Robby Prenkert

…101st blog entry of 2009, and my 150th total entry on this blog.

Wow. Should this even count?

In my ENGL 101 class today I had my students do a writing warm-up exercise, something we do every day at the start of class. Usually I post a prompt of some sort up on the screen—a picture, a quote, a question—and invite them to write a response. There are not right or wrong answers to these prompts; the point of the exercise is to get in the habit of thinking on the page. It’s a ritual, a way of practicing the discipline of writing our way into our feelings and thoughts. Last class the prompt was this: “Writing is like…” I invited the class to think metaphorically, and then to elaborate on their comparison(s), encouraging the exploration of their analogy. Today’s prompt was this: “Writing is like praying.”

This sparked a good conversation about the ways in which writing is like prayer, its practice, its purpose, its effects. I would like to see us explore the connections between prayer and writing in the days ahead.

One of my course aims is this: "To write Christian-ly." I'm not entirely sure what I mean by that. I think I have tried to encourage my students to write ethically, to respect and empathize with the reader, to writing charitably, to examine their subjects through the lenses of their Christian faith. But what about an approach to the practice of composition that is prayerful? Might that not be an even better skill to foster and facilitate? Can I teach it unless I practice it myself?

Next class I'm going to show them the steps of St. Ignatius Loyola's "Examen"—a method of prayer that may have some connections to writing. Does writing well require us to begin from a position of hope and gratitude? In the epic tradition, the poet always invoked the gods—"Sing Muse, and through me tell the story…" That's how the Odyssey begins. Why not, even if I don't explicitly state it in the piece itself, begin my own essay (or blog entry) with that sort of invocation? Would I write more clearly if I began by asking God to make me aware of my writing "sins" and to cast them out? Does writing well involve and examination of my conscience? What would asking pardon for my "sins of composition" look like, and what effect would such confession have on a writer and his writing? Is revision like repentance? Would I write better if I entered the process trusting the Holy Spirit to guide me, and not merely leaning on my own understanding?

Anyhow, here's Ignatius's Examen. I see links; but I see through a glass darkly. I'm going to experiment with it for awhile, and be alert to its connections with and implications for the writing (and reading, too) process.

METHOD FOR MAKING THE GENERAL EXAMEN

It contains in it five Points.

First Point. The first Point is to give thanks to God our Lord for the benefits received.

Second Point. The second, to ask grace to know our sins and cast them out.

Third Point. The third, to ask account of our soul from the hour that we rose up to the present Examen, hour by hour, or period by period: and first as to thoughts, and then as to words, and then as to acts, […]

Fourth Point. The fourth, to ask pardon of God our Lord for the faults.

Fifth Point. The fifth, to purpose amendment with His grace.

They don’t make ‘em like this anymore.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW54W9y6-eU&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&feature=player_embedded&fs=1&w=425&h=344]

The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they’re okay, then it’s you."

• Rita Mae Brown

“Fiction is history that might have happened. History is fiction that did happen."

- Andre Gide

MUTUAL SUBMISSION IN SELF-SACRIFICIAL LOVE

This week’s column is written by Allison Young, as part of the “Short Answers for Challenging Texts” series. Allison holds a BA in Biblical and Theological studies from Bethel University and an MDiv from Princeton Theological seminary. She served as a theological intern for Christians for Biblical Equality in the summer of 2007.

Instead, be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another with psalms, hymns and songs from the Spirit. Sing and make music from your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, people have never hated their own bodies, but they feed and care for them, just as Christ does the church—for we are members of his body. “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband (Eph. 5:18-33, TNIV).

With great gusto, and over, and over, and over, Sydney sings…

"Go Cubs go, Go Cubs go—

Hey Chicago whaddya say

The Cubs are gonna win today."

Maybe next year, Syd. Maybe next year.

Herta Mueller wins 2009 Nobel literature prize
(AP) – 10 hours ago

STOCKHOLM — Romanian-born German writer Herta Mueller has the won the 2009 Nobel Prize in literature.

The Swedish Academy, which has picked the winner annually since 1901, said Thursday that Mueller “who with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed."

The prize includes a 10 million kronor ($1.4 million) prize and will be handed out Dec. 10 in the Swedish capital.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.

STOCKHOLM (AP) — Americans Joyce Carol Oates and Philip Roth join Israel’s Amos Oz at the top of the buzz surrounding the Nobel Prize in literature, especially after the most prominent judge broke from his predecessor and said U.S. writers are worthy of the coveted award.

