Galatea 2.0

 

Pygmalion by Jean-Baptiste Regnault, 1786, Musée National du Château et des Trianons

The First AI Dating Service?

The Roman poet Ovid (43 B.C. -- 17 A.D.) tells the story of the sculptor Pygmalion in Book X of his Metamorphoses.  Appalled by the immoral behavior of the women of Cyprus, Pygmalion resolved not to marry, but ended up sculpting a statue so beautiful that he fell in love with it.  Enter Venus, the goddess of love and beauty, and before you know it, the statue came to life, and the two lived happily ever after.

Although Ovid does not give a name to the statue, later sources called her Galatea, and the story has been unendingly popular.  Just a quick glance at Wikipedia will give you an overwhelming list of poems and plays and artwork that the story has inspired.  Humans have long been fascinated with the idea of creating the perfect version of our own kind, and it would seem we still are.

Galatea and The Awkward Teen

My good friend and colleague Jason recently shared with some of us an article from the website Ditch That Textbook called "Protecting Kids from Unhealthy AI Relationships."  You must read it if you have any interaction with young people.  I won't go into the details here because you really should read the article itself.  Suffice it to say that Galatea 2.0 is here, and the dangers are real, so real in fact that they include the death of one young teen.

Some remember their teen years with fondness, and others would not revisit them with an all-expenses-paid trip through the space-time continuum.  Most of us, however, can recall at least some moments of social awkwardness during those times and we can imagine how powerful the pull would have been to have an AI friend who was always there for us, always available for a talk about anything, and always willing to take us as we were without a trace of judgment.  In fact, the idea of such a friend may be a strong pull for adults.  How much more would it be for the young person struggling to find his or her way in the world?

Real People

I am not Chicken Little.  I am not running around while frantically screaming, "The sky is falling!"  Nor am I a Luddite or technophobe.  Yet there is a profound, important difference between the interactions human beings have with each other and those they have with chatbots and the like, and it is vitally important that adults who have any responsibility for the care and development of young people nurture their relationships with real people.

Let's start with parents.  We cannot shove a device into the hands of our children so that we are then free to do the things we want.  The first relationships children develop are with their parents, but if their parents are presently absent, which is to say they are in the same room yet miles away in their own minds, children quickly learn what is important and that they are not it.  Many times I had to put off until later, or never, things I really wanted to do when our children were at home.  That was simply part of the job of being a parent.  I have written before that my mom believed strongly in looking children in the eye and giving them your full attention.  She knew how important it was for a child to feel important.

Now let's move on to teachers.  As all educators know, "ain't no tired like teacher tired, 'cause teacher tired don't stop."  If there is an academically sound reason to use technology, then we should use it, but if we bring out Kahoot or Blooket merely because we are exhausted enough to convince ourselves of their pedagogical value, then we have indeed taught something, but perhaps not what we intended.  Nothing can replace the direct, human-to-human interaction between teachers and students either for depth of academic engagement or richness of social development.  As I say so often, education is a distinctly human endeavor, and we do not serve well the humans in our charge when we farm them out to non-humans.

A Limited Menu

Those restaurants that serve the most carefully prepared foods are typically those that have few items on the menu.  They devote their time and resources to offering the best, not the most.  If a restaurant offers everything from rack of lamb to hotdogs with foie gras and fried mozzarella sticks on the side, it is less likely that any of the dishes will be done to perfection.

I had to say that because I want to conclude by advocating for extracurricular activities for children, yet I am in no way calling for additional busyness.  In fact, our children are often involved in far too many activities, but that is a topic for another essay.  Here I want merely to say that children do need to be involved with other, real human beings, and that this often happens well when they participate in sports, join music or drama programs, or become involved in extracurricular clubs.  When used properly, these opportunities are not merely places to warehouse young people after school and before bedtime.  They can be avenues through which they develop meaningful, human relationships, the kind that will last longer and contribute to richer life than can be hoped for with Galatea 2.0.

The Thrill of Connections

 

What do a Diet Coke and a stack of student work to be graded have to do with each other?  They both represent the unbridled thrill of making connections.

Hundreds of Letters

One of the perks of the job, at least for me, is having the opportunity to write letters of recommendation for students.  I have written close to four hundred so far and for everything ranging from jobs to scholarships to university acceptance.  I consider it a perk of the job because it allows me to make a connection between a student and the world beyond the school.  The letter of recommendation allows me to brag a bit on students I have come to know well and in whom I see so many wonderful talents that I cannot help but be excited to introduce them to others in the hope that they, too, will see what I see and help those students on the next part of their journey.

It is always a joy when students tell me how things turned out...whether they were offered the job, received the scholarship, or were accepted into the university of their dreams.  Such was the case recently when one senior came to tell me that she had been accepted into the top university on her list.  I was nearly as excited as she was and added her name, university, and intended major to the list on our dry-erase board.  She then gave me a beautiful, hand-written thank you note and a 20-ounce bottle of Diet Coke, which I saved until this afternoon to enjoy while doing some work.  The drink is delightful, and I will treasure the note, but the biggest thrill was in helping connect this student with the next institution on her educational adventure.

