Burkas at St. Kilda's.

I am teaching a Centre College class on Australian National Identity in Australia this month.

For our first full day in Australia, I took everyone to the beach. This was fun for the students, and had the practical effect of beating jet lag. Our bodies spent the day adjusting internally to the Australian sun clock, and they were so tired afterwards they went to bed at a reasonable time (I think - I do not enquire to closely).

St. Kilda's is an human-scaled beach town just down the tram from central Melbourne. We were advised to get off at the Luna Park stop. We puzzled at the name until we saw the front gate of the amusement park of that name, a four story clown's head. We walked through the clowns' gigantic mouth into an old-fashioned amusement park, with bumper cars, rocking "ships," and a big old roller-coaster running the perimeter. The one oddity of the rides was the "hellarious" haunted house, featuring evil clowns.

Every world city features wonderful cross-cultural mixes. Australians with Japanese tattoos, Americans with Aussie Rules Football team shirts, a Japanese girl with an "I don't give a chuck" tee-shirt that showed a Chuck Taylor sneaker. My favorite sighting of the day came within Luna Park. Muslim mother and daughter, Pakistani at a guess. Daughter in modest Muslim apparel - covered head, arms, legs. Mother in full burka, only her eyes showing. Both laughing, heading to the rides. And both wearing Crocs - pink for daughter, purple for mom.

Go calmly mixing world.

Happy New Year From Fiji - Tomorrow

I am teaching a Centre College class on Australian National Identity in Australia this month.

We are in Fiji on a day-long layover on our way to Melbourne. We left Los Angeles on New Year's Eve (we watched the ball drop in Times Square on streaming video on a student laptop, then blew noisemakers while we waited at the gate). When we arrived it was already the Second (thanks to the International Date Line).

I was going to store our luggage and force sociology on the students by taking cabs to a Hindu Temple and the one-block main street. For ten hours.

Wiser heads prevailed, though, and through the help of Margaret Travel Agency in Nadi airport - that is, by Margaret herself - we instead bought three rooms for the 22 of us at a modest beach resort. We stored the luggage, got to shower and swim in the ocean and the pool, eat a leisurely lunch, and head back to the last leg of the flight refreshed.

I recommend this plan to all.

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and I Write to You From Australia in the New Year!

The Gruntled Center will take its annual Christmas vacation for the rest of the year.

I hope you enjoy your Christmas week, however you spend it.

If You Are Reading This, Your Odds of Lasting Marriage Are Better Than Even

Divorce360.org has a divorce calculator that lets you calculate the odds of your marriage ending in divorce. The basic finding is that college graduates who did not marry very young have good odds of their marriages lasting. Different generations have different odds, which are built in to the calculator.

Based on old general data on who reads blogs, and anecdotal but very current information on who reads this blog, I would say confidently that the Gruntled Center audience is in the good end of the distribution of lasting marriages. Nothing is guaranteed, of course, but your odds are good. So relax and enjoy.

Thinking About a World Without Newspapers

The Gruntleds are heavy news consumers. We listen to National Professors Radio -- I mean, National Public Radio -- each morning. A normal evening in our house has everyone on a laptop reading some kind of news, with cable news in the background, leading into fake news on TV. We have among us dozens of news and semi-news blogs on RSS feed. Mrs. G. has the BBC website as her homepage (I, of course, have Centre College :-) ). Many a blog starts with the New York Times.com or CNN.com or BBC.com. And we subscribe to two daily newspapers, which I read religiously. If news were cut off, we would be in big trouble.

But if newspapers disappeared, our life would barely change.

It is clear that newspapers are in big trouble everywhere. Recently I read some speculation that one consequence of the current recession might be to decimate newspapers as an industry, shrinking down to the very big and the very local.

On the whole I can see more benefits than costs to converting news delivery to electronic forms. They are easier to search, quote, save, and link together.

My only concern is that there is not enough money in online news to support reporters, especially local reporters. Local news may become entirely a part-time "mom job" carried by stringers. We already have the example of the California paper that is written entirely by part-timers in India, reworking public sources. National news may become a subset of cable news. I dearly hope that subscription models of national news sources might work, but I can't think of any right now that I feel a need to subscribe to. Television is profitable because it includes ads in the one information stream it offers at a time, but television is a very bad medium for news.

We do need news, and that means news that pays. We don't need newspapers.

