A Tall Poppy? Not I.

From a column by Dorothy Rabinowitz in Friday's WSJ.

Duke President Richard Brodhead was doubtless disturbed by the charges [in the Lacrosse team case] and the plight of the accused athletes. But that didn't prevent him from firing the lacrosse coach, in deference to the reigning hysteria--or treating the team members as though they merited shunning. For the most part, he kept his head down while the fires raged around him. His was, it should be said, not unusual behavior. The great consuming career goal of our college and university presidents--with the exception of oddities like Harvard's Larry Summers--has for more than two decades been the same: to avoid any word or deed that might incur the wrath of their gender- and race-obsessed faculties and allied campus activists. University presidents once had higher ambitions.

The entire article is worth reading.

A Duke Faculty Member for a Duke Alum to be Proud Of

Steve Baldwin, Professor of Chemistry.

Here is a post about him and what he had to say about the Lacrosse Travesty. Be sure to follow the link to what he wrote last year in the Duke Chronicle, the student newspaper. (Thanks, Instapundit.)

Two Items of Evidence for Our's Once Being a Christian Nation

Among my mother's things, she left a pocket New Testament that my dad carried during WW II when he was in the Navy. My mother said that the government gave one of these to each service man and woman. The first page of this little book has the heading "The White House - Washington" and this message:

As Commander-in-Chief I take pleasure in commending the reading of the Bible to all who serve in the armed forces of the United States. Throughout the centuries men of many faiths and diverse origins have found in the Sacred Book words of wisdom, counsel and inspirition. It is a fountain of strength and now, as always, an aid in attaining the highest inspirations of the human soul.

This page bears the facsimile signature of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

At the back of the New Testament, the little book contains the Ten Commandments, and "Psalms, Prayers, and Hymns", including Psalms 19, 23, 24, 27, 46, 51, 91, and 121, The Lord's Prayer, A Prayer on Going into Battle, A Prayer for Loved Ones, A Prayer for a Pure Heart, A Prayer of Thanksgiving, Washington's Prayer for the Nation, A Prayer of Penitence, and hymns, Our God, Our Help; Lead On, O King Eternal; Onward Christian Solders; Faith of Our Fathers; Eternal Father, Strong to Save; How Firm a Foundation; Rock of Ages; Abide with Me; Now the Day is Over; America the Beautiful; My Country, 'Tis of Thee; the National Anthem. Finally there are two pages entitled "Where to Look" with scriptures. For example, If you are facing a crisis, read the 46th Psalm, page iv.

(As I leafed through this book, looking for notes, I found only one, a little piece of paper at Romans 10 with the citation "Romans 10: 1-10" in my dad's handwriting.)

Looking at this New Testament reminded me of the Bible that I received when I graduated from Duke University in 1968. It is a leather bound, gilt-edged RSV that each graduating senior received on the platform, just before being handed his or her diploma and shaking the president's hand. The first page of the Bible has a copy of the old Duke official seal at the top. The seal is circular with a cross prominent in the middle. The base of the cross appears to be the top of a mountain, perhaps Calvary, and the sun's rays blaze from behind. Along the circumference are the words Universitas Dukiana and Eruditio et Religio.

Below the seal are the words "presented to __________________ upon graduation from Duke University [class of] 1968. Below that inscription is the following:

THE AIMS of Duke University are to assert a faith in the eternal union of knowledge and religion set forth in the teachings and character of Jesus Christ, the son of God; to advance learning in all lines of truth; to defend scholarship against all false notions and ideals; to develop a Christian love of freedom and truth; to promote a sincere spirit of tolerance; to discourage all partisan and sectarian strife; and to render the largest permanent service to the individual, the state, the nation, and the church. Unto these ends shall the affairs of this University always be administered.

