Books I've Read 2009

I’ve been keeping track of the books I read each year for about 10 years now. I usually just write a page about them in my planner and move on, but this year I thought I would share the list. My goal is to read at least a book a month, on average. Sometimes I get bogged down with other things, or I pick a really long one, so the cadence isn’t right, but I usually catch up with a shorter book or when I travel for work. I usually only get a half hour or so of reading in before bed, but that isn’t every night, so a typical book takes me several weeks to get through it. I’m not a particularly fast reader...20-50 pages an hour, depending on the density of words and ideas in the text.

Instead of going through them in the order I read them, I am clumping them according to subject.

Work-related

Introduction to Space Weather, Moldwin:

I used it for the text for my class for the first time this year, so I am counting it as a “new” book read in 2009. It’s a switch from what I had been using, but the other one wasn’t really a textbook, so I thought I’d try this out. It’s the right subject, but I think it is too low of a level for the junior-oriented class I teach. However, one student (out of 15) complimented it very highly in their open-form evaluation. I have a few months to decide if I want to use it again or not. For those of you not in the space weather business, this is a nice introduction to the field (with easy problems at the end of each section).

Religious

Call to Conversion, Wallis

I really like the Christian viewpoints of Jim Wallis, editor of Sojourners magazine and author of several books. This is one of them. It’s not a new book, but it was very well written and I enjoyed it very much. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in learning more about Christianity.

The Shack, Young

I don’t know whether to put this here or in general fiction. It’s not a particularly well-written book , in my opinion, but others were raving about it, so I gave it a try. I like the main religious idea of the book in that God wants to have a personal relationship with us, but I don’t like the make-believe fantasy aspects of the story and I really don’t like the attempt of the author to make it seem like a true story (in the foreword and afterward sections).

Political/Current Events

How Soccer Explains the World, Foer

Clever book in which the author travels to famous soccer venues around the world and then uses the stories and sights of the area to interpret world events. His main conclusion is that even though globalization has made the world smaller and made local name brands meaningless, the local people still have strongly held views of nationalism, even to the point of xenophobia. Even though capitalism loves globalization, actual people usually do not.

The Federalists, Anti-Federalists, and the American Tradition, McWilliams

A long and arduous book containing various essays regarding the Founding Fathers. A good read, overall, but some parts were very slow going. I think that I am somewhere in between the Federalists (strong central government, weak state governments) and anti-Federalists (just the opposite), but in general my political leanings are towards the Federalists.

Citizen Paine, Kaminski

This book had a short biography of Thomas Paine and then several hundred pages of quotes from his writings, organized by category. I found the quotes difficult to understand without the rest of the text around them, so after a while I just breezed through them. The bio, however, was very informative. I didn’t know Thomas Paine came to America just a year or so before 1776, and wrote his major works (The American Crisis and Common Sense) after only being here for a very short while. He was a man looking to start fight, one who wholeheartedly committed himself to a cause with fervent zeal. He went on to be a rabble-rouser in France during their revolution a few decades later.

One United People, Millican

An excellent (but slow-going) examination of every single one of the Federalist Papers. The Federalist is still one of the most authoritative works on the thoughts behind the Founding Fathers regarding the Constitution. Millican reaches the conclusion that the 3 writers of these essays are all in agreement that the Constitution supports a strong central government and weak state governments. After reading his book, I agree.

General Fiction

Streets of Laredo, McMurtry

Larry McMurtry is an excellent storyteller. This is number 4 in the Lonesome Dove series (Lonesome Dove is number 3, but it’s the most famous of the set).

The Host, Meyers

Yes, I read a Stephanie Meyers book this year. At least it wasn’t one of the Twilight books, okay?! Seriously, though, she is also an excellent writer and this was a terrific book. I highly recommend it, especially to science fiction lovers.