The Coffee House Test of a Crunchy Suburb

David Brooks introduces the useful concept of the "crunchy suburb" in On Paradise Road. This is an inner suburb of a big city. It has more of the people he called "bobos" (bourgeois bohemians) in an earlier book. Among suburbs, it is likely to have more professionals, better schools, and more sophisticated consumer goods.

We are in Mt. Lebanon, a Pittsburgh suburb where my sister is hosting Christmas this year. It meets these criteria. Mt. Lebanon has, I think, been more corporate and Republican in the past, but is shifting in the professional and Democratic direction that many good-schools inner suburbs are.

Danville, KY, is too much of a small town to have such nuances among the various sections of town. The coffee houses are in the middle of town and serve everyone from all the neighborhoods and "suburbs." We needed to come to a larger city to see a crunchy suburb in action.

We are sitting in a coffee house in Mt. Lebanon. It filled up just after school drop-off. Mrs. G. suggested that this is a measure of a crunchy suburb. The first necessity of a weekday morning is to get the kids to school. The second necessity is espresso.

Rick Warren is a Centrist Choice

Rick Warren is a leading voice in the next generation of evangelical Protestants engaging the world. I thought it was a great idea that Warren was the one Barack Obama and John McCain went to together to reach an evangelical audience that might not pay attention to worldly politics at all. Warren could have taken the enormous success of the Saddleback Church and A Purpose-Driven Life and rested on it. Instead, he, his wife, and his church have reached out into addressing the problems of the worst-off people in the whole world. This is a great thing for evangelicalism.

As to his rejection of homosexual practice (not homosexual people), that is what Southern Baptists do, that is how they read the Bible, that is the official position of the denomination. And so do most evangelicals, who make up thirty to forty percent of Americans. Rejecting a third of the electorate out of hand always gets liberals and Democrats in trouble.

President-elect Obama wants to bridge the gap and reduce the polarization in the nation. That is what he has said all along. That is part of what we elected him for. Choosing Rick Warren, with whom he does not agree on all worldly issues but does agree on the crucial question of who is the president's savior, is a good step in bringing all Americans together.

Catholic Dogs vs. Presbyterian Dogma

Funny Videos

OK, this is a prank. It is a good one, though, down to the misspelling of Catholicism.

Cohabitation Makes You FAT

Women who cohabit tend to gain weight because they start eating the junk their boyfriends favor. Married women, by contrast, make healthier meals for their families, which is one of the main reasons that husbands have longer and healthier lives than unmarried men do.

Involved Fathers Stay; Involved Husband-Fathers Stay More

Lisa Belkin in the New York Times is reporting a very interesting study from Natasha Cabrera at the University of Maryland on what makes unmarried fathers stay. Cabrera and colleagues found that the more involved the father was with the pregnancy and birth of his child, the more likely he was to still be there three years later -- if he had moved in with the mom. It did not make a big difference if they also got married in this period. Cabrera concludes that what matters is the father's "personal involvement" in the mother's and child's future, not the "paperwork."

I draw a somewhat different conclusion. The data for this study comes from the "Fragile Families" study, so they have already been selected for their weak connection to marriage. These are couples who get pregnant outside of marriage, and do not marry because they are pregnant. Some marry well after the birth of the child, and many don't marry at all. This is the subculture with the weakest understanding of marriage as a social institution to begin with. They do not see how marriage can help them strengthen their relationship in the first place, before children. They see marriage as a seal, even a reward, for an already strong relationship. This is one of the reasons that marriages in this subculture are rare and weak to begin with.

Cabrera's conclusion, that marriage is just paperwork, is not fully true for the anti-marriage subculture she is studying, and is less and less true the further you get from fragile families and move toward solid middle-class marriage subcultures.

The Census Bureau Gives Up on Black Marriage

The exciting headline in the New York Times is "Two-Parent Black Families Showing Gains." The percent of black kids living with two parents leaped up from an abysmal 35% in 2004 to a somewhat less abysmal 39.5% in 2007. This is a surprising -- nay, improbably large -- gain in so short a time. The comparable white figure is 77%.

Now, I think there probably is a small but very encouraging uptick in the middle-class black kids living with their married parents. Call this the Obama end of the spectrum.

But this big improvement is, alas, partly a statistical trick. In 2007, the Census Bureau decided to call "parents" any man or woman they lived with. The Bureau stopped counting whether the couple was married or not or even whether they were the biological parents of the child. This change fudges the numbers of kids with married parents for all groups. It is particularly bad for African American kids, though, because they are most likely to live with unmarried parents.