Dear Professor Scott,

After class I came up as the other students filed out. I was disturbed because I just did not quite get what you wanted in the paper you had assigned us. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but it was something like “Do you want this, Dr. Scott, or that or something else?” I did not know exactly what you wanted, and I wanted to know exactly what it was. I was sure I needed to know. I thought you would tell me.

You said, “Just let the chips fall, Mr. Stokes.”

To my surprise the day brightened, I relaxed, said thank you, and out I went. You liked what I wrote.

Furthermore, that conversation became part of our family’s lore, because I repeated it time and time again to my children as they grew up. “Just let the chips fall, Mary or Macon or Walter.” It was the “chips fall” story. They knew exactly what that meant. It meant that “I have confidence in you to figure this out. You have permission to paint your own bulls-eye. How you frame the issue, you not me, within bounds of reasonableness that are really wider than you think, is as much a part of this assignment as how you address the issue.” You said all that in a short sentence, and it was a sort of release.

So here am I, reading the article about you in the Duke Magazine, and thinking about you again, feeling blessed to have been in your class and marveling at how you can be your age already and me mine. I went to the University of Chicago Law School, then to New York City as a law clerk for a federal judge, then back home to Miami where I joined a law firm, and I have practiced law in Miami ever since. My wife was a freshman at Duke the year I met you, and she and I married when she finished.. We have three surviving children, each of whom graduated from Davidson College, two sons (a philosophy major and a classics major) and a daughter (an English major). The sons are in “eBusiness” in Austin and are married. Mary teaches English at a boarding school for missionary children in Kijabe, Kenya. One son in Austin has two tiny children. If I live long enough, I’ll tell them the “chips fall” story.

Please add my thanks to all the others you richly deserve.

Sincerely,



Paul Stokes
Class of ‘68

Duke LaX

Don't miss KC Johnson's sum up of the proceedings on Tuesday. I have followed that case on his blog from the beginning, sent there by Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit fame.

Go Duke!

Succisa virescit!

The Jarhead Footlocker Principle

My friend and colleague, Juan, is a US Marine. He told me when he was in boot camp, all the men in his unit (platoon?) were housed in one barracks. At the end of the day, the shower room could handle half of them at a time, so one half remained in the barracks while the other half cleaned up.

At the foot of each bed in the barracks sat a Marine's footlocker, housing all the possessions he was allowed to have at the base. The DI said that a Marine must keep his footlocker locked. The DI said that the very first day.

Of course, someone forgot as he went with his group to the shower. When he got back, his footlocker was upended and all of its contents scattered throughout the barracks, courtesy of the DI. I guess it happened just that once.

The point of the rule and the stringent enforcement of the rule was to keep temptation out of the way of the other men in the unit. It's fine to talk about honor and self-enforcing codes and the like. But the DI didn't look at it that way. His view was that each of the men had a responsibility not to put a stumbling block in the way of his comrades.

I have thought about that principle a good bit as I have read what is going on in Durham with the Duke lacrosse team criminal proceedings. Certainly, we can all lament the fraudulent action of the prosecutor, the abandonment of the young men by their professors, and the cynicism of the test-the-wind-first administration, but what about the Jarhead footlocker principle? What responsibility does the Duke lacrosse team bear for making possible the theft of their reputations by the stripper? What responsibility does the Duke community bear for developing and sustaining a culture where off-campus parties like the one involved in this case have been tolerated since I was at Duke? Those who rejoice in their righteous indignation over the miscarriage of justice for the young men should temper themselves a bit and consider who is responsible for setting the stage for the unfortunate, perhaps inevitable drama that ensued.

Six Questions.

I was one of three people that Sean tagged to answer this list of questions.

1) What is the most fun work you've ever done, and why?

The summer between my junior and senior year at college, I worked as a research assistant for a history professor who was writing a book on Southern Christianity before the Civil War. I stayed in Durham for that summer. Why was it so much fun? I was very, very interested in that subject, and the professor and his wife, who was also a history professor, were young and fun to be with, and they liked the work I did and we had great talks about the subject. And I was nowhere near the girlfriends who kept my life in such turmoil during my years at college before I met Carol. (I met her at the end of the first semester of my senior year.)