Kids’ Books

The Lightning Thief, Riordan

Sea of Monsters, Riordan

The Titan’s Curse, Riordan

Battle of the Labyrinth, Riordan

The Last Olympian, Riordan

Yes, I read the entire Percy Jackson series. My son was so excited about them and kept asking me to read it that I eventually gave in and plowed through them. They are good books, and Rick Riordan has a nice way of weaving a storyline together throughout several books. It was worth the time.

The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, DiCamillo

Okay, I’ve read a lot of kids’ books this year, but this is another that I am including in the list because my son read it for his school “book club” and parents are invited to the discussion. So, I thought I’d read it. It’s a 200-page book, but with the large font and pictures, it took about 2 hours. It’s a captivating story about learning to love, losing love, and moving on to new love.

I’m currently reading Jews and Christians: A Troubled Family as well as Eragon. The latter is a back-and-forth deal with my son where we each read a page. Not quite as good as the Riordan books, but my son is enjoying it. So, I don’t think these two books actually make it on the list, since I am not done with them yet, but I’ll mention them here at the end.

Kind Of Dense

I just realized that pantsmonkey is a friend of mine. This blogger has posted comments on my site several times over the summer, but just now I finally made the connection. I guess I’m kind of dense sometimes.

I see on her blog that she is deeply passionate about GLBT rights, especially gay marriage. She is saddened each time another state declares that marriage is only between a man and a woman, taking away the possibility of GLBT people to experience “the full range of human experience.”

I completely agree with her.

I should also do more to stop the legislative assault on common decency. I do not see how limiting the private affairs of other people helps those who vote for these law and state constitutional amendments. Like I have said, I think that the Bible (yes, I am a Christian) is not anti-gay, and a good website that summarizes some of the arguments in favor of this position are posted here. I am not a Biblical scholar, but I think I know enough to understand that the premises laid on this post are valid and cast serious doubt on fundamental Christianity’s staunch resistance to anything GLBT related. There is a chance I could be wrong, but I would like to at least discuss it and publicly, objectively scrutinize the arguments for and against Christian condemnation GLBT rights.

Not today...another post sometime.

Could've Been Better

I finished the book “The Shack” by Wm. Paul Young. I don’t think that this was a well-written book. I like the philosophy behind the personality of God in the book: God’s relationship with us is one of love, care, and compassion. It’s the story that I didn’t like. There actually wasn’t much plotline, and instead it had these lengthy dissertations by the three God characters. The writing wasn’t that compelling and I often found myself questioning the emotions stated for the characters. The text would say that Mack was comfortable with the God characters and loved the way they talked with each other and interacted, but then didn’t convince me of that feeling by actually detailing the comfort-inducing conversation. So, instead of being engrossed by the story and not wanting to put the book down, I found it easy to stop reading each night because the story rarely left in a state where I just had to get to the next page.

I also greatly dislike the fantasy encounter of it and the bitterness it might make others feel who have undergone similar loss. Why hasn’t God invited me out to the Shack yet and had a personal, read encounter with me? This is where I greatly dislike the Foreword and Afterward of the book, in which the writer attempts to convince the reader that this is a true story. These two parts of the book should have been omitted because it completely soured the novel for me. Why even pretend it’s a real story? Then I went to the website and realized that the author’s life is remarkably similar to Mack’s life situation...many kids, lives near Portland, experienced unbearable tragedy. This frustrates me. My understanding of the book now is that it is his advice to others about the style of God he found when dealing with his grief. Yet he wrote it as a novel instead of a nonfiction inspirational/spiritual book. It isn’t that I dislike the image of God that he found and is sharing with others, I just chafe at the method he chose for this distribution.

Strange Coincidence

About a week ago I started reading the book “The Shack” by William Young. It’s this novel about a man who becomes extremely sad when his youngest daughter is abducted while they are on a camping trip together, and the police track the perp to a remote shack, where they find the truck and the girl’s dress but not the girl or the kidnapper.  Three years later, he is called back to the shack to have a very strange encounter with three very loving and generous people.  Over the course of conversing and interacting with them, he learns to understand his pain and accept his loss.  I am only halfway through the book, so I don’t know how it ends yet.  It’s well written and entertaining, and I am enjoying the break every evening to get absorbed into this man’s adventure at the shack.