On Humbly Requesting that the Church's Natural Leaders Serve the Church, Despite the Aggro

I received a comment on yesterday's post from Alex, who I know speaks for many:

Perhaps if the PC(USA) got rid of its "affirmative action" policies o the 60s era, the "tall steeple pastors" would feel more welcome to serve as part of the leadership of the denomination. But my question is: Why would a tall steeple pastor like Vic Pentz WANT to serve as a leader in the denomination on the national level? Churches like Peachtree Pres, quite frankly, don't need the structures/organization that the PCUSA provides, because they already have the available personnel, money, resources, capital etc to do their own programming exactly the way they want to without help from the Presbytery/Synod/GA.

I agree completely.

The big successful churches, who produce most of the growth and carry out most of the local programs of the denomination, need the Presbyterian Church (USA) less than other congregations do. But the denomination needs them. The pastors of tall steeple churches are not the best pastors in the church -- fine pastors are found in all kinds of congregations, and each kind of congregation needs a different kind of pastor. My point is that the denomination needs tall steeple pastors, and their equivalents among the Ruling Elders, to bring their leadership and expertize to help run the denominational structures, too.

So how do we get tall steeple pastors and leading elders to want to invest their precious time and energy in leading the PC(USA)? We honor their leadership. In sociological terms, we pay them in status. We thank them for the wise work they have done, and ask them, nicely, to take on further tasks for the larger church even though that takes them away from their main job, which is running a major local congregation.

The successful leaders of our major congregations, both ministers and elders, are the core of that great collective resource of the church, its Establishment. Of course there are ministers and elders who are not in tall steeple churches who should be in that Establishment, too. We should honor them and ask them nicely to serve the whole denomination, even though they, too, have more pressing local matters to attend to.

The big difference is that we used to honor the people we wanted to be our Establishment because we knew they had better things to do. Now we treat them with suspicion. Not surprisingly, they skip the denominational structure and go about the business of being church. Sometimes, in frustration, they create parallel denomination-like structures so that they can get on with it already, without all the politics and aggravation.

We need to honor the Establishment precisely because being the Establishment is a costly sacrifice.

Pentz and the Presbyterian Establishment

The Witherspoon Society has posted a response to my essay on Rebuilding the Presbyterian Establishment from Rev. Vic Pentz, pastor of Peachtree Presbyterian Church. Peachtree is the largest congregation in the Presbyterian Church (USA). Pentz had, it appears, been asked to sign a petition critical of the idea of rebuilding an establishment. He declined to sign. Witherspoon draws the conclusion that Pentz, and by extension other large-church pastors, "has more important things to do" than be part of an establishment.

I believe that is the wrong conclusion to draw from Pentz' response. Here is what he wrote in response to the anti-establishment petition:

"I am pretty confident that I speak for many other large church pastors in saying that when it comes to deciding whether to commit time and energy to the pressing concerns and sheer joys of ministry, or to fight for the reins of the PCUSA, there is no contest.

Everyone can relax.

We’re out in the world with our congregations joining God in the work of the Kingdom."

Vic Pentz does not say that the Presbyterian Church does not need an establishment. He does not say that he does not want to be part of the church's establishment. He does not say that pastors and elders of the denomination's leading congregations have no concern with leading the church's work.

That is why Vic Pentz helped found the Presbyterian Global Fellowship, an organization of tall steeple churches doing part of the job of the denomination. PGF is based in Peachtree Presbyterian Church.

Vic Pentz says he doesn't have time to fight for the reins of the PCUSA. He and churches like his are already doing the work that the PCUSA should be doing. If the existing power structure of the PC(USA) supported rebuilding an establishment of authoritative leaders (authoritative, not authoritarian), then Pentz and other dynamic Teaching Elders and Ruling Elders wouldn't have to fight to run help run the denomination -- they would be asked to.

The Witherspoon Establishment vs. The Presbyterian Establishment

I thank the Witherspoon Society, the Presbyterian Church (USA)'s venerable liberal activist group, for posting a critique of my Rebuilding the Presbyterian Establishment. A distinguished group of professors, lions of the Sixties struggles that created the current affirmative-action model of church authority, defend the status quo. In so doing they bring out several misconceptions about my argument. As one young blogger wrote, "I'm not sure what the 'Witherspoon Society' is, but I can only hope that one day I write something that gets that many teachers cranky enough to sign something like that..."

They want to fight the old war; I am ready to move on to the new one.

