Wired youth forget how to write in China and Japan

This story is one of the saddest things I have ever heard. Chinese and Japanese teenagers, who now use their phones and computers very heavily to communicate, are beginning to have a very hard time remember how to write the different characters of their language.

Like every Chinese child, Li Hanwei spent her schooldays memorising thousands of the intricate characters that make up the Chinese writing system.

Yet aged just 21 and now a university student in Hong Kong, Li already finds that when she picks up a pen to write, the characters for words as simple as “embarrassed” have slipped from her mind.

“I can remember the shape, but I can’t remember the strokes that you need to write it,” she says. “It’s a bit of a problem.”

Surveys indicate the phenomenon, dubbed “character amnesia”, is widespread across China, causing young Chinese to fear for the future of their ancient writing system.

Young Japanese people also report the problem, which is caused by the constant use of computers and mobile phones with alphabet-based input systems.

There is even a Chinese word for it: “tibiwangzi”, or “take pen, forget character”.

More than just the ability to write out thoughts, China is very proud of the written form of their ancient language. Many of the museums I visited had examples of calligraphy, which is a big deal for them as a form of art.

What hope does a culture have if its children can no longer write?

Evangelicals should become more Protestant, not more Catholic

Jonathan Fitzgerald chronicles an increasing trend among evangelicals: frequent conversions to Catholicism. He writes:

Croslow’s interest in Catholicism began over six years ago when he was a sophomore in high school. At the time, Croslow’s Midwestern evangelical church experienced a crisis that is all too common among evangelical churches: what he describes as “a crisis of spiritual authority.” As a result of experiencing disappointment in his pastor, Croslow began to question everything he had learned from him. This questioning led him to study the historical origins of scripture and then of the Christian church itself. Eventually he concluded that Catholicism in its current form is the closest iteration of the early church fathers’ intentions. He asks, “If Saint Augustine showed up today, could we seriously think that he’d attend a Southern Baptist church in Houston?” The answer, to Croslow, is a resounding “No.”

Croslow’s belief that the Catholic Church most accurately reflects the intentions of the early church fathers is echoed throughout the movement as other evangelicals seek a church whose roots run deeper than the Reformation. Further, due to the number of non-denominational churches that have proliferated since the Jesus Movement, many evangelicals’ knowledge of their history runs only as far back as the 1970s. These are the young believers who are attracted to a Church that sees itself as the direct descendent of the religion founded by Saint Peter and the apostles.

I sympathize with many of the concerns of these newly minted Catholics about the state of non-denominational evangelicalism; however, I wonder whether they have considered another option: becoming more Protestant (that is, Protestant like the first Protestants) instead of more Catholic.

Protestants do see Scripture as the criteria against which all theological opinions should be judged–whether opinions of mine, Calvin’s, or Augustine’s. Protestants do not, however, believe that Augustine’s are to be read with skepticism and defensiveness just because he was born after Paul, but before the Reformation.

In fact, Protestants love reading Augustine, along with the rest of the Church Fathers. Why? Because the theology of the Church Fathers is Christian Theology, and it belongs just as much to Protestants as it does to Catholics. Protestant theology finds solid continuity with the Church Fathers–and the best Protestant theology seeks to show better continuity with the Church Fathers on certain points than Catholic dogma.

Moreover, Protestants do not distrust liturgy, especially ancient liturgy developed by some of the first Christians. I had a Wesleyan-Anglican professor in seminary who would often ask, “Which part of liturgy don’t you like–the Scripture or the prayer?” I loved that guy, incidentally.

It seems to me that the converts cited in this article are finding evangelicalism weighed in the balances and found wanting not so much because evangelicalism is too Protestant, but because it is not sufficiently Protestant.

HT: Justin Taylor

Book Review: The Closing of the American Mind, by Allan Bloom

I just finished Allan Bloom’s book, The Closing of the American Mind, and I loved it. In case you don’t have time to read the whole book, I have written a short book review that you might find helpful.

Enjoy!