2A) Name one thing you did in the past that you no longer do but wish you did?

Sing in a very good choir, with a fine director and equally fine choral music, and get a chance to solo now and then.

2B) Name one thing you've always wanted to do but keep putting it off?

Get the sort of sailboat that trailors easily, that is seaworthy, that will sleep two comfortably, and can sail right up onto a beach. Trailer it up the coast of Florida, Georgia and South Carolina and, from time to time, put it into the water and sail around for a few days. Then sail it back, trailer it again, and move up the coast to another inviting spot. I know the sail boat I would want for this, a Rhodes 22.

3A) What two things would you most like to learn or be better at, and why?

Hebrew. Greek. So I could read the Bible in the original texts.

3B) If you could take a class/workshop/apprentice from anyone in the world living or dead, who would it be and what would you hope to learn?

Wow, this is a hard one, because there are so many people I would want to choose. I mean, you would have to say Jesus first, and then St. Paul, and then St. Augustine, Calvin, Martin Luther, George Washington, Teddy Roosevelt, the first Duke of Marlborough, Shakespeare, Wellington, Michelangelo. The list would go on and on.

4A) What three words might your best friends or family use to describe you?

A little self-centered, funny sometimes, moody sometimes.

4B) Now list two more words you wish described you.

Entirely competent. Christlike.

5) What are your top three passions? (can be current or past, work, hobbies, or causes)

Carol, then the rest of my family, and thirdly my law practice.

6) Write and answer one more question that YOU would ask someone.

"Why do you think God put you here at this time and place?"

First, I am absolutely unique and God wanted someone just like me at this particular point in the space-time continuum to love him and to be loved by him. Second, somewhere in the scheme of things, I fit into a larger plan that is so wonderful and beautiful that I can only dimly and mostly incompletely imagine it. As to my particular part of that plan, it has to do with being the husband to my wife, father to my children, grandfather to my grandchildren, son to my mom, friend to my friends, lawyer to my clients, and a member of the church, visible and invisible, local and globa. - all the things I am doing now. I feel pretty much within God's will presently but with too many major, major exceptions that have to do with my inability always to do the right thing and think rightly.

OK, whom do I tag? I tag the Beetz!!!

Deserving of its own post: Thug U
Alex writes: I'm looking for my favorite Miami Hurricanes fans to post something about the big brawl over the weekend. What, you think we care more about IJM stuff than we do about college football??

Paul responds: It's embarrassing. I am talking about the score, of course.

Macon quips: Yeah, only winning by 35 points is unacceptable. Thug U? Bring it on.

I caught the local (Charlotte, NC) sports radio show, where they ripped Coker, the team and the ACC. Regarding the latter, they pondered, as do I, how the ACC can promote sportsmanship in their cute promos during games and only hand out one-game suspensions, which for Miami players means not playing against Duke, who is now glad basketball season is here. The brawl was classless, tasteless and pathetic. Coker's and the school's response (to date) are equally shameful. If I had any inclination to root for Miami, I now have none.

BTW, If a similar event happened at South Carolina, Spurrier would kick the offenders off the team.

Bring it on, indeed.

Your Duke Biblical Textual Criticism is a pretty typical Modernist conclusion.

I'm not talking about the decision to call something an "Epilogue." It's very clear that, as in most Old Testament books, there are parts of Job that seem to be different kinds of text. Either a different style, or different vocabulary indicate such a difference.

But so what? The conclusion that it's less "true" is so full of hidden pre-suppositions that it's laughable. How, for example, should one determine whether the "epilogue" came last or first?

Or, perhaps the "writer" of Job is merely a kind of editor who's putting together stories he heard, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit?

