20 Things that Happen in a Minute

I’m familiar with the “If the world were a village of 100 people” comparison, but the comparison of a minute in time – and the differential rates of pay – is quite effective. I’m not sure why an insurance quotes site had it originally; Sociological Images picked it up.

Souls in Transition – book

Cover via Amazon

Sociologist Christian Smith has been researching the spiritual lives of young people for several years.  In Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults he follows up with on the hundreds of young people he interviewed five years ago for Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers.   I am particularly interested: this is the age group, and the stage of life, of most of the students I teach, and those with whom I worship at the College Mass.

You can imagine how delighted to be invited to participate in an online book discussion with college educators and staff across the country.  It’s part of the Network for Vocation in Undergraduate Education (NetVUE) to provide avenues for young people to explore and deepen the linkages between their faith and their work/family/recreation lives.  They’ve been working for about a decade on background research, but most of the programs have been either on a single campus or conferences of short duration.

The newest venture creates an online community – those of us interested in this topic across a variety of campuses can share ideas and find out what others have been doing.  At my college, the VP for Academic Affairs put out a call late on a Friday afternoon before a holiday weekend, with quick replies required – and nonetheless more than 30 people were interested in participating.  This was more than could be allowed to post from one college: we would swamp the system.  So I’m doubly delighted to be among the 12 who will be able to both speak and listen; the rest are listeners (and can ask us to speak for them).

The conversation begins on February 1, with a chapter a week.  The introductory instructions include the phrase “Remember that the author is a social scientist; he is reporting what is not what might or should be; some parts of it may be unsettling or uncomfortable to just about every religious persuasion.”  That sounds really intriguing!

I’m planning to write something here each week based on my reading and the conversation, to share the conversation even a bit further.

This work by Sister Edith Bogue is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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Collapse – film

My friends know I don’t read scary books or go to scary movies.  Unless they are documentaries.

Michael Ruppert in Collapse

So tonight I went to see Chris Smith’s Collapse, which is really an extended interview with author and social analyst Michael Ruppert; his 2009 book Confronting Collapse: The Crisis of Energy and Money in a Post Peak Oil World seems to present similar content – but I wouldn’t trade his compelling presence for the ease of a book.  Roger Ebert’s review, which made me eager to see the film, does a good job of summing up the content and the tone.  He rates it ★ ★ ★ ★.

Michael Ruppert draws together many facts and strands of thought.  Oil production is peaking, the new oil coming on board is harder to get and less plentiful than the oil that is running out, and demand in India and China is sky-rocketing.   Oil is involved in everything we say and do: not only fuel, but paint, tires, food (fertilizer, irrigation, processing, transport). The economic and banking system assumes constant growth, which has increased in magnitude and pace over the last 100 years due to the impact of fossil fuel especially oil.  When oil costs more than people can pay, the system will break down.

While I found the entire film intriguing – I’m leaving out all the twists and turns and Dick Cheney and the CIA and drugs – one comparison provides an interesting example of Ruppert’s thinking and use of data.  He asked, seemingly rhetorically, what happens when the oil runs out.  Then, surprisingly, he had an answer.  When the Soviet Union collapsed, it stopped exporting subsidized oil.  The two nations affected most dramatically – because they had no oil and no source of oil – were North Korea and Cuba.  Ruppert contrasts the response: in North Korea, a rigid hierarchical dictatorship oversaw massive suffering, reduction in life style, and starvation.  In Cuba, people were urged to start growing food everywhere: in green space in cities, on rooftops – and the natural, non-oil based food has improved their health and avoided starvation.

In spite of the scary picture he paints, Ruppert is a joyous man – he talks about inducing smiles in other people as a pastime – who is committed to painting this picture because he DOES see the way out: through learning to live simply, locally, and with a community.

I’m surprised that this film made it to Duluth before Minneapolis, Denver or San Francisco. If you have a chance to see it – the web site says that some movies-on-demand cable systems have it to – I encourage you to go.

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This work by Sister Edith Bogue is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

What makes health care Catholic?

Image by vernon_dutton via Flickr

This semester, I’m working with a senior Honors student who wants to look at Benedictine and Franciscan health care institutions.  That’s a good project, but I would prefer she get a better picture of Catholic health care in general.   I hoped there would be books like Ex Corde Ecclesiae: Documents Concerning Reception and Implementation that would point to central documents and their interpretation, or overviews like Hesburgh’s The Challenge and Promise of a Catholic University, or more general discussions like Landy’s As Leaven in the World: Catholic Perspectives on Faith, Vocation, and the Intellectual Life.

But I was disappointed.  The website of the Catholic Health Association and of the Catholic Medical Association have a variety of statements on particular issues, and updates on business-oriented news about Catholic health care.  I found one or two books on Catholic health care ethics.

Every Catholic health system I’ve encounter – not only those sponsored by our monastery, but others begun by the Sisters of St. Joseph, the Franciscans, the Mercy Sisters, all have a core idea that health care that is Catholic would be different in some way.  Inspired by Matthew 25:31-40 as most are – that in caring for the sick one is caring for Christ himself – Catholic health care should have some characteristics other than particular ethical decisions.  If Catholic higher education should be grounded in the Catholic intellectual tradition, then, I thought, Catholic health care would be grounded in the Catholic health care tradition.

And yet I’m stymied: I can’t find that over-arching view of the tradition anywhere.  Before Ex Corde there wasn’t that much written in a general way about Catholic higher education; maybe we’re still waiting for someone to write such a definitive viewpoint for health care.