Sidenote about The Shack:  I greatly dislike the Foreword, which is written from the author’s perspective and tries to convince the reader that the following story is true.  I cannot accept this premise, and my impression of the book is negatively tainted because of it.  To me, the author has spoiled an otherwise engrossing tale with the intentionally misleading deception of trying to make me believe that the events in the book really happened to someone. That is dangerous false hope and unreal expectations for others.  He should have simply left it out.  If you ever get the gumption to read this book, I encourage you to skip the Foreword.

Anyway, back to my story:  a friend from college has been battling cancer for several years, but passed away this last weekend.  She is a mother of 4, and was diagnosed with the illness during her last pregnancy (I think that was 8 years ago now, or maybe more).  I haven’t seen her in over a year, at which time she was well enough to make the trip to another mutual friend’s wedding.  Before that, it had been several years, probably since before the diagnosis, that I had last seen her and her family.  It was a slow decline with ups and downs, but never particularly good and cancer free anywhere in there.  She lived her life as well as she could, and fought the disease with all she had.  I am sad that I won’t get to see her again.  I am sad for her husband, who is a great guy full of life and overflowing with opinions.  I am sad for her children, who really only knew their mom while she was sick. 

I am not looking for a lesson from her death.  It pretty much sucks.  It is a strange coincidence, though, that I am reading a book about sadness after loss and the redemption and healing that God can give you.  Perhaps the book will help me deal with this.

Prayers for Tenure Casebook

My friend (since childhood) is up for tenure this fall.

Tenure didn’t work out so well as University #1 for him.  It was a hard blow, and no one likes to be told to move on, but I think that the culture of that college and that town wasn’t right for him anyway.  He seems to be more comfortable at University #2, and from what I hear, the administration has been treating him better than his former management.  The fit is also particularly good for his wife, as I hear that this town is an excellent location for her profession and that she has developed a well-established network of contacts. 

As with most tenure reviews, this is an up-or-out assessment of his abilities, and the future of his life at University #2 is in the balance.  He is very hopeful about his chances of tenure, but there is still that uncertainty providing a bit of stress to the start of this new school year.

Being in a humanities field, his casebook I am sure will look substantially different from mine.  Books are far more prevalent and expected on his publication list than on mine. I am sure he has topical journals in which to publish, and hopefully he has an ample stack of such papers to show for his years in the field.  In my research area, numerous peer-reviewed journal articles per year are the norm, and books before tenure are an extreme rarity. In fact, I was specifically told not to write a book too early, because it detracts from the regular and expected measures of productivity.

I can only trust that he has received good mentoring from senior faculty in his department (or others in his field elsewhere around the country), that they are advocates for him within the college, and that he has accomplished all that he needs to have done regarding teaching, service, and research.  I can only trust that others in his field beyond University #2 have a favorable impression of his contributions to the field, that they know and respect his work, and that the evaluation letters clearly reflect these positive opinions.  I can only trust that he has mentored one or more graduate students through thesis or dissertation completion, that these former students have favorable impressions of their time with him at University #2, and that they will adequately voice their opinions back to the casebook committee.

So, I hope that you will join me in praying for the success of his tenure casebook, and should it not work out for him, to ask for God to give him the courage and perseverance to move on with his career, wherever it might take him and his family.

Homosexuality and Christianity

I was recently sent this link:
http://www.newsmax.com/us/us_lutherans_gays/2009/08/21/250805.html

It comments on the recent proposal before the governing board of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA) to allow open, practicing gays to serve as clergy. The article is posted on NewsMax, so it is written with an anti-gay slant and hints that the ELCA will be split apart if this proposal is passed.

So, the question is this: is homosexuality incompatible with Christianity? As a Christian, should I hate all homosexuals and make it my mission to point out their transgression and actively persuade them to give up their life of sin? Should I protest Gay Pride marches and vocally oppose gay marriage laws?