True to tradition, the secretive Swedish Academy won’t even reveal who has been nominated ahead of the announcement Thursday.

To avoid leaks academy members avoid discussing candidates in e-mails or in public. When they must — such as when they dine out together — they use quirky code names, like “Chateaubriand” for last year’s winner, Jean-Marie Le Clezio of France.

Britons Doris Lessing and Harold Pinter, winners in 2007 and 2005, were “Little Dorrit” and “Harry Potter,” while Orhan Pamuk — the 2006 winner — was simply dubbed “OP,” initials that Swedes associate with a domestic brand of liquor.

“It’s sometimes when we meet in public spaces and public environments and then we have to resort to code words but it isn’t that frequent,” Peter Englund, the academy’s permanent secretary, told The Associated Press in an interview.

Academy members have also been known to use fake covers to camouflage their books whenever reading in public.

Sometimes even those feints aren’t enough. The academy suspected a leak last year when Le Clezio surged to No. 1 in Nobel betting a day before the announcement.

“We have taken a number of measures to see that it isn’t repeated this year,” said Englund, who used to work in military intelligence. He declined to describe the measures.

This year British betting firm Ladbrokes is giving the lowest odds to Oz, German writer Herta Mueller and a trio of Americans: Oates, Roth and Thomas Pynchon.

The academy keeps nominations secret for 50 years but nominators — language professors, former Nobel laureates and members of literature academies worldwide — sometimes make their submissions public.

This year, Danish literature professor Anne-Marie Mai revealed she had nominated Bob Dylan because she was upset about Englund’s predecessor’s critical remarks about American literature.

Before last year’s prize announcement, outgoing permanent secretary Horace Engdahl said the U.S. was too insular and ignorant to challenge Europe as the center of the literary world.

Englund struck a different tone, telling AP Tuesday that in most language areas “there are authors that really deserve and could get the Nobel Prize and that goes for the United States and the Americas, as well."

On Thursday Englund will announce the winner at the academy’s headquarters in Stockholm’s Old Town.

The last American winner was Toni Morrison in 1993. No writer from South America has won since Gabriel Garcia Marquez in 1982. The last North American writer was Canadian Saul Bellow, who won in 1976 and was a resident of the United States for much of his life.

Dylan is believed to have been nominated several times before, but doesn’t quite fit the profile of a Nobel literature laureate. Besides primarily being a songwriter, his mass following could also be considered a minus by the Swedish Academy, which often chooses writers who are unfamiliar to the everyday reader.

However, Dylan is considered by many prominent literary critics to be a major poet, his song lyrics worthy of serious study.

Dylan’s literary merits aside, Nobel watchers note that anyone can be nominated for the six Nobel awards in medicine, physics, chemistry, literature, peace and economics, but that doesn’t mean they have any chance of winning.

The list of unsuccessful peace prize nominees includes dictators Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler.

“There are some completely crazy nominations,” said Mans Ehrenberg, who sits on the chemistry prize committee. He said occasionally committee members get e-mails “from people who think they should get the prize."

That violates a key Nobel rule: you can’t nominate yourself. New Zealand literature professor J.M. Brown tried to get around that rule in 1905, when he nominated Godfrey Sweven, which turned out to be his own pseudonym.

British wartime leader Winston Churchill missed out on the peace prize despite two nominations, but his oratory and his works of historical scholarship earned him the literature prize in 1953.

Spanish poet Angel Guimera y Jorge was nominated for the literature prize 17 consecutive years, but never won.

The Swedish Academy receives hundreds of literature nominations every year, whittled down to a shortlist of five names by May. Those authors are studied carefully before a winner is selected in a majority vote.

Known in Swedish as “De Aderton” — the Eighteen — the academy members are Swedish writers, book critics, linguists and literature professors.

Right now there are only 15 active members. One seat is vacant and two members have boycotted meetings since the 1990s because of internal disputes, including over whether the academy should condemn death threats against British writer Salman Rushdie.

Englund said there usually is animated discussion between academy members before the vote, though they try to keep things civil.

“There are never sort of cutthroat debates and people getting really angry and storming out of the room,” he said.

Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair falls out and the teeth decay.

