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More important than JFK

Posted: November 23, 2021 by chrisharper in catholic, Church doctrine
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By Christopher Harper

Almost every American who was alive on November 22, 1963, knows where he and she was. That’s because JFK died that day.

But a far more influential man, Clive Staples Lewis, also died that day.

Better known as C.S. Lewis, or Jack to his friends and family, Lewis was one of the most important Christian apologists and fiction writers of the 20th century.

A recent motion picture, The Most Reluctant Convert, tells the story of Lewis’s evolution from atheist to great Christian writer. See https://www.cslewismovie.com/home/

The film doesn’t deal directly with his more famous works, The Chronicles of Narnia and The Screwtape Letters, but follows Lewis’s path from nonbeliever to true believer. 

The Most Reluctant Convert is based on a successful stage play written by Max McLean. This filmed version features McLean as an elderly C.S. Lewis who walks viewers through key dramatized moments in his younger years.

The film uses Lewis’s own words to describe his path. As a young man, he explored the occult, including Nordic mythology. Eventually, he recognized how empty and destructive those choices were. Part of that realization occurred, he said, when he came to the aid of a tormented fellow war veteran who screamed that he was being hounded by devils and dragged into hell.

Lewis began his academic career as an undergraduate student at Oxford University. After a brief but dramatic stint in World War I, where he was wounded, he was elected a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, where he worked from 1925 to 1954. He later joined the faculty at Cambridge University, where he taught until he died in 1963,

At Oxford, he returned to Christianity, having been influenced by arguments with his Oxford colleague and friend J. R. R. Tolkien, the author of Lord of the Rings. Lewis resisted conversion as he described in Surprised by Joy:

You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen [College, Oxford], night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929, I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. 

Let me leave you with two other important quotations from Lewis:

We meet no ordinary people in our lives.

In a much-cited passage from Mere Christianity, Lewis challenged the view that Jesus was a great moral teacher but not God. 

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg – or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon, or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

The Most Reluctant Convert is an engaging and important film. See it if it’s still in a theater near you!

Praise for Poland

Posted: November 16, 2021 by chrisharper in Uncategorized

By Christopher Harper

Poland has become what I’d like the United States to be—a country that restricts illegal aliens, stands up to Russia, and respects life.

In 2015, when millions of migrants and asylum seekers surged over Europe’s borders, the immigration crisis nearly tore apart the European Union. Many members offered asylum to the refugees; others, like Poland and Hungary, wanted no part of it.

Six years later, the current standoff at the border between Poland and Belarus echoes that crisis. Still, European officials insist that member states are united when it comes to defending Europe’s borders.

The crisis, like the one at the U.S. border, is a manufactured one. In the case of Poland, Aleksandr Lukashenko, the dictator of Belarus, has created the crisis in response to sanctions imposed by Poland and the rest of the EU over a stolen election and repression of domestic dissent.

The crisis began in late August, when growing groups of migrants, mainly from the Middle East, began massing at the borders of Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania, shepherded there by Belarus. That movement has become much larger, with at least 4,000 men, women, and children trapped in the cold between Belarus and its neighbors.

Not only is Poland standing up to Belarus but also Russia, which is backing Lukashenko. President Vladimir V. Putin has blamed the West for stoking the migration crisis and agreed to deploy nuclear-capable bombers to patrol the border zone.

Last week, the German foreign minister, Heiko Maas, called Lukashenko’s tactics a “cynical power play” and said that blackmail must not be allowed to succeed. In Washington, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, met President Brandon and emerged to say that what was transpiring on the Belarus border was “a hybrid attack, not a migration crisis.”

The support for Poland is especially striking while the European Union is locked in a significant confrontation about the supremacy of European law over Polish law and about restrictions on the independence of the judiciary. In that confrontation, Brussels is withholding from Warsaw billions of dollars in funds intended to help economic recovery from the coronavirus pandemic.

Poland and the EU have been battling for months over the supremacy of the court system. Poland wants its courts to have the final say; the EU wants its opinions to govern its members, including Poland.

A critical judicial disagreement involves Poland’s law that restricts abortions only in the cases of rape, incest, or a significant health issue for the mother.

Whatever the case, Poland has pulled the rest of Europe kicking and screaming into a confrontation with Russia. Poland should get more support from the Brandon administration, which once called it a threat to democracy because of its “right-wing” views.

It so happens that I agree with most of those “threats” to democracy.

Pork, pork, and more pork

Posted: November 9, 2021 by chrisharper in Uncategorized
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By Christopher Harper 

By my calculations, every man, woman, and child of the 331 million citizens of the United States should get a benefit of $3.021.14 of the $1 trillion in pork just agreed upon by Congress. 

I’m willing to get a little less than others, and I realize that some of the alleged benefits of the program may not become apparent to me. 

