Do Calvinists Believe in Luck?

I have the honor of being chosen as one of "The Twelve" to blog for a year for Perspectives: A Journal of Reformed Thought. It is a new blog for Perspectives and it launches today. As honor cascades upon honor, I have been chosen to be the first blogger. You can read my first post by clicking here. Please do click -- it takes a while for the audience to find a new blog and it would be great if you could help us out. The other bloggers are far more distinguished and qualified than I, but I get to sneak in amongst them and mess around a bit.

Today I ask the question "Do Calvinists Believe in Luck?" and wonder about God's hand working in the events of our lives. If you are like me and don't know the answers, I think you'll enjoy reading my post. If you have it all figured out, be so kind as to enlighten the rest of us, please.

I have a new post for this blog ready about the movie Moneyball and hope to put it up on Wednesday. Talk to you then.

"Like Noah's Ark Crashing in Zanesville, Ohio"

I have been in Iowa this week and am now in Chicago and missed that a story of mine was run by ThinkChristian.net a couple of days ago. You can see the story by clicking here. I was asked to write something about that sad story that unfolded in Zanesville, Ohio last week. Take a look.

Middlemarch

I finished reading George Eliot’s Middlemarch last night. I sort of feel like I’ve finished a marathon – Middlemarch is 811 pages of small print, little dialogue, and long paragraphs. There aren’t any pictures. Honestly, I didn’t feel like the action really kicked in until about chapter 70. Initially, I was at sea because the lead characters of the first section had disappeared by the second section. I knew they would all come together eventually, but my attention span has been shaped by TV sit-coms and hanging in for things to come together over a number of weeks of reading took some doing. I don’t want to say it’s taken me a long time to get through it, but the book’s been to Mackinac Island, Madison, Minneapolis and Seattle and I was compelled to finish it last night to prevent it from going to South Dakota and Iowa with me today.

Whew.

And yet, what a book.

Here’s the genius of it – if someone had to write a summary of the plot there would be a few twists and turns, but on the whole a dispassionate observer might feel there was nothing really remarkable about it. And they’d be right. It isn’t the story that matters. What matters is the way George Eliot shines a light on what it means to be a human being, and, most significantly, how we make moral and ethical choices. She shines an uncompromising light on the realities and complexities of marriage. She shines a light on the evil effects of gossip, on wealth, on class and on the clergy. Even though I found it slow going at the beginning, I had two people whose literary opinions I respect (one an English professor, the other a magazine editor) tell me that Middlemarch was their favorite novel. I was compelled to keep reading until the book started working its charms on me, and I’m happy to say eventually it did.

So here’s the point. I don’t expect you to rush out and get Middlemarch. I showed the book to someone as I was reading it and she more or less said, “Yikes, I’ll never read that!” The lack of white space on the pages is intimidating. What I do want to challenge you to do is to go find a classic you’ve never read and dive in. Classics are the cheapest books to read. They give them away on Kindle. Every library has them. They are the least expensive books in the store at Barnes and Noble. Pick up one you’ve never read. Get into Jane Austen or Anthony Trollope or Fyodor Dostoevsky or Mary Shelley or James Joyce or George Eliot or the Bronte sisters or Charles Dickens or Nathaniel Hawthorne or Herman Melville or Mark Twain or F. Scott Fitzgerald or Ernest Hemingway and find out what all the fuss is about. Don’t settle for the education you got in high school and college. Keep growing; keep pushing yourself … keep reading.

Gangs of New York

Way back in the 1980’s the President of Young Life was invited to appear on the Phil Donahue show. If you are my age, you remember Donahue invented much of the modern daytime talk show genre, combining elements that people like Oprah, Montel Williams, Jerry Springer and Maury Povich have later perfected. The YL President accepted the invitation with some reluctance. He was one of about nine panelists on the show, and before long it turned into a sort of free-for-all argument. The President of Young Life refused to engage in a shouting match, and sat quietly while others around him got louder and louder. At the end of the show the President of Young Life felt like it had been a waste of his time, that no real points had been made, that no one really listened to anyone else and no consensus of opinion had been reached. Phil Donahue, on the other hand, was smiling as he walked up to the panelists and said, “Thank you. That was a hell of a show.” At that point, the President of Young Life had an “aha” moment when he realized the purpose all along had been to stir up anger instead of education or enlightenment.

Here is another story: a couple of years ago when I was doing my European sojourn, I traveled with my friend Ken Knipp for a few days. We started in London, went to Barcelona and wound up in Stuttgart. We were working, but we did manage to enjoy a few nice things in each of those places. We found a room on-line for a ridiculously low price at the Trafalgar Square Hilton and took the tube (Minding the Gap the whole way) down to Trafalgar. To our surprise there were thousands of people in Trafalgar Square protesting. They were there because Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and others were in London for a G8 meeting. The people in Trafalgar Square were protesting worldwide economic policies. One of them held a sign that said, “Eliminate money.” I thought the sign was silly. A few days later, when we were in Stuttgart, I mentioned that sign to my friend Dieter, who gently corrected my condescension by explaining some of the basic principles of economic anarchists. What struck me wasn’t the power of the anarchists’ arguments, what struck me was that Dieter had taken the time to understand them. Our world would be so much better if we took the time to understand different points of view instead of dismiss them.