-Flannery O’Connor

How quickly they forget the lessons of Sunday school
LEONARD PITTS JR.
The Bellingham Herald 9-22-2009

“Thou shalt not bear false witness …” — Exodus 20:16

Jim Wallis wants to take Glenn Beck to Sunday school.

On occasion, the Fox News host has spoken of his daughter, who was born with cerebral palsy. According to Sojourners, a faith-based organization Wallis co-founded and leads, Beck recalled last month how doctors warned that the baby, if carried to term, might never walk, speak or feed herself. That was 21 years ago and she is now a miraculous young woman who defied the dire expectations.

Beck has suggested that under health-care reform, the government would be empowered to euthanize children like his. But who is Washington to decide whether a life is worth living? “That’s for God to decide,” he is quoted as saying. “Not the government."

From this, we learn two things. The first is that Glenn Beck believes in God. The second is that Glenn Beck lies. You’d hope those things would be mutually exclusive.

For the record and for the umpteenth time: no version of health-care reform being contemplated by Congress mandates death for the old, the disabled or the infirm. That’s a canard. It is mendacity, prevarication, bald-faced lie.

In other words, politics.

The art of the untruth is, after all, the life’s blood of governance. As a brief spin through PolitiFact.com, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact checking Web site will attest, no party, ideology or politician has a monopoly on lying. Lying is as bipartisan as it gets.

And yet, the lies that have characterized the debate over health care are in a class all their own — not simply because they are outrageous, but because they are designed specifically to enflame and terrorize. As such, those lies are deserving of special rebuke. Last week, they got it.

Sojourners, which calls itself the nation’s largest network of progressive Christians, says its members sent out thousands of e-mails to five of the biggest offenders: Beck, his fellow Fox personalities Sean Hannity, Steve Doocy and Bill O’Reilly, and radio host Rush Limbaugh. Each e-mail said the same thing in essence: stop lying. Wallis, a celebrated theologian and author of “The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith & Politics in a Post — Religious Right America,” says Sojourners is trying to redeem things people “really should’ve learned in Sunday school.”

“For example, Sean Hannity said we’re going to have a government rationing body that tells women with breast cancer, ‘You’re dead. It’s a death sentence.’ That’s just not true. So instead, in our e-mail we told the story of a real person, a real woman who was denied her breast cancer surgery because of her health provider’s discovery of a pre-existing condition called acne.”

He adds, “A lot of the things the talk-show hosts say will happen are ‘already’ happening because of the behavior of the health-care providers. They’re not true because of health-care reform, they’re true because of the present system.”

It is not, says Wallis, his intention to accuse everyone who opposes health-care reform of lying. Nor, he says, is it his intention to promote a given proposal. All he’s trying to do is reframe health care as the moral issue it is, and restore verities we all learned in Sunday School. Or Hebrew School. Or Islamic School. Or, heck, kindergarten.

That it’s wrong to lie, wrong to pick on the vulnerable. And that we have a duty to care for those who cannot care for themselves, the ones Jesus called “the least of these.”

Those are simple, sacred and profound principles. But you wonder if the simple, sacred and profound still have power to sway us. Obviously, Jim Wallis has faith they do. I hope he’s right. Yet what a spectacular leap it takes to believe the tiny whisper of conscience might be heard over the shrill outcry of America screaming at its mirror.

That is in itself a sobering measure of how far we’ve wandered from the things we once knew as kids.

… and with enormous gusto, Syd sings:

“Don’t let Satan Whoof it out,
I’m gonna let it shine!
Don’t let Satan Whoof it out,
I’m gonna let it shine,
let it shine,
let it shine,
let it shine!!"

And ten thousand angels, and one grandpa, listen in. Laughing.

We get to carry each other…

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgZ4ammawyI&hl=en&fs=1&hd=1&w=640&h=505]

I wanna tear down the walls / that hold me inside.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQxl9EI9YBg&hl=en&fs=1&&w=425&h=344]

It will be…

Magnificent.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUgj5_bNCpk

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEGOb48gIe4&hl=en&fs=1&&w=560&h=340]


Magnificent
Magnificent

I was born
I was born to be with you
In this space and time
After that and ever after I haven’t had a clue
Only to break rhyme
This foolishness can leave a heart black and blue

Only love, only love can leave such a mark
But only love, only love can heal such a scar

I was born
I was born to sing for you
I didn’t have a choice but to lift you up
And sing whatever song you wanted me to
I give you back my voice
From the womb my first cry, it was a joyful noise…

Only love, only love can leave such a mark
But only love, only love can heal such a scar

Justified till we die, you and I will magnify
The Magnificent
Magnificent

Only love, only love can leave such a mark
But only love, only love unites our hearts

Justified till we die, you and I will magnify
The Magnificent
Magnificent
Magnificent

Three days on the “gold coast.”

