Jesus Creed
Unfortunately, this has become far too often the experience of coaches (and I coached HS basketball for ten years — sophomore level):
A Michigan high school basketball coach, who earlier this year was named best coach in his class, has resigned. And he calls parents the No. 1 reason for his departure….
Here are Castor’s comments, as reported by the Daily Press:
“I have a lot of different reasons why I wanted to resign and only a few reasons to stick around.
“I thought our administration at Gladstone was really supportive of our program and they did a great job. But I thought there were some things early on in the year, small situations that were mind blowing … I dealt with our fan club. I ended up having a meeting with them. I thought the meeting was out of line.
“At the end of the day, the reason why I am resigning is because of parents. I don’t want to deal with them. The last five years I have coached at Gladstone I have given it my life. My time could have been better spent doing other things.
“I really, really enjoy this. But parents have taken the fun and enjoyment right out of it. Maybe some of this is on me. I just don’t have thick enough skin or the will to put up with it. For that amount of time, it’s just not worth it.”
Combative parents consistently rank in the top five of our annual survey of “most concerning issues” in interscholastic sports. We offer a number of resources on handling parents and developing working relationships with moms and dads.
Fortunately, our world is made of folks like this too! Jamie Sotonoff:
Isaac Vatkin always cared for his wife, Teresa. Even as his own death approached, he clung to life as his wife’s health, too, began to deteriorate.
On Saturday, when they were both unresponsive and breathing shallowly, the staff at Highland Park Hospital wheeled the longtime Skokie residents, who had been married for 69 years, into the same room and put their beds side by side.
Family members positioned their hands so they touched.
“I didn’t want them to be scared,” their granddaughter Debbie Handler said. “I thought maybe if they knew the other was there, it would help.”
Teresa, 89, died first. Minutes after they separated the couple’s hands and removed Teresa from the room, Isaac, 91, passed. They died 40 minutes apart.
“Their love for each other was so strong, they simply could not live without each other,” their daughter, Clara Gesklin, said during their joint funeral service Monday at Shalom Memorial Funeral Home in Arlington Heights.
Saw this at Reuters for a title to an article:Visas to citizens of Trump travel ban nations drops [?!!??!?!!]
Bob Robinson begins his analysis and critique of the APEST proposals of Alan Hirsch and others:
When I first read Alan Hirsch’s book The Forgotten Ways (Brazos Press, 2006. 2nd Edition pubished by Baker, 2009), I was enthralled. The first five chapters had me rethinking the mission of the church in foundational ways. But then came chapter 6, in which he introduced the “apostolic environment” that feeds into a paradigm “APEPT,” the five words found in Ephesians 4:11-12 that describes gifts God gives to the church in order to equip Christians: Apostles, Prophets, Evangelists, Pastors, Teachers. (Since this book was published, the second “P” for “Pastor” has since been replaced with an “S” for “Shepherd,” and thus it is now called “APEST”).
As I first read this proposal, I found it wanting – exegetically, theologically and ecclesiologically. I figured that others would just as easily see the problems with such a paradigm and we’d all move along.
But, the Missional Movement has latched heavily onto Hirsch’s paradigm and many churches are now using it as the means by which to identify leaders for the sake of advancing the missional church beyond what they see as an old, biblically ill-informed institutionalism that has ruined the modern church in American evangelicalism. Alan Hirsch further defined APEST in his 2012 book written with Tim Catchim, The Permanent Revolution: Apostolic Imagination and Practice for the 21st Century Church and is now about to release a new book entitled 5Q: Reactivating the Original Intelligence and Capacity of the Body of Christ, which is getting a lot of pre-publication hype.
More and more churches I know are giving a short survey to help each person figure out which of the APEST he or she might be (see the survey at fivefoldsurvey.com). The goal is to better utilize people and their gifts for the mission of the local church. I will dive into criticizing this survey in a later post.
In this post, I will review the exegetical issues. Then in the next posts, I will review the theological and ecclesiological issues.