Philosophy and Family

Because I love connections, I experience deep joy every year when my Latin III students read the writings of the ancient Stoic philosopher Seneca.  After translating and discussing selections from his epistles, they must compose a philosophical letter of their own in which they offer advice as he did to his friend Lucilius.  They must also submit a paper in which they respond to various prompts that allow them to reflect on what they have read and explore how this ancient wisdom might be applied in their own lives.

There is no point in my trying to convey just how rich most of the writings of these students are.  This blog post would turn into a small book of its own were I to include every paragraph of well written and well thought reflections by these students, and to select only a few would be nearly impossible.  Should I include the one in which a student shared with her mother Seneca's wisdom about not burdening yourself with work while on vacation, a bit of wisdom her mother accepted and that allowed the family to have a more pleasant time away from home?  Should I include the advice that two students wrote to their own future children, advice based on the writings of a philosopher twenty-one centuries in their past?  It would seem unfair not to include all the ways in which students wrote of their own, significant transformations as they have taken charge of their lives and the challenges in them by applying the thoughts of this famous Stoic.

But Wait! There's More!

If stories like these inspire you and cause you to remember that there can be true joy in teaching, if they help you to see beyond the pressures of the daily classroom, keep an eye out for my book The Golden Waffle Principle:  Finding Meaning in Teaching, which comes out in December.  Watch stevenrperkins.com and follow @stevenrperk on X, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube for lots of great things leading up to its release and great content once it comes out.  Until then, I look forward to seeing you on the shared journey of discovery that is education.

My New Book on Education

There is a reason I have not been blogging much lately.  In fact, my previous post came out exactly seven months ago, so it is time for me to share with readers what is going on.

Writing a Book

I remember telling the Speaker of the Indiana House of Representatives at the 2014 Teacher of the Year banquet that I was not interested in an award that would sit on a shelf.  If being named INTOY would open doors for me to do more for students and the education profession, then so much the better, and I am pleased to say that it has.

2024 marks the tenth anniversary of my receiving that honor, and a lot has happened over those ten years.  During that time I have been blessed to work with colleagues from across the United States and beyond, to speak at numerous events, and to continue writing.  There were academic articles, the second edition of Latin For Dummies with my friend Clifford Hull, and this blog.  Along the way we experienced a global pandemic, I retired from public education, and I began teaching at a Catholic high school.  Now it seems time to acknowledge some of that in a formal way, and so I have been engaged in the process of writing a book, which took me away from regular blogging.  Hopefully the tradeoff will be worth it.

Looking Back to See the Future

I enjoy a good look through a picture album as much as the next person, but if this book were merely a retrospective or for that matter focused on me, it would have little appeal and would be akin to the dust-gathering trophies about which I am not particularly interested.  Instead, this book is a collection of essays drawn from thoughts and writings and conversations across the past decade.  Although it does make frequent reference to the past, such references are to the wisdom of the ages expressed in the poetry and philosophy and art that have inspired the human race for thousands of years, and this is done with the goal helping us see a better educational experience for our children.

We need to recapture the thrill and excitement that come from a grand vision of education.  Education is a supremely human endeavor.  It is conducted by human beings with human beings, and we were created for more than is often experienced in our schools today.  Yet there have been glimpses of that grand vision through the ages.  We have known what it meant to seek and to discover the true, the good, and the beautiful, and many of us do so even today, for the natural curiosity of a student, whether at age six or age sixty, if guided well, leads to life, and that is the true measure of education.

Sine Quibus Non

A sine qua non is something that is essential.  A literal translation from the Latin is, "without which not."  To make the expression more personal, I have restated it as sine quibus non, or "without whom not," and this book, coming out in December, is indeed a sine quibus non.  In it are some of my favorite people, such Homer and Plato, Cicero and Vergil, St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine.  There are my own, wonderful teachers from Kindergarten through graduate school, all of whom find mention in the book, and there are many colleagues beside whom I have been so blessed to teach and with whom I have enjoyed countless scintillating conversations over the years, discussions so exciting that I was sure the very particles in the air around us had become electrified.

It is de rigueur to thank those without whom one could not have done a thing, but the worry is always that someone will be left out.  Please know that if you have ever been my teacher, my student, or my colleague, I am grateful for the time we have spent together on the shared journey of discovery that is education.  Here, now, I must name a very few.

I offer my deepest thanks to Ed Coleman, David McGinness, Kathy Nimmer, and Kate Smith for offering kind words to be used on the book jacket, and their full statements of support are within the book.  When I asked the girl who would become my wife for what would be our first date, I was well and truly surprised when she said she would go out with me.  The next word coming over the phone from my end after she said "yes" was "really?"  I had the same reaction when each of these extraordinary educators agreed to lend their name and approbation to this project.

Special thanks go to my dear friend Gary Abud, Jr.  We met when he was the 2014 Michigan Teacher of the Year and we have covered some solid ground together.  Not only am I grateful for his remarks on the book, but also for the sheer delight of working with him and his company CoGrounded to see it market.

I would not be a teacher were it not for so many of my family members who traveled the hallways of Indiana schools before me, and I talk about that in the book.  My dad died in 2009, but I was able to share with my mom that I was working on this book before she passed away late last year.  I can see traces of how they lived out their callings as teachers, and my dad as principal, every single day in my classes.

