While I’m off doing laundry and shopping, after a scare when my SSI check was late arriving at the bank, maybe you’d like to watch this YouTube.
Davidson Loehr was in the class admitted to Meadville/Lombard and the U of C Div School just after mine. We were both "retreads" hitting our forties. The M/L classes were very small, 6 or 4 or maybe 10. The faculty was only 3. It was easy to get into M/L if you had a good patron (both Dave and I did) but, once in M/L, as part of the “cluster” of seminaries of many denominations, we had access to all of them. We earned an MA at the U of C as a part of our D.Min. An MA meant 3 rigorous tests (meant to filter good Ph.D. candidates) and passing a French exam.
The dirty little secret was that fewer and fewer M/L people could handle the U of C MA, and they began to fight the requirements. Not only that, they got stuck before they qualified for the in-house D.Min., which were finally just commuted down to M.Div. This and economic realities have gradually led to the sale of the ML building and separation into a Chicago Loop “address” with no campus. Quality of preparation for ministry is a separate issue, because it goes not to only how rigorous content should be for “learned ministers” (as opposed to “inspired ministers”) but also brings in what is sometimes called “formation,” which is really more like being “psychologically sound.” It gets called “spiritual.”
In raw practical terms, it meant “don’t rock the boat” and “don’t challenge the faculty.” I had a friendship with David that was based at least partly on boat-rocking. He was troublesome enough that the faculty asked him to leave. (Not a formal expulsion, I think.) He had impressive academic chops and a strong mentor, Langdon Gilkey (a truly fabulous man, gone now), so he just transferred over to U of C on their terms and got his degree there. He’s a member of the Jesus seminar. http://virtualreligion.net/forum/ and others.
David arrived at M/L with a total woodshop (he made double-digit hourly wages building counters and bookshelves while I made $8 an hour transcribing at the Law School) and a piano. He was also an excellent photographer, a fine singer, a good cook, and a divorcee. As a minister he was charming and contentious and got fired from his church for claiming the WTT catastrophe was a CIA plot of some kind. It’s amazing to see him here on video, the wise old man, saying things I suppose he supposes will please the judges for a big prize contributed by Bill Gates.
See what you think.
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I've had a few hours of smoky drive time suitable for thinking while I pass the combines going round and round and smell the newly cut alfalfa, nearly overwhelming. I'm much harsher than David.
I still can't find online any offer from Bill Gates about predictions, esp. about religion.
1. Gates and Jimmy Carter have proven with solid evidence that if enough money is provided, things like malaria or ebola can be prevented. IF the adults can be prevented from taking the mosquito nets off the childrens' beds so as to catch fish with them. IF the ebola patients can be provided with care that is ordinary in the better US hospitals, the death rate goes down from near universal to something like 60% and a vaccine was soon at hand. It just takes money and determination. The reason it isn't done, or is done in a way that puts thousands of people on a leash, is that keeping people needy can control them.
2. The climate is already shifting. In a few hundred years the patterns and intensities will be entirely different. Every coast city will be destroyed unless it can survive partially submerged. Every vegetation growing pattern will change. Every insect population will move around, mostly north, and the birds will go with them.
3. Natural resources are close to used up. That includes exotic metals. We will soon be sifting through the trash piles to recover them. Fertile soil is a natural resource we are also using up. We can replenish the minerals but not the microlife biotics which are part of the fertility. Combine with changing water resources, and we will probably lose much of the major grain resources that have made population expansion possible. This means famine and displaced populations.
4. The travel and transmission resources across the planet are inadequate and collapsing. Even the satellite systems are meeting their end-of-life projections.
5. Capitalism is 500 years old and wearing out. We need new ways to mediate the whole with the individual. That includes a transformation of what we think of as nations, which are no longer nimble or fluid enough.
This means that the world -- not just the Western world or the developed world -- is going to lose population and quality of life both abruptly and more drastically than we are imagining. I expect the population to be at least halved. Maybe down to ten per cent. There will be MUCH trauma, but I don't think it will be like the dramatic dystopian movies. More of a quiet withering.
The religion problem is that we are limited fleshware trying to get our minds around what is by definition without any limits. As the rude saying goes, we keep trying to eff the ineffable. But we aren't taking advantage of what we have. Thinking is done with a whole body, and as well with a body of other people.
The practical solutions we will develop will mean cooperation instead of competition, solar and vegetable energy, maybe abandonment of parts of the planet, and surprising new developments that come out of what looks like chaos. We already have more genders than we can understand, race is a dissolving concept, skills we once valued are now useless and others need to be invented.
More of all this is already with us than we realize. Those who educate themselves through experience are closer to the truth than the school-goers.
__________________________
I've had a few hours of smoky drive time suitable for thinking while I pass the combines going round and round and smell the newly cut alfalfa, nearly overwhelming. I'm much harsher than David.
I still can't find online any offer from Bill Gates about predictions, esp. about religion.
1. Gates and Jimmy Carter have proven with solid evidence that if enough money is provided, things like malaria or ebola can be prevented. IF the adults can be prevented from taking the mosquito nets off the childrens' beds so as to catch fish with them. IF the ebola patients can be provided with care that is ordinary in the better US hospitals, the death rate goes down from near universal to something like 60% and a vaccine was soon at hand. It just takes money and determination. The reason it isn't done, or is done in a way that puts thousands of people on a leash, is that keeping people needy can control them.
2. The climate is already shifting. In a few hundred years the patterns and intensities will be entirely different. Every coast city will be destroyed unless it can survive partially submerged. Every vegetation growing pattern will change. Every insect population will move around, mostly north, and the birds will go with them.
3. Natural resources are close to used up. That includes exotic metals. We will soon be sifting through the trash piles to recover them. Fertile soil is a natural resource we are also using up. We can replenish the minerals but not the microlife biotics which are part of the fertility. Combine with changing water resources, and we will probably lose much of the major grain resources that have made population expansion possible. This means famine and displaced populations.
4. The travel and transmission resources across the planet are inadequate and collapsing. Even the satellite systems are meeting their end-of-life projections.
5. Capitalism is 500 years old and wearing out. We need new ways to mediate the whole with the individual. That includes a transformation of what we think of as nations, which are no longer nimble or fluid enough.
This means that the world -- not just the Western world or the developed world -- is going to lose population and quality of life both abruptly and more drastically than we are imagining. I expect the population to be at least halved. Maybe down to ten per cent. There will be MUCH trauma, but I don't think it will be like the dramatic dystopian movies. More of a quiet withering.
The religion problem is that we are limited fleshware trying to get our minds around what is by definition without any limits. As the rude saying goes, we keep trying to eff the ineffable. But we aren't taking advantage of what we have. Thinking is done with a whole body, and as well with a body of other people.
The practical solutions we will develop will mean cooperation instead of competition, solar and vegetable energy, maybe abandonment of parts of the planet, and surprising new developments that come out of what looks like chaos. We already have more genders than we can understand, race is a dissolving concept, skills we once valued are now useless and others need to be invented.
More of all this is already with us than we realize. Those who educate themselves through experience are closer to the truth than the school-goers.
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