I think the answer is no. As the article states, the ELCA, and in fact most Christian denominations, do not follow a literal prescription of every verse in some English translation of the Bible. Like the article states, what about women? Paul says that they should be silent with covered heads and no braids. What?! I don’t get the no braided hair rule at all. Why should I not braid my daughter’s hair? She likes it!

In reading the Bible, especially Paul's letters, I believe that you have to take into account the context of the culture and the local circumstances that the particular church was facing. The braided hair concern of Paul most likely was directed at a local custom of another religious sect (like the followers of Isis or Aphrodite). I think he was concerned about people trying to turn Christian worship services into worship of one of these other gods. He probably wrote it to preserve the integrity of the local Christian community, and physically distinguishing themselves from the actions of other religions was a way to do this. Did he mean for the no braids rule to become part of everlasting Christian doctrine? No.

So, what about homosexuality? The book of Romans has a lot to say about this. All negative. It is easy to think that Christians should be anti-gay. However, the local custom was that gays were promiscuous. I believe that this is what Paul was arguing against, whether it is heterosexual or homosexual promiscuity. Paul would probably dislike the scantily-clad leather outfits I have seen on groups of gays in the French Quarter, and would probably have strong words against the one-night-stand mentality of gay pick-up locations. However, I do not think that he would condemn loving, monogamous homosexual partnerships.

Why? Because I believe that our relationships with others is our relationship with God. We should treat others as we want to be treated, and I cannot see how two consenting adults in a loving relationship is against God or creating any problems for me. I fully support gay marriage and I hope that other Christians realize that allowing someone to fully care for their life-partner is the loving, compassionate, Christian thing to do.

Pittsburgh Day 5: Going Global

Today, I heard the leader of the Stephen Ministries organization, Ken Haugk, say that they are very close to unveiling a “whole church leadership system," analogous to the Stephen Ministry leadership and management system that I have been learning about all week. This is truly fantastic, as I think that this system is universally applicable to any management situation (see Day 2 post below). I think I might quit my tenured faculty job and go to work for Stephen Ministries to help them develop a “whole scientist leadership system." I did not receive any leadership or management training when I became a professor, or a research scientist, or whenever it was that I had to start writing proposals and funding myself and hiring grad students and building a group. I know that our department offers nothing like this for any of our junior faculty, tenure-track or research-track. While I am not actually serious about quitting my job, I am serious about developing a leadership and management toolkit for scientists...unless someone can tell me where such a thing already exists.

Pittsburgh Day 3: Leadership Training

This is one of the few meetings I’ve attended where I come back from the sessions more energized than when I went down in the morning. This stuff is great.

I have this nagging fear that I will forget it all when I get back to reality next week, and that the excitement I have for implementing good management practices will fade away and I will simply continue on with how I am doing things now. Actually, I am not that far off from the system they are presenting this week, except perhaps on the planning stages. I think I do a pretty good job with defining tasks to achieve near-term goals (vision and strategy) and pretty good at supervising and mentoring those in my group. Where I need help is in the long-term thinking section of the master plan: defining core values, defining a mission/purpose, and assessing progress against such universal principles. In short, I think I am becoming a good manager, but I have not yet become a good leader.

Pittsburgh Day 2: Management Training

I am enjoying this Stephen Leader Training Course. It’s basically an intensive bombardment of information and activities on how to lead a church program, specifically a Stephen Ministry program. They seem to have taken fundamental management practices and put a Christian twist on them. It’s very nice for me, as I am essentially a manager at work and have never had a formal managerial training course like this. While the day was long without much time for wandering my thoughts to other topics, I’m taking some time this evening to reflect on how the day’s lessons could be applied to my work environment.