I am grateful to my children Austin and Olivia for allowing me to serve a calling even higher than that of teacher.  In particular, I must offer heartiest thanks to Austin for his work with CoGrounded and me on the cover of the book and the design of stevenrperkins.com.  There is no greater thrill than working on projects with one's own adult children.

Finally, I will conclude by expressing my deepest appreciation for my wife Melissa in the words that I used in my speech the night of the 2014 Indiana Teacher of the Year banquet.  "She's so conjunctive to my life and soul, that, as the star moves not but in his sphere, I could not but by her."  The Governor of Indiana and the Speaker of the House were most eager to ask me for the wording of what I said that night, for they thought it a fitting line to say to their own wives.  I confessed then as I do now that the words were not mine but Shakespeare's from Hamlet, Act 4, Scene 7.  

Designing the Future

 

What is the role of design in the modern world?  Does it only apply to decorating your bedroom, or could it be about something more?  Industrial Design is a highly interdisciplinary field, and I recently had the opportunity to see some of the most recent designers who are about to shape how we interact with the world.

What Is Industrial Design?

Mine is the world of nouns and verbs, of poetry and philosophy, and specifically as these all played out two thousand years ago in ancient Greece and Rome.  When our son decided to major in Industrial Design at Purdue University, I had to go to the department website to see what it was all about.  That, of course, was but a first step, and over the years that my wife and I visited campus and saw what our son was doing, I began to gain a better understanding.

My first realization that our son's undergraduate program of study would not be like mine was when he took us to one of his classrooms during his freshman year.  My experience of collegiate study involved classrooms with desks and the main library on campus, especially in the 870 and 880 section of the ninth floor.  His was a workshop.  This would be a hands-on course of study, one that involved math, art, history, and much more.

 

He and his class would learn to sketch and ideate, design using the latest software, and then realize their ideas in wood and metal, plastic and cloth, and of course, 3-D printing.

Design Daze

Each year the senior class of the Industrial Design Department hosts a day-long event to showcase their work.  They fill a gallery in Yue Kong Pao Hall of Visual and Performing Arts with their work and present throughout the day in sessions in a nearby auditorium to an audience of industry professionals, their own ID professors, and delighted families and friends.

 

As I listened to these young designers share their creations, all of which had been created to address particular needs, from a variety of medical issues to safety concerns in sports, from advancements in military technology to better ways for us to interact with the natural world, several things became clear.  Design is about far more than merely making a product attractive.  The field of Industrial Design is about solving problems.  It is about listening to people and applying science and art and creativity to making their lives better.  As I work with my own students and talk with them about their dreams for the future, Industrial Design has become an area that I have shared with them and will continue to present as a possible course of study for those with the imagination to help design our future.

Special Note

I love talking with the parents of my students, but it was a treat like no other to be on the receiving end when Steve Visser, ID Professor and Program Coordinator, and Assistant Professor of ID Jung Joo Sohn both made it a point to talk with my wife and me about our son.  They knew him as more than a faceless student and spoke to his work and his preparedness for entering the world of Industrial Design.  Thanks to their efforts and all of the Purdue faculty, our son has enjoyed two internships during his undergraduate career and has been hired by Midwest Studios for a position he will begin after graduation.

For Whom Homer Tolls

 "Ask not for whom the bell tolls," advised John Donne, quickly adding, "it tolls for thee."  Yet we may well ask for whom Homer tolls, or more accurately, for whom his song still sings today.  Are his writings texts to be translated, merely "a bit of Greek construe" as a student once argued with Michael Redgrave in the classic film The Browning Version?  Are they works to be mined to support this or that idea or cause du jour?  And what has all this to do with the reigning question across social media at the moment, "How often do you think of the Roman Empire?

Rome On My Mind

It would seem, if we are to believe the polls being conducted by women with the men they know, that Ray Charles may have had the land of Augustus in his thoughts when he famously covered Hoagy Carmichael's 1930 song "Georgia On My Mind."

For reasons passing understanding, "How often do you think about the Roman Empire" is the fun question going around the land, and one particular response to it caught my attention.

First, this man's comparison of the ancient world with the modern is sound.  Second, he has remembered what he has learned well enough to be largely correct and able to speak meaningfully.  Yet how many would write him off because he is shirtless on his porch and speaking with a southern accent?  This man is precisely the person for whom Homer still sings, and I'll tell you why.

A Glorious Birthright

As the video shows, this man can speak about the issues of his day with reference to the past in order to better understand and respond to his world.  Would that our many preening intellectuals and elected officials could do the same.  Nearly twenty-five years ago, Victor Davis Hanson wrote Who Killed Homer?, a book that takes no prisoners in calling out the elitism of contemporary classical studies.

My copy is highlighted on almost every page, with margin notes that frequently include exclamation marks, so I will give you just a brief taste of what Hanson has observed.

All that is left to the career Classicist is to play the theoretical game, to reinvent the Greeks and Roman each year, to dress up Homer as a transvestite this fall, a syllable-toting accountant next spring.  To do something else, something actually important, to put stone and text together, to combine papyrus and coin, to make sense of some noble, big idea for the carpenter, teacher, and dentist, would require an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century scholar like Gibbon, Mommsen, or Grote.  They would be persons of action, of wide reading, of passion and prejudice -- "assumers" and "generalizers," in other words, who, like Homer, rarely nod, have a life outside the campus, and are not ground out of modern American doctoral programs.