In the meantime, I guess I’ll be trying to create an anthology!

Bishop Sirba comes to supper

Image by Edith OSB via Flickr

Duluth received its much-prayed-for shepherd when Bishop Paul Sirba was ordained in December, a little more than a year after our previous bishop was named archbishop in Cincinnati. Many of us attended the Solemn Vespers and Ordination, and came away with the sense that our diocese was very lucky indeed.

This past Sunday, Bishop Sirba came to the monastery for Evening Prayer and supper.  He chose to come an hour early, spending the time meeting each of the retired sisters on Benet Hall one-by-one, thanking them for their months of prayer for unknown bishop-to-be.

A sister who had entered religious life decades before Bishop Sirba was born was a bit surprised to hear this was the bishop.  “Oh! A good-looking young bishop!” she exclaimed.  “Well,” he said humbly, “I am pretty young as bishops go.”  Not to be denied, our sister said, “Yes, and good-looking too!”  With a bit of a blush, he went on to meet the next sister.

After supper, Bishop Sirba spoke a few words to us, thanking us for our work in this diocese and our prayers.  His words were sometimes lighthearted, sometimes more serious – always personable.  His blessing was heartfelt and powerful – and we were glad to receive it.

I hope this is just the first of many visits with Bishop Sirba.

Do you have time for beauty?

Joshua Bell playing in the Metro

Sometimes a news story asks philosophical questions that cause us to stop and think deeply about our lives and the way we lead them.  That’s the case for Pearls Before Breakfast, Gene Weingarten’s Pulitzer-prize winning story from the Washington Post in 2007 that is making the rounds again on Facebook – so I finally saw it.

The premise: what would happen if one of the world’s best violinists played some of the world’s best music on one of the best instruments in the world – but in the persona of a street musician in a public place?

Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post asked Joshua Bell to carry out the experiment at the L’Enfant Metro station during the morning rush hour on January 12, 2007.   It was captured on video (below) and audio.

They developed contingency plans for crowd control, but not for the big nothing which, in fact occurred.

The essay:  I wonder what Weingarten would have written if the crowd had gathered, if more people had acknowledge the presence, and the beauty, of the music. He must have had something in mind when he proposed the plan to Bell.  As it happened, the lack of response elicited a  deep and insightful reflection about our lives and priorities, but also about the factors that influence our perceptions of the events going on around us.  No one expects to hear an excellent musician playing in the Metro; he lacked “a frame” that highlights the quality and importance of the music, as the National Gallery’s Mark Leithauser said.

Weingarten’s essay masterfully draws us into the topic – why some

Numeracy Humor

Talking back to the radio and groaning at news stories are occupational hazards for people who teach research methods and statistics.  The worst errors – and we hear them everyday – report something as a finding when the description of the research or the numbers demonstrates that there’s little or no basis for thinking this finding applies to your life or mine. 

How delightful to find 4 of the most common errors summed up in one comic from PhD Comics:

Powered by ScribeFire.

The Census is coming

The year 2010 is the year that the census will be taken – a count of all the people in America. A study by the Pew Research Center finds that nearly a third of young people (age 18-29) have not heard of the U.S. Census and don’t know what it does; other groups are similarly uninformed. Some are mistrustful; there are blog posts warning about the dangers of responding to Census takers.

The Census will be used to allocation congressional seats, and to award billions of dollars in federal and state aid.  Learn more from the 5 minute video.

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Secrets of success (are they secret?)

Image by tillwe via Flickr

Every semester, I teach a class made up mostly of first year college students who are there, for the most part, as involuntary clients: the course meets one or another requirement for them. Some are awake and alive to the life of the mind. Some have a drive for superior performance. Many simply hope to get out in 4 years with a degree that will let them get a decent job and have a life. A few are in college to satisfy parents or because it seemed like the thing to do.

Every semester, some falter and fail. Many get through, but without much joy or curiosity. A few are captured by the topic, engage fully, get fascinated, succeed, and go on to do great things.

Yet all of them have some dream, something they hope for, something that makes it worthwhile to get up in the morning. Some part of being in this class must be connected to that dream – but it’s very tough to find it.

This semester, I’m trying an experiment.  I’m going to include short videos that talk about the path to success in realistic, empirically based terms (this is a sociology class!!!) in many of the classes.  These can be a boost to the motivation, a reminder of the link to the dream, an encouragement to keep going when (as it always does) the going gets tough.

We had the first day of class today.  I showed Richard St. John’s 8 Secrets of Success.  It does me good to watch it!

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Keeping a Rule of Life

Image by Edith OSB via Flickr

After more than a decade of monastic life “according to the Rule of Benedict,” I find myself scouring the volumes of journals and books for a basic statement of what it means to have and keep a Rule in one’s life.  This is the topic I chose for our Benedictine oblate meeting in February, never imagining that I would not find much written. Much has been written about particular rules – Benedict’s, yes, but also Basil, Augustine, Pachomius and others.  The spirituality of having a rule, though, doesn’t seem to come up.

I had never thought about the taking of rule of life – separate from the various rules – until a brief chance conversation with Episcopalian priest and theologian A.K.M.Adam (AKMA) on a snowy evening in Princeton NJ well over a decade ago. Up until that moment, I saw Benedict’s Rule – and all the other rules – simply as a necessary aspect of organized religious life.  How could a group know what it was about, collectively, and stay on track, without some common understanding.  In just a few sentences, AKMA spoke about the importance of having a rule, but that