The 10 steps in the system:
-- Leadership: picking the right team to lead the program. For work, this is me, but should I expand into a scientific empire, then I need to pick the right people to lead with me.
-- Vision: I should create a long-range, in some sense unattainable, vision statement for myself and my research team, then keep this on my mind as I do everything else I do as a professor.
-- Awareness: I need to publicize my work in multiple ways so that (a) other researchers know what I’m doing and (b) potential students/hires will know what I’m doing.
-- Recruit: I need to actively and conscientiously pursue the best students and potential hires for my group.
-- Train: I need to have a plan for training new students and group members, and then diligently implement that plan. I can see that this will be a hard one to follow, because doing science is an inexact science, but I think I should come up with a general philosophy about training, at the very least.
-- Commission: graduation of undergrads and grad students? Promotion of research scientists?
-- Referrals: not the best translation, as this is Stephen Ministry specific, but I think it means, for my work life, getting my students directed toward the proper project for each one of them, and thinking seriously about these assignments.
-- Supervise: I should regularly meet with them, as a group, to provide affirmation of their accomplishments, support for their ongoing endeavors, and constructive feedback on areas where improvement is needed.
-- Affirm: this is not only part of the last one (affirmation during supervision), but also affirmation in other venues, especially public ones, like promoting my students to other researchers while at meetings.
-- Evaluate: I don’t think I want to implement a periodic evaluation of my students and group members, but I do think that I should occasionally think critically about how things are going, especially with regard to the vision/plan mentioned above.

They give advice and examples on how to do each of these steps. While their material is all slanted towards Stephen Ministry, I can easily see how it is universally applicable to whatever program you are leading and/or managing. So, this is going to be a good week.

Still not much progress on my funding proposal for the military. I will spend time on that now. More tomorrow.

Pittsburgh Day 1

Woah. That was quite a week. Last weekend, we took off for a weekend to my wife’s high school reunion. It’s amazing how quickly complete strangers open up and spill their life histories to each other. I especially find it odd the way some of the reunion-goers’ spouses instantly revealed the details of their lives to other spouses of reunion-goers. We have basically nothing in common except that people we married knew each other several decades ago. No matter! Let me tell you about the time my son threw up in the family minivan while going to see grandma last summer... It was a good time, but just a little creepy at moments when a person you really don’t care to get to know has you cornered for a while. Otherwise, a nice evening.

On Monday, my daughter got sick. Coughing and fever. Then wheezing and shortness of breath. With her asthma, we decided to take her in to the doctor’s office. They sent us on to the ER, and then she was admitted. Respiratory issues, with a low blood-oxygen level. She was finally released Friday morning.

Just in time for closing on the sale of our house Friday afternoon. We actually got a small check back, which is something to be thankful for in this day. But, you know what that means...packing, moving, and cleaning, all week long. With one parent in the hospital at my daughter’s bedside. Oof da. I’m tired, and work (let alone this blog) were neglected. It was my summer undergrad student’s last week, too. Fun for him, I only spent about 20 minutes with him all week. Not enough, but it couldn’t be helped.

So, now I am in Pittsburgh at a training conference for a church leadership role (a Stephen Ministry training conference, for those that know about this). It’s going to be a long week of drinking from the firehose, I think, but I have to make time for work, considering the last 3 weeks were blown on programming and then moving/caretaking. The military money proposal is due in mid August, and I am nowhere near done with it, like I wanted to be by this time. Wish me luck.

Bible Study

Over the last 2-1/2 years, I took a rather long and in-depth weekly Bible study class from my church. [For those of you that need to know, it was the 34-week Disciple course. The first one. The “red” one.] Okay, it didn’t take me over 2 years; I went through it twice: once as a student, and then again as a teacher/facilitator. I learned many new things during these years, about the Bible, God, Jesus, myself, and other people (in my church and elsewhere). I highly recommend it to everyone. Here are a few of the highlights of the things that I learned:

(1) The Bible is not inerrantly, word-for-word dictated by the Hand of God. I believe that it is inspired by God but written by people. I already knew this, but taking this course, listening to both experts (my pastor, and those on the videos) and classmates talk about it, and spending some time reading vast chunks of the text (twice!) greatly reinforced this belief. The argument can really be distilled into a single question: which translation is the inerrant truth?