Here, interestingly enough, is what most closely binds the High Classicists:  they disdain the average student -- and the entire American middle class for that matter.  Yet those burger-flipping students constitute the vast majority of students in our colleges and universities....  (pp. 149-150)

Why are Homer and the rest of the classical Greco-Roman authors important for carpenters, teachers, and dentists, for burger-flipping students, and for people like the man in the video above?  It is because the works of these ancient writers, beautiful and dangerous and enlightening and disturbing as they may be, have become world heritage works, the birthright of all who claim to be human.  They must not be hidden behind lenses of ideology nor made inaccessible through a thick blanket of obscurantist jargon.  Hanson again, "We read Virgil in Latin to learn, word by powerful word, of man's heroic struggle with a nature that in the long run will always win, of humanity's destined confrontation with its own limitations" (p. 187).

The Roman Empire For All

Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, Spring, 1992 - Fall, 1993, Third Series, Vol. 2, No. 2/3, printed an article that had originally been published in Harper's Magazine in March of 1966.  It was written by the eminent classicist and translator William Arrowsmith.  A professor at Boston University, Princeton University, MIT, Yale, Johns Hopkins, NYU, and Emory, he also served as the chair of the Classics Department at The University of Texas, where I years later completed my M.A.  He was admirably qualified to write a piece called "The Shame of the Graduate Schools:  A Plea for a New American Scholar."  His words written more than fifty years ago echo in those of Hanson.

An alarmingly high proportion of what is published in classics -- and in other fields -- is simply rubbish or trivia. An alarming percentage of the subsidized books published by university presses have no business being published. An alarming number of the humanistic projects which yearly receive grants, fellowships, stipends, and support are not worth supporting. They represent the commitment of a given institution or university to support the humanities, in spite of the fact that the project is palpably unsound, or doubtful, or dull.  

There is no more sickening spectacle in the modern university than that of the men whose very natures have been violated in order to suit the requirements of a system.  But the damage to scholarship is nothing in comparison to the human waste involved.  Three out of four men in academic life are the victims of this wasteful and terrible system.... Three out of four men you meet in academic life are quite simply unfulfilled.  (pp. 165, 166)

Whether it is high school, undergraduate, or graduate education, the discoveries and products of mankind are the birthright of all people to explore, to be inspired by, and to build upon.  Human beings should not be, must not be, victims of a "wasteful and terrible system."  Any education that equips a person like the man in the video above is worthy of the name.  Any that does not should stop its masquerade as education and go out of business.

How, then, do we present, as Poe once wrote, "the glories that were Greece and the grandeur that was Rome," along with all the other thoughts and discoveries and achievements in the arts and sciences produced by the human race, to our children, both young and old?  Theologian, scholar, and translator Benjamin Jowett had an idea, which he shared in the preface to his 1881 translation of Thucydides.

The voluminous learning of past ages [has] to be recast in easier and more manageable forms, and if Greek literature is not to pass away, it seems to be necessary that in every age some one who has drunk deeply from the original fountain should renew the love of it in the world, and once more present that old life, with its great ideas and great actions, its creations in politics and in art, like the distant remembrances of youth, before the delighted eyes of mankind.

I stopped my graduate work in classics when I realized that my field and I were asking different questions.  Most in my field were exploring minutiae of philology, tracking the literary influence of one author on another, when I was asking whether what a given author said were true.  It proved to be a good choice, for it led me back to the secondary classroom, with occasional, subsequent stints at the undergraduate level.  For more than three decades I have been blessed with the opportunity to journey with students to the lands of the true, the good, and the beautiful aboard

Those Nicéan barks of yore,

That gently, o'er a perfumed sea,

    The weary, way-worn wanderer bore

    To his own native shore,

for truly the land of Homer and Vergil is the native land of all.

Reading God

Many people talk about biblical illiteracy today, but what about God illiteracy, our misreading of God Himself?  How do we fall into the trap of reading between the lines and seeing what is not there when it comes to God?

Professional Development

At the high school where I teach, we recently had a professional development session that focused on social skills.  Ultimately, it was about helping students discover, strengthen, and grow in their own social skills, but first we took a quick look at our own areas of strength and areas in which we are less comfortable.

Later, I discussed this with my wife, also an educator, and others, and this led to a journal entry that a friend allowed me to share.  This person is a successful adult whose childhood had its share of emotional damage.  What follows are the actual words I have permission to post in this piece.  It was based on my discussion of the professional development I described above, particularly the element of Communication, which was described in one of our slides as "Reading accurately and responding well to verbal and non-verbal cues."

Faith and Misreading God

I immediately thought of how good I have been at that stemming from strategic necessity in my youth and navigating my mother's insanity.  But as good as I have been, I must confess I sometimes get it wrong.  Take for example why I don't like it when anyone does something for me and why I hate celebrating my birthday and Christmas.  Kindness, in my experience, never comes without strings, but what if I am reading between the lines what isn't there?  What if, rather than reading people for my own protection, I simply took people straight on?  And doesn't this lie at the heart of my distrust of God?  I read Him, or rather, I read what I think are the clues about Him, but do not take Him or other people directly at their word.

And isn't this what faith is and what it means to walk by faith and not by sight?  "Traduttore, traditore"* indeed.  I translate everyone according to a system based on how to survive childhood with a severely damaged mother, but what if that is all wrong?