View this document on Scribd

My New Job – RentPing.com

So, after graduating with a M.Div. from Beeson Divinity School, I got a job as a salesman. And, in case you are wondering, that isn’t a bad thing–I’m actually enjoying what I am doing right now. I do have some theological thoughts on sales, but I will probably try to put those in another post. For now, I just wanted to describe RentPing and how it works — partially as advertising, but mainly because I really think that it’s a pretty cool system.

Whether you are looking for apartments for rent in Lincoln or Omaha, Nebraska, RentPing helps you to save a bunch of time because you can take full video tours of apartments all over town. Check out a sample here:

(If you are interested, you can find the details of the apartment for rent in Lincoln, Nebraska here.)

Also, you can search by price, bedrooms, bathrooms, location, etc…, pretty easily. So, if you know someone looking for an apartment for rent in Lincoln or Omaha, Nebraska (although we are in the process of expanding beyond those two cities), encourage them to check it out.

Christian Meeting Review

I have been thinking a lot lately about how my theology ought to shape the way I look at every aspect of my life. Specifically, I have been trying to think through how Reformed theology might influence how I approach parliamentary procedure and business meetings as a professional parliamentarian.

So, because of that curiosity, I decided to start a monthly publication where I would try to work out some of those issues by writing about them. I will call this publication the Christian Meeting Review, and the first issue is below. For more information, you can visit my website.

View this document on Scribd

(By the way, I have uploaded several of my parliamentary procedure documents for free download on my Scribd account.)

Barney Frank 2005 vs. Barney Frank 2009

June 27, 2005: “Homes that are occupied may see an ebb and flow in the price at a certain percentage level, but you are not going to see the collapse that you see when people talk about a bubble. And so those of us on our committee in particular are going to continue to push for home ownership.”

---

April 20, 2009: “You know, people haven’t fully understood, one of the causes of the terrible crisis we had over the last two years, which is giving us today’s problem, it came from people being pushed into buying houses, taking out loans, that they couldn’t afford. Part of that was a conservative view that rental housing was a bad thing. I had been trying with a lot of others to try and continue programs to build decent rental housing for people. What we had were people in power who didn’t like that that said, “No, no, we’ll help them become home owners.” Well, people were pushed into home ownership who shouldn’t have been there.“

Why is this man “tasked with enacting broad reforms of the financial system“?

Freddie Mac/Fannie Mae Hearing in 2004

Although I think that this would have been a stronger video without the highly partisan written commentary throughout, I think the statements of these politicians speak for themselves. From the perspective of 2009, this is almost hard to watch — not only because this problem blew up the way it did, but because Democrats very effectively pinned this crisis on Republicans in the last election, one of the reasons that Democrats won so handily.

To this day, Rep. Barney Frank continues to blame Bush and the Republicans for not effectively regulating the housing loan industry and Freddie Mac/Fannie Mae. I don’t think that setting this up as a Democrats-bad/Republicans-good issue effectively deals with the issues (trust me, I’ve got plenty of problems with a lot of Republicans right now), but I do think that if Rep. Frank adamantly opposed regulation to Freddie Mac/Fannie Mae in 2004 (see 4:53 and 6:05), he should be held accountable today when he tries to blame the Republicans for pushing irresponsible, sub-prime loans through the government.

His statement is all the more outrageous when he now claims that the problem in the mortgage lending industry was apparent in 2003 (when the Republicans were in power), a year before this hearing took place. As I said above, the written comments in the video are somewhat partisan, but it does make clear that the Republicans are pushing for regulation, and the Democrats are the ones opposing it.

Pray for China

In a little over a week, I will be heading to China for three weeks on a mission trip with a few other people from my school. I would appreciate your prayers now and during those three weeks, especially because China is not exactly the most friendly country in the world toward Christianity.

In my preparations for leaving, however, I have learned that China is not as bad as I had thought — we shouldn’t be in any real danger. Also, we will be going there with a man who was a missionary there for 17 years, so he knows the lay of the land pretty well.