(2) Some parts of the Bible are made up whole cloth. This goes along with the first one, but I am not just saying that the Bible contains a distorted or selectively-picked version of the truth, but that parts of it are pure fiction. I believe that the books of Daniel, Jonah, Job, and Revelation are novels. This doesn’t mean that they should be removed from the Bible, though. On the contrary, fiction is sometimes needed to poignantly yet concisely express a particular truth.

(3) We should ask “why” not “how” when reading the Bible. When we approach the Bible, we should not ask “how did that happen?” but instead “why does God want us to know this story?” Changing this mindset from trying to prove that the story is factually correct and piece together a plausible reconstruction is a huge relief to me. I used to need to find the explanation for how a certain story played out. I no longer have to do this. Instead, I read a passage and think about what that story means as far as my relationship with God and with other people.

(4) My relationship with God is equivalent to my relationship with other people. I do not mean that the two relationships are similar. I mean that they are the same relationship. I was always very frustrated by pastors or pious Christians would blithely state that we are to love God with our whole heart. I had no idea what that meant. Now, I have an answer: it means to love other people, to care for them, to be considerate to them, and to listen to them and try to understand their viewpoint and opinion. Interestingly, this is captured succinctly in one of the most famous verses of the Bible.

(5) The Golden Rule is what life is all about. That verse I just referred to is the one in which Jesus is asked about the greatest commandment from the Law. His reply is to love God with all of your heart, mind, body and soul, but he doesn’t stop there. He continues: and the second commandment is like it: to love your neighbor as yourself. The Bible quotes him several times giving this answer, in slight variations, the other common way is this: do to others as you want them to do to you. The kicker is the phrase in the middle, linking the two. Jesus gives an obscure answer that no one really knows how to do (love God, this invisible supreme entity) with a very specific answer on how to actually accomplish it.

(6) We should help those that ask for help. Again, this is how Jesus explains our relationship with God: when you help the least among you, you help God. This is one of the things I love about my church: it has many social mission activities at the local, national, and international levels for both youth and adults. We’re not a big congregation...we have maybe 300 official members, and far less than that on summer Sundays when we drop down to one service. Even still, we find a way to reach out and help other people: volunteering at the local family homeless shelter, collecting food and clothing for the local social service organizations, and going on work “mission” trips to far-off places. There is essentially no evangelism in these activities, just the example of helping others.

(7) God helps us through other people. This is the flip side of the above 2 points. You know the story of the guy who drowned on his rooftop during a massive flood because he was waiting for God to save him. Over the course of the day, several rescuers come to him, but he refuses their help. When he dies and goes to heaven, he asks God why he didn’t save him. God replies, “I sent you a truck, a boat, and a helicopter!” I think this joke is actually a fairly true description of how God provides help to us.

(8) God wants us to be in a community. Religion is a private affair, but it is also a very public and social one. God wants his followers to be in a community together, to support each other and help each other learn how to become better Christians. I think that such a community is necessary to develop or maintain a healthy relationship with God, and that those who think their Christianity is a solely private endeavor are severely hampering their spiritual growth.

(9) Jesus stayed out of politics and economics. He did not try to reinvent the local business practices nor try to instill a new governmental regime. The Bible barely mentions either of these major realms of human activity. Therefore, I don’t think it is appropriate to use Christianity to formulate an economic or political philosophy.

(10) Jesus directly challenged religious hypocrisy and continuously fought for social justice. While he didn’t try to shake up the political or economic structure of Judea, he did, at every opportunity, confront religious hypocrisy and injustice. Our spirituality is not defined by how many religious practices we follow, but by what we do for those in need around us.

I’ll probably think of more lessons I learned from this Bible study, but this is a good starting list for now. I will go into each of these in more detail in later posts, but it’s good to finally sit down and write out such a list. It’s been hanging around in my head for a while, and this blog is giving me a chance to finally write it down. Let me end this post by saying that I am profoundly thankful that I took the Disciple class and that I then got the chance to teach it. It is an excellent Bible study that has changed my outlook on life.