Jesus, this is one of my most raw and heartfelt prayers.  Remove the scales from my eyes, call me to You on the water, help my unbelief, help me to risk pain and hurt to live by faith and in so doing be healed of the deep hurts of my past.

*Traduttore, traditore is an Italian expression meaning "the translator is a traitor."

Reading Through Lenses

Certainly the professional development session at my school bore fruit beyond what its presenters intended, but let's consider something here.  Being able to read the verbal and non-verbal cues of others is crucial in maintaining strong relationships.  If I cannot see from your unusual quietness that something important is happening with you and proceed to babble on and on about some trivial excitement in my own life, I risk hurting you with insensitivity and missing an opportunity to be a true friend.  Yet I must be careful not to read between the lines what isn't there.  In literary, philosophical, and theological studies, we talk of exegesis, which is drawing meaning from a text, and try to guard against its opposite, eisegesis, which is reading something into a text.  As my friend's journal entry shows, it is entirely possible to read people incorrectly by interpreting their verbal and non-verbal cues through lenses that we have established and that may not be fitting for a given interaction.  Are we reading our cues as they are, or do we process them through a filter that will confirm our preconceived notions?

As much harm as it can cause when we read incorrectly our human relationships, how much more damage results when we misread God?  Taking God as He has presented Himself most fully in the person of Jesus Christ is indeed a risk.  It involves setting aside our conceptions of Him that have been based on pain or fantasy, cold logic or wishful thinking, or even the false stories and erroneous teachings of others.  It requires setting aside the colorful lenses through which we view things, even lenses that we think help us see clearly, and viewing Him and all His creation, including other people, through the truly clear lens of faith.

Getting Lost in Our Infinite God

 

Astronaut Dr. David Bowman in 2001:  A Space Odyssey

Control is fun.  Starting at a young age, every one of us wants more of it over more aspects of our lives.  We begin to pick out our own clothes, decide what we want to eat, and, with our first tricycle, discover the thrill of plotting the course of our own journey.  The pangs of anxiety that come with increased control as we fret over more significant decisions like whether to ask someone out on a date or which university to choose are quickly quelled by the sheer fun of the myriad smaller acts of control that decorate our lives.  It's fun to customize our laptops with stickers and curate our own music lists online.  Sooner or later, however, we discover that the pressures of control are no longer outweighed by the joys, and the best that many hope for is to keep the pressures and joys in balance.  We play the stress of controlling our finances off against the pleasure of choosing where to go on vacation.  Yet there is something far better and far more freeing, but it requires a bit of imagination and getting lost.

The Imagination of God

God created human beings in His own image.  Jesus is the Imago Dei, the image of God in its fullness.  Part of what it means for us to be made in the image of this image-making God is that we, too, are gifted with great imaginations.  We think things up out of nothing and bring them into reality.  From Michelangelo's David to the internal combustion engine to Mozart's Requiem to the James Webb Space Telescope, we really are quite imaginative creatures, and it will take all the imagination we have to approach a certain truth about God.  He is infinite.

Aristotle says that there must be something that causes other things to move that is not itself moved by anything else, the unmoved mover (ἔστι τι ὃ οὐ κινούμενον κινεῖ, Metaphysics 12.1072a).  Think of it this way.  You are grilling hot dogs around a nice campfire, but what caused there to be fire in that particular fire pit?  You struck match and put it under a log.  But where did the log come from?  It came from the tree that had stood nearby.  Where did the tree come from?  It came from a seed.  How did the seed get there?  A bird dropped it.  Where did the bird get it, and for that matter, where did the bird come from?  You see where this is going.  At some point the whole thing gets ridiculous and you have to think, "There has to be a stopping point somewhere," and that stopping point is what Aristotle called the unmoved mover.  Picking up from Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas says this unmoved mover is God.  (Therefore it is necessary to come to some first mover that is moved by no other, and this everyone understands to be God.  Ergo necesse est devenire ad aliquod primum movens, quod a nullo movetur, et hoc omnes intelligunt Deum.  Summa Theologiae 1, Q2, A3)

Now kick back and just let your mind go.  What could it possibly be like, what could it possibly mean for something to exist that has no cause?  Let your mind drift.  Use a piece of art or perhaps something like the famous stargate scene in the classic film 2001:  A Space Odyssey.

"God is the fullness of Being and of every perfection, without origin and without end. All creatures receive all that they are and have from him; but he alone is his very being, and he is of himself everything that he is" (CCC 213).  On the surface, that really doesn't make sense, but the liberating thing is that it doesn't have to.  As you begin to stretch your imagine to conceive of the inconceivable, an infinite being without beginning or end, you get lost in that notion.  You realize that you can't get your head around such a thing, much less control it, and in that moment you take your first taste of freedom.

Realizing Fatherhood

As the infomercials used to say, but wait!  There's more!  Despite having no beginning and no end, God is also personal, which is to say, He is a person.  No, He is not human, but what it means to be a human person comes from the personhood of God, and if that still sounds a bit too abstract, God is our Father.  What follows is something I journaled recently after pondering the identity of God.