Nevertheless, I suggest everyone do some calculations about how this megaton barrel of pork will affect you. Here’s an overview of the plan: https://www.investopedia.com/here-s-what-s-in-the-usd1-trillion-infrastructure-bill-passed-by-the-senate-5196817 

Pork Barrel No. 1: $110 billion for construction and repair of roads, transportation research at universities, funding for Puerto Rico’s highways, and “congestion relief” in American cities. 

I moved from the congested city of Philadelphia and rarely use major highways. To wit, the major highway near my current home in Muncy, Pennsylvania, Interstate 180, is moving along just fine without any new federal funding. Moreover, the state roads near my house, including the street at my front door, have just been redone. Benefit to me: Nada.

Pork Barrel No. 2: $66 billion for railroads include upgrades and maintenance of America’s passenger rail system and freight rail safety, but nothing for high-speed rail. Thirty-nine billion dollars for public transit would provide for upgrades to public transit systems nationwide. The allocation also includes money to create new bus routes and help make public transit more accessible to seniors and disabled Americans. 

I love railroads and have traveled throughout the world on trains in China, France, Poland, Russia, and the United Kingdom. But the money here will be spent mainly on the Northeast Corridor, which means that Democrat-held cities will get nearly all of the dough. The same goes for public transit systems, which are almost entirely under Democrat control. Benefit to me: Zero.  

Pork barrel No. 3: $65 billion for the power grid to fund updates to power lines and cables and to provide money to prevent power grid hacking. 

Can’t the power companies charge their customers for the upgrades? Since PG&E, California’s main utility, is an absolute mess, I suspect a big chunk of the goodies will head to the Left Coast. Benefit to me: Nothing. 

Pork barrel No. 4: $65 billion to expand broadband in rural areas and low-income communities. Approximately $14 billion of the total would help reduce Internet bills for low-income citizens. 

I live in a rural area and get broadband just fine. Money in my pocket: Zero.  

I’ve gone through the rest of the appropriation, including dough for electric buses, electric charging stations, lead-pipe removal, and various other plans. I don’t find anything that will save me money or make my life better.  

What Brandon and Congress did accomplish, however, is to add a massive government bureaucracy to oversee all of these projects that won’t get going until 2023 at the earliest.  

It’s also important to keep in mind how unwieldy and corruption-prone massive projects become. Take, for example, the Big Dig highway project in Boston. Starting in 1991, the project was supposed to be completed in 1998 for $2.8 billion. Instead, it wasn’t finished until 2007 at the cost of $23 billion—a project tarnished by corruption, design flaws, and waste. 

Just think what the Democrats can do with budgets nearly 500 times the original estimate of the Big Dig!  

All told, I don’t see any appreciable difference in my life except that I am likely to pay increased taxes to cover the plunder and pork from the almost blank check Brandon and Congress have signed. 

Coddling college students

Posted: November 2, 2021 by chrisharper in education
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By Christopher Harper

The pandemic may have a devastating impact on education that few people could have predicted.

Instead of focusing on making up for losses in educational attainment, students and faculty are concentrating on how to exacerbate the problems the pandemic created.

During the pandemic, Temple University, like many other institutions of higher learning, encouraged faculty to be more lenient about deadlines and grading policies. In fact, Temple gave students the option to change to a pass-no pass grading system rather than the typical A-through-F standards.

As a result, returning students seem more interested in complaining about the past months of the pandemic than buckling down to determine what they didn’t learn and needed to.

I am teaching courses on ethics and media law during the fall semester. As I did during the pandemic, I am teaching the courses online, and the students have opted to choose this form of learning even though in-person sections exist.

I have never had more requests for extensions on assignments! It is as though many students have lost the ability to organize their time.

In the past, I have allowed students to hand in materials up to a week late for 70 percent credit. Now students—many of whom have obtained waivers under disability arrangements for attention-deficit disorder and similar ailments—are demanding full credit up to a month after an assignment is due.

As a professor of journalism, I demand that students understand grammar, punctuation, and style. Three mistakes, I advise, will result in a deduction of 10 percent. I suggest that students pay $20 a month for an excellent program at grammarly.com.

The adherence to such standards has become almost irrelevant this semester since many students could care less about such requirements. Instead, the students simply take the deductions rather than learn how to write appropriately and effectively. One student responded “lol,” or laughing out loud, to my suggestions.

But the administration does not tell students that they need to hunker down. Instead, Temple and other institutions coddle the students.

Only last week, my college encouraged students to “take a break to prioritize self-care.”

During the event, students had the opportunity to participate in:

  • Mini massages with a licensed massage therapist
  • Paws N’ Play session with a therapy dog
  • Hot chocolate bar with all the fixings
  • Pumpkin painting contest
  • Volleyball and cornhole
  • Wellness Resource Center table
  • Prize wheel, Plinko board, and more!

Simply put, I cannot tolerate the notion that feeling good rather than working hard has become the dominant underpinning of a college education. Moreover, I think the current climate will leave many students poorly prepared for what they’ll find in the workplace.

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