The Founding Fathers

It’s July 4th, so I thought I’d write about our country today. I’ve been off of blogging for a week or so, mainly because work was too busy and cut into my early mornings and evenings. Getting back from a long trip always takes a few days to recover and achieve normalcy in the office, but also having a proposal due (for which I had a lot of reading and writing to do) complicated the readjustment. Luckily, I don’t have to teach in the summer, so I don’t have worry about class notes and homework sets on top of it all.

A couple of years ago I read a book about the Founding Fathers by Brooke Allen called “Moral Minority.” She felt it necessary to rebut the claims of the conservative Christian Right that America is a Christian Nation founded on the principles of Jesus. She went through the religious-oriented writings of 6 of the big names in creating our country: Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Madison. I think that she makes a superb argument for her counter position that the Founding Fathers were, with only a few exceptions, deists of the Enlightenment era who accepted the notion of a supreme being but rejected the god-nature of Jesus. They were very afraid of a state-sponsored religion and very intentionally left out religion from the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The “separation of church and state” argument is not actually in the Constitution (only briefly in the First Amendment), but rather it is discussed in gory detail in the Federalist Papers, the lengthy and numerous persuasive essays on which the Constitution is based.

I think that the Founding Fathers were very perceptive in defining the country in this way. Forcing a religion on people is never a good idea, and history shows us that such enforcement often leads to the bloodiest times for humanity. Even though I am a Christian, I am very thankful that America is not a Christian Nation. I do not think Christianity (or any religion) is served well when politicians make it mandatory. To me, religion requires a deep, personal sincerity that cannot be imposed on anyone by others. You can offer your own religious experiences as an example to others, but only they can decide to truly believe. Enforced membership is counterproductive and, I think, ultimately damaging to the religion such a rule is trying to enhance.

Personal evangelism, though, is a different matter. I like to talk about religious topics, but I also don’t want to push my religious beliefs on others. That’s a delicate and undefined line that I usually don’t know that I’ve crossed until the other person is offended. Religion (like politics) is a tough thing to discuss with others unless they are of the same mindset as you (in which case you simply agree) or they are exceptionally open-minded (in which case they will agree that you have the right to that position). Either way the discussion is often short-lived. I have found that anything less than this leads to arguments or awkward silences. Again, this leads to another short-lived discussion.

Science and Christianity

No, I am not a member of the Church of Christ, Scientist or a follower of Scientology. I am a scientist who is also a Christian, a member of a Presbyterian congregation, to be specific. Some think that religion and science is incompatible, but not me. I see God in nature and I believe that I am getting to know him better as I learn more about the natural world. I don’t view the Bible as literally true. In fact, I think that many sections of it are actually completely made up. The point of the Bible is not to ask, “how did God do that?” or, “how did this event really happen?” but instead to ask, “why would God want me to know this story?” Genesis is actually a correct description of the history of Earth, if viewed from the Earth’s surface. Whether miracles actually took place as described in the Bible or not, that’s not the point. The point is for us to learn something from the story about how God wants us to live our lives. He wants us to learn from the Bible how to have a better relationship with him, which, in my interpretation, is the same as having better relationships with people here on Earth. I see God not only in the spectacular natural phenomena, like aurora and sunsets, but also in the mundane, like the speckled coloration of a boulder or the intricate patterns of a leaf. The more I know about how these things are formed and how they behave according to natural laws of the physical universe, the more I appreciate them and respect them. So, I don’t find my scientific vocation and training in conflict with my religious beliefs and worldview. I remain objective in my work and, I would say, my take on religion helps me to be a better scientist. Knowing that God created the universe, I always strive to understand the basic mechanisms responsible for some strange and unexplained feature in the data I am pondering. That is, I try not to hold any preconceived biases about how things work. It also means that I strive to treat all other scientists with respect and consideration, because I know that God created them for a special purpose and that my relationship with them is a reflection of my relationship with God. So, are science and religion incompatible? I don’t think so.