Such a "revelation" by college professors and sophomores is only troublesome if one has a very weak view of the doctrine of inspiration. such a doctrine might look something like: the document is inspired only if one person wrote it and wrote it all in one sitting, preferably under some sort of hypnotic trance.

But a robust doctrine of inspiration can handle the fact that perhaps there was a rough draft of a letter first, or that there were source documents used by the author, or that someone came along later who knew the end of the story and added it on.

(The latter is quite obviously the case with Deuteronomy, where the accepted author, Moses, has his own death described. Of course, if you held something like the weak view of inspiration, you'd have to posit that God told Moses how he was going to die. But with a robust view of inspiration, one needn't do that backflip when you can simply take the step of saying, "Yep, someone else wrote that after Moses died, this person was also inspired to write that last chapter and to add it on to the end of Deuteronomy.")

A robust doctrine of inspiration must be able to account for multiple source documents, multiple authors, multiple contexts, multiple audiences, as well as the transmission of said documents and the concilliar decisions to finally decide which books & letters counted as inspired and which ones were heretical.

What Makes a Man? Our Friday morning breakfast group had its last visit with Job yesterday. We talked about what we had learned and whether what we read has made(or should make) any difference to our lives. (Of course, it should. But in our entertainment culture, it is always important to ask whether any given activity will make a difference. So many pleasant activities seem to make no difference at all.)

One of my favorite passages in Job, which I have mentioned before, is Job 40:7a, where God admonishes Job, "Brace yourself like a man." (NIV) I simply cannot get that admonition out of my mind. In context, God is replying to Job's impertinent whining in verses 4 and 5 of that chapter. Both the ASV and the KJV translate the admonition as "Gird up thy loins now like a man" and the RSV "Gird up your loins like a man". I like the more literal "gird up your loins". It means get ready to do something important, in this case (as it should be in every case) doing God's will in the particular situation. The use of that word-picture "gird up your loins" is in several other places in Scripture.

The definition of the phrase to which I link above identifies "the loins" as the area between the waist and rib cage, because that is considered to be the strongest part of one's body. So the kettlebell boys are right on target. The loins are one's "core" muscles. It is also where the area around which one's battle belt is bound.

It seems harsh that God would tell Job at the end of the book to "Gird up they loins now like a man." Come on, Lord, give the guy a break. Look what you have already put him through. Hasn't he been broken down enough? And what, exactly, does he have left to gird, after you have destroyed everything in his life but his life?

God continues to speak to Job after 40:7, and he requires Job to consider both the "behemoth", the strongest created thing on land, and the "leviathan", the strongest created thing in the sea. I think God does that because he is showing Job what a man is not. Man is not the strongest created being in the world and because he is not then (a) he should not think himself so, (b) he should not aspire to be so, and (c) in not being so, he needs to brace himself for what the world, with Satan in it, will do to him and his family. So how does one gird his core to deal with his life, when God has already indicated that man is relatively weak? Of course, the answer is by having a right relationship with God, something, apparently, Job does not yet quite have. (See, of course, Ephesians 6:11-18!)

Finally, in Chapter 42, the first six verses, Job gets it right. He confesses that he never knew what he was talking about, as he questioned God, that his eyes finally see God, that he finally knows his place and just who he is, and that he therefore repents "in dust and ashes".

After verse six, the final section of Job begins, a section which my NIV describes as "Epilogue". When I studied Job in our Old Testament class at Duke years ago, at least one of the commentators said that this passage was just an "add-on" by someone other than the person who wrote the book, an add-on to make God a little more palatable. In other words, the "epilogue" is not "true" as the prior passages of the book are "true". We get to see how God "makes-up" for being so nasty to Job, by giving him more than Job had before God set Satan loose on him. What Job gets at the end of the book is rather like "compensatory damages" which one might recover in a court of law when someone wrongs him. That's a pretty unsatisfactory take on that section.

I think the passage should be read as an example of what a man can do who finally knows who he is, who God is, and what his place is in respect of God.