pentecost; Church;
• themes: God as love; fall and redemption; presence of God in creation; the admirable commercium; moving through death to life; grace of the Holy Spirit; Church as the Body of Christ; Church as the bride of Christ; Church as the People of God; Church as the Temple of the Spirit; Church as graced society of sinners
• ongoing debates: substitutionary atonement vs. mystical participation; Church as visible vs. invisible; church as sinful vs. perfect; grace as immediate (from HS) or mediated through the church; charismatic renewal and "pentecostal catholics"
• paradoxes: God is both merciful and just; God creates without needing us; Infinite eternal God wholly present in a 1st c. Palestinian Jew; God both totally beyond us and accessible to anybody; Christ's victory through defeat; salvation of the world through human vessels; Church both perfect and sinner
• theories: soteriology and models of atonement; Models of the Church (Dulles);
• underlying assumptions: faith in God's self-revelation in Jesus Christ; the Holy Spirit guides the Catholic Church and protects it from doctrinal error
• recurring questions: What is authentic love? How can we talk about God if he is a mystery? What is God like? Where can I find God? How is Jesus fully human and fully divine? How does salvation "work" in Christianity? Why was Pentecost necessary? Why is the Holy Spirit necessary? Why do we need a church? What do the Church's titles mean? Why do some texts call the Church "perfect" when it obviously isn't?
• understandings or principles: Love is not so much a feeling as it is a skill and a choice, based on virtue and freedom rather than appetite; Mysteries of faith are not unsolvable puzzles but supreme realities to be lived in; Paradoxes keep us from trying to "grasp" God in an idolatrous way; Paradoxes can lead us to deeper--but not complete--understanding by reflecting on them; God reveals himself in creation and in human beings, infallibly in the Scriptures and fully in the person of Jesus Christ; the Incarnation introduced a new economy of symbols because God allowed himself to be fully present as a creature; the Paschal Mystery is understood in various ways to be the linchpin of Christian salvation; Christ's salvation depends on his continued presence on earth through the Church as his Body, through the power of the Holy Spirit, and this mystery was initiated fully on Pentecost; the scriptural images of the church unveil God as the source of its holiness and the gaurantor of its mission; the Church is both a graced, organic, visible society of sinners and the unblemished, in vitro presence of, and access to the Kingdom of God.

Dang. That's a lot.

Let's break this down further into the three-tiered content priorities:

Outer: Worth Being Familiar With

• Divergent beliefs of Catholics and Protestants about Christian fundamentals
• Theories of soteriology and their contributors
• Avery Dulles' Models of the Church

Middle: Important to Know and Do

• Terms: mystery, paradox, agape, eros, incarnation, grace, paschal, pentecost, mystical
• Look up passages from Scripture; read for understanding

Center: Big Ideas and Core Concepts

Big ideas: mystery, paradox, authentic love, "incarnation" and religious representation, Paschal Mystery, Pentecost, Church

Big ideas framed as understandings:

• To call God "Love" both respects God's mysteriousness and summarizes his self-revelation to human beings.
• The Paschal Mystery is the linchpin of God's love and of Christian salvation.
• The Church is the visible continuation of the presence of Christ and the Paschal Mystery throught the power of the Holy Spirit.

Core tasks:

• Critically examine uses of the word "love" in popular discourse and in theology.
• Explain how the Paschal Mystery fulfills Jesus' promise of eternal life.
• Interpret data about the Catholic Church according to the distinction between its human and divine dimensions.