All of which brings me to the relationship between the Occupy Wall Street movement and the Tea Party. Am I the only one who realizes how much they have in common? And yet they view each other as the enemy.

The Tea Party was created by backlash over government bailouts. Who did the government bailout? Big business, banks and Wall Street. Who are the Occupy Wall Street people upset at? Big business, banks and Wall Street. The difference is the Tea Party is upset at the government for doing the bailouts. The Occupy Wall Streeters are upset at the businesses and banks and brokerages for getting the bailouts.

Remember the first story I told and step away from the media (and political) tendency to inflame rather than enlighten. Pay no attention to Rush Limbaugh singing the praises of the Tea Party while calling the Occupy Wall Streeters “perpetually lazy and spoiled rotten.” Just ignore him and all the others of his ilk, including those on the left who support Occupy Wall Street and condemn the Tea Party. They are entertainers, not journalists, and entertainers understand you have to create conflict to have a story. Remember, if Rush Limbaugh solved problems he’d be out of a job.

Don’t take the conflict bait. Instead, follow the example of Dieter in Germany and take the time to learn and listen to other points of view.

Both groups are populist movements driven by anger. They are angry for good reason. Anger is an ally – it reveals injustice. When you are angry it’s because you sense something isn’t fair. It isn’t fair that kids graduate with student loan debt equivalent to a modest mortgage. It isn’t fair that health insurance costs are the biggest line item in the household budget for self-employed and unemployed people. It isn’t fair that so many competent and capable people have been out of work for over a year. It isn’t fair that the government bailed out billionaires while average people live on edge. It isn’t fair that the government keeps wasting so much of our money. It isn’t fair that bitter factions in the government keep stopping anything productive from happening. It isn’t fair that we’ve spent $1.2 trillion on two wars without any plan on how to pay for them. And it isn’t fair that tax breaks for the richest Americans are being protected in the current environment. No wonder people are angry.

I called this post Gangs of New York in homage to the Martin Scorsese film of the same name which I finally saw last week. It is a flawed film, but like everything Scorsese touches it is worth looking at and contemplating. Set around the time of the Civil War, it portrays New York City as a bloody cauldron of vice, where the line between politician and gangster is very, very thin. And as the movie develops a showdown between two rival gangs becomes inevitable. The two gangs have most everything in common but despise each other. They were bent on cutting each other up instead of focusing together on the forces that conspired to keep them in the hell hole where they lived. Sound familiar?

There is a way out. It’s called listening.

Why?

I have a series of devotionals running in Words of Hope for the next couple of weeks. You can see it by clicking here and you can also access it through Facebook here.

The title of the first one is "Why?" It does offer a brief glimpse of what's been going on with me over the past 18 months or so. Just to be clear, "Why?" is not about the Tigers losing this weekend. I am so over that.

Although mightily limited by space (these devotionals max out at 170 words) "Why?" is a first attempt to plumb the depths of trying to make sense of life and what role trusting God plays in our day to day existence. "Why?" refers to the fog that has descended over my vocational life. I keep coming in second place in interviews. Someone said to me yesterday "Second place is better than third place," but I'm not sure I buy that. Getting a job is not like a horse race, where you get paid for coming in second. Second is the same as last.

So, "Why?" Why do the things that happen to us happen? Although I'm fairly sure we'll never know any satisfying answers, I can't help but ask the question.

Stuck in the Middle With You

A lifetime ago, when I sold baseball cards on weekends with my erstwhile partner Bullet Bob Bird, we used to ask ourselves “What did we learn?” when a card show ended. (Things we learned: guys named “Scooter” were entertaining; Maury Wills liked ice cream; and while a lot of people wanted something for nothing, some men were willing to spend a lot of money trying to recapture their childhoods.)

I felt like asking our old card show question after watching Prohibition, the latest documentary film from Ken Burns on PBS last week. It seems unbelievable, but the United States once banned the production and sale of alcohol for 13 years (1920 – 1933). Prohibition was largely the result of the work of the Anti-Saloon League and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. They had good cause for their efforts – the nation had a drinking problem, and too many men drank away their paychecks and then violently took out their alcohol-fueled frustrations on their wives and children. The fatal flaw of Prohibition, though, was that rather than attempt regulation or reform, the Prohibitionists went for a total ban. Conservative Christians got a law passed that would have landed Jesus in jail. It is no coincidence that this happened under three Republican administrations – Harding, Coolidge and Hoover – or that it was repealed under a Democrat (Franklin Roosevelt). It also is not coincidental that it happened immediately following World War I – there was a strong anti-German sentiment in the air, and many of the most successful brewers were Germans like Schlitz, Stroh, Pabst, Busch and Miller.

By going for a ban instead of regulation and reform, the law backfired on those who passed it. Things happened that must have mortified Prohibition’s supporters. Organized crime rose because of the easy money put into the hands of criminals who became celebrities, like Al Capone, Lucky Luciano and Dutch Schultz. Average people who enjoyed a glass of wine from time to time were forced into criminal behavior. As the hard economic realities of the Depression set in, the government had lost all the tax revenue from alcohol sales – a major stream of income. Drinking’s attraction grew – after all, a speakeasy is a lot more tantalizing than a saloon. More people drank after alcohol became illegal than before.