When God speaks to Moses from the burning bush and says, "I am the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob," and then reveals his name as YHWH, "I Am," He is truly inviting us into an infinitely larger reality, identity, and relationship than the mud-hut-dwelling, dirt-scratching experience of life and family that we have known with our blood relatives.  What would life be like if we look up from our meagre existence and truly saw our Father and knew we were His?

You may think my description of earthly, familial relationships is harsh and inaccurate, but consider that the largest mansion and the smallest mobile home are essentially the same thing.  They are both boxes made of stuff from the earth in which people sleep and eat.  And just as we must scratch the dirt with hands or tools in order to draw anything of value from it for sustenance, so we often face hard, emotionally backbreaking challenges to interact with family members in order to bring forth the joys of familial life we all know are available.  

So, I'll ask again.  What would your life look like if you raised your eyes from the problems and hassles that beset you on a daily basis and became lost in the life of your infinite Father, the one who loves you beyond what you or I could ever define the word "love" to mean?

Faith and Complex Greek Words

Which is the more difficult word, "love" or "antidisestablishmentarianism?"  At first glance, many would say the latter, but that is because long, multisyllabic words seem scary.  When you get right down to it, "antidisestablishmentarianism" is easy to break down into its etymological roots, and the definition is quite narrow and specific.  It means the belief that a church that has received government support should continue to do so and should not be disestablished.  "Love," on the other hand, is a word applied to a romantic interest, a favorite type of pizza, devotion to one's country, and the driving force behind the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.  Through constant use and familiarity, it has taken on so many meanings as to be nearly meaningless, and the same is true of another common word, "faith."  It has come to have a sort wispy sense, something light and delicate and otherworldly, but, as we will see, it is a concrete, robust word capable of supporting the massive edifice of a human life.

Etymology and Theology

Trinity, Andrei Rublev, 1425

Hebrews 11:1 is a well known verse that states in the King James Version, "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."  The Greek word translated substance is ὑπόστασις (hypostasis), which breaks down into two parts meaning to stand beneath.  The English word "substance" is itself little more than a transliteration of the Latin word used in the Vulgate translation substantia, which means the same thing as the Greek.  The light may be starting to dawn for you as you think, "How nice!  Faith is that which stands beneath my hopes.  It is the foundation on which hope is built."  If you stopped here, you would certainly be blessed with a good understanding.  Hope indeed is not merely a fanciful wish, but something with a strong foundation, but as infomercials on late-night television used to say, "But wait!  There's more!"

That Greek word hypostasis took on new meaning in the fourth century A.D. with the Cappodocian Fathers Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory Nazianzen.  Their thinking, along with the Holy Spirit-led work at the First Council of Constantinople in 381, led to a phrase that summarizes the orthodox Christian understanding of the Trinity, μία οὐσία, τρεῖς ὑποστάσεις (mia ousia, treis hypostaseis), a phrase that is typically translated, "one being/essence, three persons."  In Christian theology, the idea of hypostasis goes beyond that which stands beneath.  It contains more than the notion of a foundation.  Hypostasis expresses the very idea of God the Father qua Father, God the Son qua Son, and God the Holy Spirit qua Spirit.

Look again at Hebrews 11:1.  Faith is the hypostasis of things hoped for.  Suddenly we see something real about faith, taking "real" in the literal sense from its Latin root res, meaning "thing."  When something has been realized or has become real, it has been "thingified."  It is more than just an abstract thought.  Faith is not fancy, but the real foundation of hope, as real as the three persons of the Holy Trinity.

Etymology and Philosophy

The second half of that verse expands on this idea by stating that faith is the evidence of things not seen.  The word translated "evidence" is ἔλεγχος (elenchos), and any student of philosophy in general or Socrates in particular will know that this word carries a lot of freight.  Most commonly seen in its latinized spelling, elenchus is the method by which Socrates would test the ideas of others in an effort to find the truth.  It involved the vigorous back-and-forth discussion that we find in the dialogues of Plato, dialogues that were in essence a verbal crucible in which the dross of falsehood was burned away until only the pure truth of a matter remained.

This is what faith is, according to Hebrews 11:1.  It is the unsparing process that arrives at truth, even when that truth cannot be grasped by the physical senses.  

Putting It All Together

Faith is something robust and vigorous.  It is solid and alive.  Because it is hypostasis and elenchos, it is capable of supporting hope and indeed our very lives.  Foundations, of course, can be composed of many materials, so the real question is about what our faith is made of.  The kind of faith that Hebrews 11:1 is referring to is the kind best described in the words of the 1834 hymn by Edward Mote.

My hope is built on nothing less

Than Jesus' blood and righteousness.

I dare not trust the sweetest frame,

But wholly lean on Jesus' name.

On Christ the solid rock I stand.

All other ground is sinking sand.

All other ground is sinking sand.

Whitesnake and Jeopardy: Bellwethers of Biblical Literacy?

 

In 1982 a British hard rock band released its fifth album, and in 2023, the television game show Jeopardy! aired the latest of its more than eight thousand episodes.  What could either of these possibly have in common?  They each have something to say about contemporary biblical literacy.

Less Than Subtle

David Coverdale formed Whitesnake in 1978 following the breakup of the legendary Deep Purple in 1976.  Even before this group became MTV darlings in the late '80s as they led the hair metal charge through a cloud of Aqua Net, they were a well established, bluesy, hard rock outfit with a fair amount of success around the world.  What they were not was subtle.  The closest their often sex-drenched lyrics came to nuance was the frequent wink-wink, nudge-nudge of the double entendre. 