The "PCUSA Professors' Response" reads my argument as nostalgia for sacramental authority of the clergy. They cite the stirring Biblical claim that in Christ "there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither bond nor free, neither male nor female" (Gal. 3:28) as proof of the need for structures in the church to represent different demographic groups. The cite Neibuhr to argue that we are prone to distort all human structures with our pride and sin, including structures that were meant for good. Most importantly, they believe that “The challenge for the PCUSA in the 21st century is to figure out how to further the work of reconciliation in a world with different social realities and challenges than the world of the 20th century.”

My point exactly. The affirmative action model championed by these activist professors in their youth is outdated now. Demographic representation rules were meant to foster a consciousness that diversity is good. They worked. Now those required structures perpetuate judging people's fitness for church leadership by their race, sex, and age. Galatians 3:28 is a call for the church to get beyond the world's obsessions with ethnicity, class, and sex -- not permanently institutionalize them in the church. What we need is not nostalgia for the structures of two generations ago, but a clear focus on spiritual service to Jesus Christ and his Great Commission. We should make every effort to try to draw into the burdens of church leadership people from all backgrounds who love and competently serve the church.

The church will always face internal competition, sometimes even conflict. What has gotten us through as a supernatural institution is our commitment to Christ and Scripture, and generous help from the Holy Spirit. What has gotten us through as a human institution is a body of leaders, both Teaching Elders and Ruling Elders, who have learned great practical wisdom about how to run Presbyterian institutions. When those leaders work together for the good of the church, we honor them as the Establishment who can be relied on in crisis. The church faces crises today, as we did in the past, and we will have to rely on our leaders in the future as much as we had to in the past.

Social Closure Through Pseudo-Speciation

Social closure is what turns the vague spectrum of social status into a specific ladder of social classes. Somewhat arbitrary distinctions, such as educational credentials or occupations, are turned into real social distinctions that affect who you make a life with. The idea of social closure, which was advanced by Max Weber, has been most fully developed by Frank Parkin. I have written about marriage and social closure before.

Richard Conniff wrote an interesting book on The Natural History of the Rich. As the title suggests, he uses insights from animal behavior, especially primatology, to look at the behavior of rich people. One of the characteristics of the very rich is that they put up strong boundaries between themselves and other people. They live in fear of thieves, parasites, and gold-diggers. For their own physical, financial, and psychological safety they tend to make a life only with other rich people. They also tend to marry only within the rich group. They adopt the metaphorically biological language of "the tribe" and create a vast interrelated "cousinage." Conniff says all these forms of separation by the rich amount to "pseudo-speciation."

Pseudo-speciation is the ultimate tendency of social closure.

"Born Rich"

"Born Rich" is a documentary made by Johnson and Johnson heir Jamie Johnson about kids like himself. He saw the curse that inherited wealth can be in his own family, and wanted to try to head off problems by studying people like himself. This is a smart idea, and I wish him well in finding a meaningful path for himself. As he says, the American Dream is to do better than your parents; he can't do that, so is trying to find a life worth living in America outside the American dream.

We saw the documentary in class again today. It first came out in 2003, but retains its punch. It is very hard to study the rich, because they have a thousand ways to keep you out and shut you up. Almost the only path that works is when an insider decides to study the wealthy tribe, and publishes the results. Some of Johnson's fellow rich kids come of well, notably Ivanka Trump. Others come off so badly that, like Luke Weil, a gambling equipment heir, they sued, unsuccessfully, to take back the release they had signed to appear in the documentary.

The picture is not really a pretty one. Having every privilege in the world seems to undermine these kids more than it helps. Quite a few will grow up to be mature adults, but they are as much hurt by their privilege as helped when young. Even the ones who are not self-destructive tend to report that they lack the drive to complete really hard projects, because they don't have to.

"Born Rich" is a valuable, narrow documentary. I look forward to Johnson's new film, "The One Percent," about the effects of income inequality between the bottom masses and the top one percent.

The Establishment is a Network of Networks

I want to develop a point I made briefly in response to yesterday's post (Modcast). The Establishment, whether Presbyterian or some other kind, is not a tight organic network of strong ties. For one thing, as a national body, it is too dispersed to have the regular contact that a strong network requires. For another, it links together people from different, sometimes competing, institutions.

Within each institution the members of the Establishment are elite individuals, often the top of the local pyramid. As a result, they are well connected in their institution, and to others in their local area. As members of the Establishment, these elite individuals are connected to many other elite individuals by weak ties. Thus, the many strong local networks that these elite individuals are central to are loosely tied to many other strong local networks. The whole Establishment is powerful because the information in any one of these local networks can be mobilized and spread through the national network of weak ties to other places in the Establishment network.