After a little more than a decade of rampant hypocrisy, Prohibition was repealed, and I’m asking the question, “What did we learn?” When I was in college taking a class called “Recent American History” (from a professor my dad had also had – which meant my “Recent American History” teacher had lived through all the history he taught) the professor used the old saw, “You can’t legislate morality” to comment about Prohibition. Even then I disagreed with him. We legislate morality all the time. What are our laws other than attempts to legislate moral behavior? Aren’t the lessons of Prohibition more complex than that?

There is a huge lesson about the role of government to be learned here. Our government currently is polarized between two opposing views of what their role should be. On the one hand, there is a political party that believes government can solve our problems. Our President has proposed a jobs package that has the government hiring unemployed workers. On the other hand, there is a political party that believes business can solve our problems. The President’s job package will never pass this party because it’s anathema to them – more of the same “government is the answer” thinking that, they believe, already plagues us. In one of the Republican debates, Mitt Romney said, “There is nothing government does that private industry can’t do better.” (Really? Does he really believe this about, say, the military? But I digress….) The irony of Prohibition is that it was the conservatives who imposed more government into the lives of average people by banning the sale of alcohol. They did this because the “no government” status that existed before Prohibition didn’t work. After Prohibition failed, there were regulations passed that we think of as common sense today – things like establishing closing times for bars and prohibiting the sale of alcoholic beverages to minors. “No government” didn’t work and “total government” didn’t work. What works is somewhere in the middle. The vast majority of Americans understand this. Somewhere between “thou shall do whatever you please” and “thou shall not” is where we live, knowing that unbridled government isn’t the answer but not trusting business to act in our interest for one second. Most of us feel stuck in the middle.

I have no clue how to solve the ideological impasse that stymies effective government in our country today. One hopes that perhaps, our elected officials watched Prohibition and took its lessons to heart.

What a Day!

Yesterday was fantastic. I found a penny in a parking lot, and you know what means: "Find a penny, pick it up, and all day you'll have good luck."

Of course the Tigers beat the Yankees. I knew that was going to happen when I found the penny. Too bad, Jay-Z and Spike Lee, too bad A-Rod and Jeter, too bad New York and your over-the-top schmaltzy God Bless America in the seventh inning. Whatever happened to Take me out to the Ballgame? As the near-maniacal Dennis Eckersley kept saying on TBS, "The Yankees are going hunting." It's the Tigers who are moving on. (And speaking of baseball guys who become broadcasters, the joke at our house is that Jim Leyland is just using this postseason as an audition to become a talking head on some sports network. Not! We have come to cherish Leyland's incoherent mumbling. Of course three months ago we despised it, but now that everything he touches turns to gold we adore it.)

I was in such a good mood last night I didn't even mind that strike zone graphic TBS used that apparently was calibrated by a monkey who'd spent the night sucking down eight bottles of cough syrup. If a pitch was in that zone, chances are it was a ball. Even the announcers apologized for their graphic (although one of them called it "Fox Trax." Oops. Wrong network.) You know things are bad when your announcers have to apologize.

Speaking of apologies, the doctors office called yesterday and apologized. We've been in an eight-month long disagreement about some stuff and yesterday the office manager called, apologized for the mixup, apologized for the tone a member of their staff took with me, said they would be refunding the money I believed they owed me, and said they would now be doing a review of their policies and procedures. How often does that happen these days? Chalk it up to the penny.

More good stuff happened yesterday, but I won't bore you with it. It all makes me wonder what today will bring. One good thing has already happened. I have another piece posted on Think Christian today about the "Stewardship of Sports Viewing." I wrote this ten days ago about football because I didn't know if the Detroit Tigers would still be alive when it was posted. Sorry, Tigers, for the lack of faith. I just hadn't found the lucky penny yet.

My Dream Job

I've always fantasized about being a movie critic -- being paid to sit in a theater and then pound out a few hundred words telling the world whether or not to invest their time and money into the hard work of dozens of others. It sounds easier than it is. Really, besides Roger Ebert, name a film critic whose opinion you trust. There used to be a guy who did movie reviews for the Grand Rapids Press who was so bad I tended to see movies he panned. After he railed against Forrest Gump, my mind was made up to steer 180 degrees from his recommendations. I know there is no accounting for taste, but how could anyone with a pulse not like Forrest Gump?

Anyhow, my fantasy has become reality. Some friends who are way, way cooler than me have a website called Rednow and have invited me to make classic film recommendations once a month on the site. You can access my first one by clicking here. The recommendation for this month is A Hard Day's Night. I'm down and feeling a bit helter skelter after yesterday's hard day's night of watching the Detroit Tigers lose, so this boy may take the long and winding road downstairs and do something like watch this movie until the end. (Okay, Beatles fans, how many song titles did I just put into that sentence?) Give it a look if you've never seen it or if it's been a few decades. It's getting better all the time.