What if we only knew more about evangelicalism, however, thanks to editors and publishers willing to produce books on evangelicalism thanks precisely to a desire to figure out the Religious Right? At the risk of self-promotion, almost fifteen years ago I noticed the coincidence of an outpouring of scholarship on evangelicalism precisely at the same time that born-again Protestants were making headlines and magazine covers thanks to their association with the Republican Party:
A funny thing happened to the study of evangelical Protestantism in the decades after Newsweek declared 1976 “the year of the evangelical.” A religious movement largely in obscurity since the Scopes Trial emerged as a source of inspiration for millions of Americans and a formidable lobby in electoral politics. Even so, the early scholarly returns on evangelicalism were not encouraging. Martin E. Marty declared that, by 1980, “there was a paucity of good research” on evangelicalism or its related subjects, fundamentalism and pentecostalism1—one indication that the so-called recovery of American religious history, lauded by Henry May in 1965, had yet to pay dividends for Protestants outside the mainline
denominations.In 1992, within a decade of Marty’s assessment, Jon Butler of Yale University claimed in a provocative paper delivered to the American Society of Church History that the tide had turned into a tsunami of historical writing on evangelicalism and its influence on American society, drowning other perspectives and interests. In response to Garry Wills’ Under God: Religion and American Politics, which faulted academics and journalists for ignoring faith’s importance, Butler asked, “Are we looking at the same subject?” He claimed that historians, especially Americanists, could scarcely pay more attention to religion: meetings of the Organization of American Historians and the American Studies Association offered countless sessions on religion, and books on American religion were published in record numbers despite the decline in publishers’ interest in New England Community studies. The publishing boom in particular drew Butler’s interest. The books described the importance of American religion, especially evangelical Christianity: “They often describe religion as a cause—sometimes the cause—of what is distinctive and important in America, American culture, politics, even identity…. They are, in the main, books about evangelical Christianity’s dominant position in American religion and its shaping of American identity from the Puritans to the Reagans.”
This is not to suggest that evangelicalism equals a certain kind of political activism, though the notion that personal faith must inform all of life makes it hard to separate religion from politics. But it does mean that the study of evangelicalism would be substantially less prominent if most Americans assumed that born-again Protestants were simply a curious group of Christians who somehow clung to the experiences that Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield first cultivated. After all, if evangelicals were not political would they generate any more attention than the Amish?
John Mark Reynolds is right about teaching great books:
Constantine Comprehensive Classical Strategy
1. Read the Book.
2. Think about the Book.
3. Ask a good question.
4. Listen and respond to students.
5. Go to step 1 and repeat (even in class).
The U.S. military has started moving parts of the controversial THAAD anti-missile defense system into a planned deployment site in South Korea, Yonhap news agency reported on Wednesday, amid high tensions over North Korea’s missile and nuclear programs.
The United States and South Korea have agreed to deploy THAAD in response to the threat of missile launches by North Korea but China says it will do little to deter the North while destabilizing the regional security balance.
Trailer trucks carrying parts of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system entered the site on what had been a golf course in the county of Seongju in a southern region of South Korea, Yonhap news agency and YTN television reported.
South Korean defense ministry officials and U.S. military officials could not immediately be reached for confirmation.
The United States began moving the first elements of the advanced missile defense system into South Korea in early March after the North test-launched four ballistic missiles.
But the U.S. and South Korean militaries have been reluctant to publicly discuss the progress of the deployment as candidates in a May 9 presidential election debated whether the move should go ahead or be delayed until after the vote.
South Korea has said China has discriminated against some South Korean companies in retaliation against the deployment.
All western governments oppose anti-Semitism. Yet the old hatred continues. How toxic is it? And are recent eruptions of anti-Semitism expressions of momentary irritation, misunderstanding, or plain ignorance?
White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer could, on a kindly view, fall into the last of these categories. His remark that Hitler used no chemical weapons, made at his Tuesday press conference, was followed by outrage and instant contrition.
Spicer meant that Hitler did not drop chemical bombs from airplanes – an accurate observation, and one made later in the day by Defense Secretary James Mattis. The Nazis used Zyklon B in their death camps: Hitler may have refrained from using chemical weapons in the battlefield for tactical reasons. …
The conflict illuminates a split in the left everywhere in the west. On one side are those who see Israel as the largest problem in the Middle East and who, to some degree, agree with organisations like Hezbollah and Hamas, both dedicated to destroying Israel.
On the other side are those who, even while condemning the current Israeli government for its settlement and other policies, support the continued existence of the Jewish state. Current Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn had belonged to the first group, and has called both of the organisations “friends” – a characterization he later said he regretted.
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