In 1982 Whitesnake released their fifth album, Saints & Sinners, and the title track contains some interesting lines.  The song opens with,

Get ready for Judgement Day

And the final curtain call

Don't lie when you testify

'Cause the Good Lord knows you're all

Saints an' sinners, priests an' thieves

Saints an' sinners, priests an' thieves

When Moses stood on the Red Sea shore

Laying the law on the line,

He said, "Don't come knockin' at the Pearly Gates

If you all you did was have a real good time."

Later in the song we get the refrain, "For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful."

Whitesnake could never be confused with a Christian band like for King & Country, so what on earth are lyrics like these doing in one of their songs?  They make for reasonably good rock lyrics, but notice what in 1982 Coverdale could reasonably assume his audience would understand:  a reference to the Christian expectation of an event commonly referred to as Judgment Day; the Christian expectation of a final accounting at that time when all must testify about their lives; a reference to the Old Testament figure Moses; the connection between Moses and the Ten Commandments of the Hebrew law; the location of Moses at the Red Sea as he led the Israelites out of bondage; and the Pearly Gates, a phrase long used as synecdoche to refer to Heaven itself.  This last is based on Revelation 21:21 in which the twelve gates of Heaven are made of pearls.  As for the prayer, it is from the Church of England and was once common throughout British schools.

I have no idea whether David Coverdale was attempting to infuse Christian doctrine into his lyrics in an attempt at subtle evangelism, but what is undeniable is that he confidently assumed his audience would get the references.  These were in the lyrics to his new album's title song, and this savvy entertainer was not about to fill that song with obscure references that no one would understand.

Blank Stares for 200

On Tuesday, June 13, 2023 the television game show Jeopardy! sparked a minor furor across social media as all three contestants failed to answer a question.  They did not get it wrong.  They simply could not answer at all.

The clue read, "Matthew 6:9 says 'Our Father which art in heaven', this 'be thy name.'"  Social media was quickly inflamed with those who could not believe that not one of the contestants knew that the missing word was "hallowed."  Even atheists weighed in to say that they would have known the answer.

What's Going On?

I can hear some of the responses now.  "That's from the King James Version, which was published in 1611.  There's no need to know something that old today."  "It doesn't matter whether someone knows the words of the Bible.  What matters is being kind to people."  Setting aside the poor reasoning of such responses for now, let's consider what may be going on with these two examples.  Why was a hard rock musician in 1982 able to write a lyric with multiple, biblical references that he could expect his audience to understand, and why were these three contestants on a game show based on wide-ranging knowledge unable to answer a biblical question in 2023?  To be fair, these are not perfectly comparable, and I am not citing hard research on biblical literacy from either era, but it may be they are indicators of what is going on in education.

Simply put, we have been moving away from requiring students to know factual knowledge for some time.  We decry methods of direct instruction as "drill and kill" and malign the lecture as being forced onto students from "the sage on the stage," even as we promote the model of the teacher as "the guide on the side."  We advocate for the teaching of higher level thinking skills and relegate factual knowledge to that which can easily be accessed online, and there are reasons for this.

It is indeed a missed opportunity if, in the presence of bright, developing minds, we never move beyond factual knowledge to the more abstract realms of speculation, but we are doing an equal disservice if we jump too early to the latter and stay there to the exclusion of the former.  We often do this because we teachers enjoy the higher, abstract, deep levels of engagement.  We don't want to focus on basic math facts and grammar when there are the delights of advanced science and poetry to explore.  We also want to avoid requiring students to know discrete facts because this usually requires study and memorization, and in a world in which there are significant challenges to these practices through familial and cultural forces, we want to do anything and everything to mitigate academic failure and promote success.  And finally, if I may be so blunt and bold, we teachers who must support our own families are unwilling to trust our financial livelihoods to the scores of students on tests.  It is far easier to create a smokescreen of inquiry-based projects and critical thinking so that no one can really hold anyone accountable for anything.

What Now?

Some of these are issues to be addressed by educators, but the particular matter of biblical literacy rests squarely on parents and church leaders.  If we parents are deferring our calling and responsibility to equip our children in the faith to church leaders alone, we are derelict in our duty.  If church leaders are mostly focused on growing the numbers of children and youth in the church or building relationships among them, they are derelict in their duty.  In Paul's second letter to Timothy, he says of the young man, "from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus."  What will it take, not to get to the point where most people could handle a sermon by the likes of St. Augustine or St. Chrysostom as they did in the fourth and fifth centuries, but merely to the point where even the audience at a hard rock concert would know what was being talked about?

A Speech, A Poem, and The Beauty of Language

 

Marcus Tullius Cicero, 106-43 B.C.

While cleaning out some things at my mom's house, I ran across something she had saved from my freshman year at Indiana University.  Apparently I had written a poem about a speech we had read in our Cicero class, and my dad had typed it up.  What could have prompted a young man of eighteen to compose on such a topic?  The answer can be found in 374 words.