On the other hand, the difference between an Establishment and an aggregation of elite individuals is that the Establishment people are tied in many parallel ways not related to work. In the social Establishment of the nation that E. Digby Baltzell wrote about, family ties assimilated elite individuals into an enduring and socializing national class. This familial class Nelson Aldrich happily called the "cousinage." In the Presbyterian Establishment, the family ties may be weaker -- though by no means absent. Instead, Establishment individuals will have shared experiences from colleges, seminaries, retreat centers, missions, and worship services of all kinds to bind them together in the green wood. These are the ties that help the church function with authority, especially in times of crisis.

Modcast

I was interviewed by the Moderator of the Presbyterian Church (USA), Rev. Bruce Reyes-Chow, today for his video podcast -- or modcast. We talked about my essay Rebuilding the Presbyterian Establishment. I thought our hour-long conversation was quite substantive, and brought out some concerns that I had (evidently) not addressed clearly enough in print.

The whole discussion can be seen here. I am told that more than 180 people connected live through ustream, and a further group were commenting (which we could not see) through twitter.

Reyes-Chow's main concern was that will still needed official structures to keep the church accountable for overcoming past sins. He did not think that our consciousness of the benefits of diverse voices was strong enough, nor that our leaders, himself included, could keep the church on the right track. This is a point on which reasonable people may reasonably differ. I am conscious of the way that mandates create a backlash, so they should be used sparingly. Likewise, it is dangerous, and ultimately becomes counterproductive, to use false or misplaced categories such as race or sex, whether for inclusion or exclusion.

The ideas in this essay have been growing for some years, in my mind and in conversation with others. If some of them prove helpful in renewing some useful authority in the church, Rebuilding the Presbyterian Establishment will have done its job.

"Australia" is a Pretty Good Epic

I am taking a class to Australia next month to study "Australian National Identity." As preparation, as well as a fun outing before finals begin, we went to see Baz Luhrmann's new film, "Australia." I had low expectations. I figured that the director would make a good-looking film with Australia's top good-looking stars. He sure delivered. The landscape was fantastic, the big scenes wonderfully done, and it would be hard to top Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman for cheesecake.

The story is a classic Western. The haughty woman must team up with the hard-bitten working man to drive them "fat cheeky bulls" across rough terrain to get to market on time. Facing them is the villainous monopolist and war profiteer who fights dirty. The ragtag fellowship of the cow overcomes great odds, with the help of a mysterious native companion. Virtue and love triumph. The film faithfully follows the conventions of a classic genre, and refers throughout to other great movies, notably "The Wizard of Oz" (which film itself appears as a character) and "Gone With the Wind." Cheesy, but very well done cheese.

And then there is a second half-film after the Western plot is done; the small matter of World War II. This is where I feared the movie would turn into "Pearl Harbor." The war plot does make the film longer than normal, but lets the director wrap up the romance better.

Australian history is much like American history, a bit later. Thus you can have a realistic cattle drive in the 1930s. The racial discrimination against "blackfellas" was common to both countries in that era, but the Australian blackfellas are the indigenous people, playing out settler/native struggles that were more prominent in the U.S. a century earlier.

What makes "Australia" different from a Western, or even a war movie, that could have been made in the U.S. in the 1930s or '40s, is the subplot about the removal of half-caste children. Luhrmann has his leading man and woman unite over a "creamy" boy, excellently played by Brandon Walters. The Australian government removed mixed-race children from their aboriginal mothers to be trained in boarding schools. This policy was the main theme of "Rabbit-Proof Fence." The shame of the "stolen generations" has been a major cause of Australian liberals, leading to a formal apology by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd earlier this year. The entire subject is being hotly contested among Australian scholars between "black armband" liberals and "white blindfold" conservatives.

Richard Flanigan, one of the co-writers of the movie, said that they had to dare themselves to make a big movie, a national epic that they could have the audacity to call "Australia." They did so because they were impressed that American filmmakers have the nerve to think that our stories have universal significance. "Australia" aims to be the Australian "Gone With the Wind," done knowingly but, ultimately, for real.

Presby Establishment Podcast With the Moderator

The Moderator of the Presbyterian Church, Rev. Bruce Reyes-Chow, has read my essay, Rebuilding the Presbyterian Establishment, and has graciously invited me to have a podcast conversation with him about it on Tuesday, December 9, from 3 to 4 p.m. Eastern time. I am looking forward to this conversation, and hope that you will respond to it.