Nevertheless, I was saddened to read this story about a man who was recently imprisoned for printing and distributing Bibles to rural Chinese people:

BEIJING – By all accounts, Shi Weihan was a model Chinese citizen.

A kind-hearted man with a sense of social responsibility, he donated funds to send poor kids to school, raised money for those suffering from congenital heart disease, and when the Sichuan earthquake hit, worked tirelessly for the emergency relief effort.

But Shi had a fatal flaw.

He printed Bibles – and gave them out for free.

This week a criminal court in Beijing sentenced him to three years in jail.

Read the rest of the story here.

Incentivize, Don’t Nationalize

Steven A. Burd, the CEO of Safeway, wrote a brilliant editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal on how his company have cut almost 40% of health care costs, compared to the national average over the past few years.

The solution?

They bill health insurance premiums on the basis of behavior, following the auto insurance industry, rather than giving a flat rate of insurance to all, regardless of blood pressure, weight, tobacco usage, etc…:

As much as we would like to take credit for being a health-care innovator, Safeway has done nothing more than borrow from the well-tested automobile insurance model. For decades, driving behavior has been correlated with accident risk and has therefore translated into premium differences among drivers. Stated somewhat differently, the auto-insurance industry has long recognized the role of personal responsibility. As a result, bad behaviors (like speeding, tickets for failure to follow the rules of the road, and frequency of accidents) are considered when establishing insurance premiums. Bad driver premiums are not subsidized by the good driver premiums.

As with most employers, Safeway’s employees pay a portion of their own health care through premiums, co-pays and deductibles. The big difference between Safeway and most employers is that we have pronounced differences in premiums that reflect each covered member’s behaviors. Our plan utilizes a provision in the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act that permits employers to differentiate premiums based on behaviors. Currently we are focused on tobacco usage, healthy weight, blood pressure and cholesterol levels.

President Obama is right to recognize that rising health care costs mean serious problems to the American economy, but I think that he is disastrously wrong in his proposed solution.

Read Burd’s editorial here.

Once for All

I was driving home from a wedding in Tennessee yesterday morning, and so I listened to a sermon on the radio in hopes of having some kind of substitute (however insufficient) for missing church. I found a couple that I had no interest in listening to beyond the first few sentences, and then I found a man who didn’t seem too bad.

On the whole, he preached a pretty good sermon, but one portion particularly bugged me. He was preaching from Hebrews 10:11-14:

¹¹And every priest stands daily at his service, offering repeatedly the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins. ¹²But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God, ¹³waiting from that time until his enemies should be made a footstool for his feet. ¹⁴For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.

In describing the Levitical priests, he said something like, “So they were just there, going through the motions days after day, doing their ‘religious thing,’ offering one sacrifice after another. But their hearts weren’t in it.”

The thrust of what he was saying was that the Israelites had “religion,” but not a “true relationship” with God. I don’t think that this is a good way to handle this passage for three reasons.

1. Some Levitical priests just “went through the motions,” but others certainly didn’t. Do you really think that, when the tabernacle (Ex. 40:34-38) and the temple (1 Kings 8:10-11) were consecrated, and the glory of YHWH descended, that the priests there were just going through the motions? I find that difficult to believe.
2. This kind of preaching almost makes it sound as though, if the Levitical priests only would have performed their duties with whole hearts, then everything would have been okay. The whole point of this passage, though, is that no amount of Levitical sacrifices could ever have accomplished anything definitive: “For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins” (Heb. 10:4).
3. The total effect of (1) and (2) is to detract from the glory of Christ. God gave the Levites a glorious covenant, but even its glory was only to point forward to the greater glory of Christ. This is Paul’s argument in 2 Corinthians 3: “For if there was glory in the ministry of condemnation, the ministry of righteousness must far exceed it in glory” (2 Cor. 3:9).

Instead of trying to explain the failure of the Levites, it is probably safer and more edifying for us to preach the matchless success of Christ in making atonement for our sin, once for all.