Milton Bradley is 6 of his last 7.

As much as I hate to admit it…

the Cubs are lousy. Which makes September a considerably less interesting month for me.

I have no memory of my first day of college classes. I sort of remember my first day of freshman orientation. I think that’s because they made us play those goofy “get to know you” ice-breaker games in the gym, and I really hated games like that when I was eighteeen.

Tomorrow is the first official day of college classes for about 400 freshman at Bethel. Twenty-eight of those will be in a class I co-teach. If my experience is indicative of anything, twenty years from now they won’t remember anything about this day. Unless they save the journal I make them write.

Or,unless something horrible happens.

So I’ll try not to let something horrible happen.

State Champions
Michigan Men’s Fastpitch
2009

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHVpJGXZ21o&hl=en&fs=1&&w=425&h=344]

In a way, each of us has an El Guapo to face. For some, shyness might be their El Guapo. For others, a lack of education might be their El Guapo. For us, El Guapo is a big, dangerous man who wants to kill us. But as sure as my name is Lucky Day, the people of Santa Poco can conquer their own personal El Guapo, who also happens to be the actual El Guapo!

--Lucky Day, The Three Amigos (1986)

Article published Jul 30, 2009

Teacher licensing rules eyed

Schools chief wants changes; board slows plan.
By DEANNA MARTIN Associated Press Writer

INDIANAPOLIS – A state licensing board put the brakes on state Superintendent Tony Bennett’s plan to revamp teacher licensing rules Wednesday after some complained the changes would downplay the importance of learning how to teach.

Bennett wants to eliminate some requirements for teacher licensing and says the process should ensure potential teachers have a deep understanding of the subject they will teach. He said current requirements focus too much attention on teaching methods.

“We need folks who understand rigorous content,” Bennett said.

Under the proposed changes, elementary education majors would take no more than 30 college credit hours in teaching methods and would have to have a minor in a content subject area such as science, math or English. It’s unclear how the limit on credit hours would work, and members of the Professional Standards Advisory Board said they wanted to clarify that and other issues before voting on whether to move forward with the changes.

The proposed rules also would allow anyone with a bachelor’s degree to become a teacher if they pass a test from the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence. Currently only seven states allow teachers to be licensed with that online program, according to the group’s Web site.

Opponents of some of the changes said future teachers need to understand teaching methods, not just be brilliant in their respective fields.

“How you teach does make a big difference,” board member George Van Horn said. “The ‘how’ is critical."

Bennett also wants to allow anyone with a master’s degree to become a district superintendent if they pass a school leader’s license test and get state approval.

Bennett said school districts need the flexibility to hire people from outside traditional education channels. The change would give local school boards more options, he said. If a board wanted to hire someone with a traditional educational background, they could do so, but if they needed an acute business manager to handle district financial problems, they could choose someone from outside the education field.

Opponents said not anyone can become a superintendent.Stephen McColley, the superintendent of Wes-Del Community Schools in Delaware County, said he was a teacher before becoming a bank executive and later a superintendent. His experience in business helped him understand the financial side of running a school district, but that was just a small portion of his job, he said."

Can I be a brain surgeon because I want to be a brain surgeon? No,” McColley said. “School superintendents must be educational leaders, not a business person who looks at the bottom line.“Several board members complained they had little time to read and review the proposed changes. Some said they got the extensive proposals 4 p.m. Tuesday, and a revised copy was given to them shortly before the meeting Wednesday afternoon.

Pat Mapes, director of the Office of Educator Licensing & Development, suggested the board meet again later to discuss the proposed changes and tweak them before voting on whether to advance them. The changes are subject to approval by the board, the Office of Management and Budget, the attorney general and the governor. If the proposals are approved, they would take effect next July.

“They’re trying to kill me,” Yossarian told him calmly.
“No one’s trying to kill you,” Clevinger cried.
“Then why are they shooting at me?” Yossarian asked.
“They’re shooting at everyone,” Clevinger answered.
“They’re trying to kill everyone."
“And what difference does that make?”

the Cubbies are in first place…