A Speech and a Poem

My first Latin class at IU was a 300-level course in Cicero taught by Betty Rose Nagle, about whom I have written here, here, and here.  Among the pieces we read that semester was Cicero's Pro Milone, a speech in defense of Titus Annius Milo that he delivered in 52 B.C.  I had read some Cicero in my Latin III class in high school and was already in a bit of awe over his command of the language, but one sentence in that undergraduate class took my breath away.  I couldn't leave it alone, and so I ended up writing a poem about it.

We often talk in our upper level Latin classes about the various benefits of literature, one of which is that literary works, like works of art of music, can capture moments for us.  The artistic efforts of another can express for us the deepest emotions for which we do not possess the words.  What follows is a young man's attempt to capture in his own words something that had so captivated his mind.  It is not a good poem, borrowing too heavily on the lines by Chapman that it references and too filled with the gushing emotion of a teenager, but the poem itself is not what is important here, but rather what inspired it.

374 Words

Cicero is famous for his periodic sentences, seemingly interminable constructions filled to the brim with parallelism and subordinate clauses.  One can get lost just trying to find the main verb.  Although this is not the style preferred today, and many teachers would likely pull out the red pen to suggest that one of his creations was in fact a run-on, when you work through a sentence like this and see the incredible balance of word against word, clause against clause, and the ebb and flow of intensity of thought, you cannot help but be amazed at its construction.  Think of the feeling you had when standing in the grandest building and marveling at both its architecture and the effort of its assembly.  Here was the sentence that inspired me as an undergraduate freshman.

De qua, si iam nollem ita diluere crimen, ut dilui, tamen impune Miloni palam clamare ac mentiri gloriose liceret: "Occidi, occidi, non Sp. Maelium, qui annona levanda iacturisque rei familiaris, quia nimis amplecti plebem videbatur, in suspicionem incidit regni appetendi; non Ti. Gracchum, qui conlegae magistratum per seditionem abrogavit, quorum interfectores impleverunt orbem terrarum nominis sui gloria; sed eum—auderet enim dicere, cum patriam periculo suo liberasset—cuius nefandum adulterium in pulvinaribus sanctissimis nobilissimae feminae comprehenderunt; eum cuius supplicio senatus sollemnis religiones expiandas saepe censuit—eum quem cum sorore germana nefarium stuprum fecisse L. Lucullus iuratus se quaestionibus habitis dixit comperisse; eum qui civem quem senatus, quem populus Romanus, quem omnes gentes urbis ac vitae civium conservatorem iudicarant, servorum armis exterminavit; eum qui regna dedit, ademit, orbem terrarum quibuscum voluit partitus est; eum qui, plurimis caedibus in foro factis, singulari virtute et gloria civem domum vi et armis compulit; eum cui nihil umquam nefas fuit, nec in facinore nec in libidine; eum qui aedem Nympharum incendit, ut memoriam publicam recensionis tabulis publicis impressam exstingueret; eum denique, cui iam nulla lex erat, nullum civile ius, nulli possessionum termini; qui non calumnia litium, non iniustis vindiciis ac sacramentis alienos fundos, sed castris, exercitu, signis inferendis petebat; qui non solum Etruscos—eos enim penitus contempserat—sed hunc P. Varium, fortissimum atque optimum civem, iudicem nostrum, pellere possessionibus armis castrisque conatus est; qui cum architectis et decempedis villas multorum hortosque peragrabat; qui Ianiculo et Alpibus spem possessionum terminarat suarum; qui, cum ab equite Romano splendido et forti, M. Paconio, non impetrasset ut sibi insulam in lacu Prilio venderet, repente luntribus in eam insulam materiem, calcem, caementa, arma convexit, dominoque trans ripam inspectante, non dubitavit exstruere aedificium in alieno; qui huic T. Furfanio,—cui viro, di immortales! (quid enim ego de muliercula Scantia, quid de adulescente P. Apinio dicam? quorum utrique mortem est minitatus, nisi sibi hortorum possessione cessissent),—sed ausum esse Furfanio dicere, si sibi pecuniam, quantam poposcerat, non dedisset, mortuum se in domum eius inlaturum, qua invidia huic esset tali viro conflagrandum; qui Appium fratrem, hominem mihi coniunctum fidissima gratia, absentem de possessione fundi deiecit; qui parietem sic per vestibulum sororis instituit ducere, sic agere fundamenta, ut sororem non modo vestibulo privaret, sed omni aditu et limine."  (Pro Milone, 27.72-75)

Let your eyes scan that block of text.  It is comprised of 374 words, contains numerous historical allusions, tricola, anaphora, asyndeton, and more.  The translation by Michael Grant for the Penguin edition breaks this one, periodic sentence in Latin into twenty-two English sentences across three and a half paragraphs.

You may or may not like Cicero's philosophy.  You may or may not like his politics.  You may or may not enjoy his style of oratory.  Regardless where one stands on the content of his words, any fair reading must surely leave a person willing to acknowledge his matchless command of the language.

After finding this poem from long ago, I looked up the sentence that inspired it in the edition I still have from that class.  It contains my penciled notes in the margins, including the notation that this part of the speech is an example of prosopoeia, which my marginalia define as "putting words in Milo's mouth."  Apart from this being a trip down my own, personal, memory lane, it prompts a question.  What turns of a phrase in a favorite book or poem, what individual sentences, what whole paragraphs or stanzas, leave you breathless not only for their content, but their form as well?

Those interested in the meaning of Cicero's sentence can find a translation here.