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A La Carte (9/8)
- 09/08/09
- 9
President Obama's Speech
Dr. Mohler comes through with a very level-headed explanation of why there is so much controversy surrounding President Obama's speech to the students of America (and why people should stop worrying about it).
Fan Feels Uplifted After Fall
Here's a feel-good story from the world of baseball: "He lay on his back in the dirt of the Pittsburgh ballpark. His neck hurt. Striking his face on the crushed rock along the first-base side felt like breaking through glass. He was bloodied. And the foul ball was gone. He had missed it, missed his one chance to grab a game ball for his son on the boy's 21st birthday..."
What's His is Her's
The Tribune has an article about Christian couples who, in an effort to not keep secrets from one another, share an email account.
Fixed NIV fixed by fixers with a New new NIV
I appreciated Gordon Cheng's concern about the New New NIV. "Secondly, and more to the issue at hand, if the Bible translation you had produced was as accurate and as to the mark as originally claimed, why in God's name would you bow to popular pressure within less than a decade of announcing your work to the sound of glory and trumpets, and go off and fix the bits you had already fixed? Especially if the fixes you had brought in to fix had fixed the problem that you had thought was there in the first place. If you take my meaning."
Dr. Mohler comes through with a very level-headed explanation of why there is so much controversy surrounding President Obama's speech to the students of America (and why people should stop worrying about it).
Fan Feels Uplifted After Fall
Here's a feel-good story from the world of baseball: "He lay on his back in the dirt of the Pittsburgh ballpark. His neck hurt. Striking his face on the crushed rock along the first-base side felt like breaking through glass. He was bloodied. And the foul ball was gone. He had missed it, missed his one chance to grab a game ball for his son on the boy's 21st birthday..."
What's His is Her's
The Tribune has an article about Christian couples who, in an effort to not keep secrets from one another, share an email account.
Fixed NIV fixed by fixers with a New new NIV
I appreciated Gordon Cheng's concern about the New New NIV. "Secondly, and more to the issue at hand, if the Bible translation you had produced was as accurate and as to the mark as originally claimed, why in God's name would you bow to popular pressure within less than a decade of announcing your work to the sound of glory and trumpets, and go off and fix the bits you had already fixed? Especially if the fixes you had brought in to fix had fixed the problem that you had thought was there in the first place. If you take my meaning."
I am a follower of Jesus Christ, a husband to Aileen and a father to three young children. I write books and blogs for fun while doing web design and consulting for a living. I worship and serve at 
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Comments (9)
TimLoved the baseball story. Brought tears to eyes. A true example of love. Read your blog for theology and I get this. The Lord's humor and wisdom. Keep up the good (& diverse work).
I don't believe Al capture the true heart of the disagreement. It wasn't so much that the president was giving an unprecedented speech to students, even though that is sort of weird and Bush would have been savaged for attempting it. No, the disagreement was originally over the manner in which the naive underlinings surrounding Obama expected individual schools to follow up with the reinforcement of the various points in the speech. Those "lesson plans", if we even want to call them that, have since been redrawn and now Obama's press is spinning the whole thing as misplaced right-wing hysteria over a little speech to encourage students to stay in school and off drugs.
Fred- People continued to complain about the speech itself even after those lesson plans were withdrawn. Despite George H.W. Bush and Reagan having done the same thing, i.e. nationally organized speech directed at school children.
Reagan even went off on a tangent in the middle of his speech and started discussing the merits of certain economic policy decisions.
Honestly I'm surprised Mohler didn't buy into the hysteria. Kudos to him for that.
On the e-mail thing, I really like the motivation behind it, but it's not practical for everyone. I REALLY don't want to see all my husband's Chess.com "your turn to move" alerts, and he could do without some of my e-lists and promotional e-mails and stuff connected with forums I moderate and so forth. It would be a mess for both of us to weed through each other's stuff all the time. On top of that, when he was serving as an elder in the church there was stuff I wasn't supposed to see at all.
I think our system works pretty well to achieve the same end, though -- our passwords are saved and looking at each other's inbox is just a click away. Using Outlook Express, we'll often start up and see each other's inbox automatically before switching to our own. We don't even have to go "looking," but each of us knows the other might easily see everything. So nothing can really be hidden, but it avoids the messiness of one e-mail for two fairly active e-mailers.
Reagan and Bush did a national speech for school children during school time and had his education czars draw up lesson plans to be discussed after the speech? When did this happen?
Reagan and Bush may not have had lesson plans that accompanied their speeches. I'm not sure. But, as I said, outrage against Obama's speech has persisted even after the offending lesson plans were withdrawn.
Bush link:
http://bushlibrary.tamu.edu/research/public_papers.php?id=3450&year=1991&month=10
Reagan link:
http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1988/111488c.htm
The Reagan one actually has a couple of gems. For one, he seems proud of the fact that his administration had increased the amount of Federal money going toward education. This from someone who was ostensibly a "small government" and "strict constitutionalist" type president.
He also talks proudly about having "bailed out" a historically black university using federal money, and about how he agrees with mandatory waiting periods for gun purchases.
"But, as I said, outrage against Obama’s speech has persisted even after the offending lesson plans were withdrawn."
Because some people found it deeply disturbing that the administration could take such an approach in the first place, and because the lesson plan was quietly changed, not repudiated.
I actually agree that people are making way too much of this, but there is a REASON people are sensitive to the idea that a president would want to use a platform of schoolchildren to promote his own agenda, it's not pure paranoia to be concerned about it. It might be paranoia to continue to be worked up about when it transpires that the whole thing is pretty innocuous, but it's at best tone-deaf of the administration to take such an approach in the first place.
I don't know why people get upset about translations, or updates of translations. Words keep evolving, falling into disuse, shifting in meaning, developing totally new meanings. There may be a curmudgeonly charm to decrying neologisms, but they keep happening. Assuming that the NIV translators take the Bible seriously, I doubt that they will ever find words that will be a permanent, satisfying translation since every translation embeds certain theological, cultural, political, linguist assumptions. You can either deal with that and keep pressing on or you can go and join the KJV-only gang.
The speech was published (and probably changed) ONLY after the hue and cry. Why is that so hard to admit? The propogandist was caught red-handed.